Literary essays Books

We need community to live. But what does it look like? Why does it often feel like it's slipping away?We are all hinged to some definition of a community, be it as simple as where we live, complex as the beliefs we share, or as intentional as...

The "f**k" count is just over sixty. The images are screenshots. The metal is mostly nu. And the grant money's gone. From the author of The Malevolent Volume and National Book Awardwinning Indecency comes a gory new mutation in the shape of nonfiction...

A collected series of intertwined poetic essays written by acclaimed Japanese poet Hiromi Ito - part nature writing, part travelogue, part existential philosophy.Written between April 2012 and November 2013, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits adopts a non-linear...

Home to fifty-eight author-selected poems and accompanying essays, Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That Matter Most is a far-reaching, essential touchstone for the art of poetry in the United States today.Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That...

Six years ago, Jo Caulfield was about to go on stage when she found out that her big sister Annie had cancer. Not the best way to start a nationwide comedy tour. But the tour turns out to be a welcome distraction for both sisters. As Jo reports back from...

The capacity to tell stories - along with language and the ability to create art - is seen as both intrinsic and unique to the human species. Over thousands of years, we've forged narratives of our origins, our journeys and our dreams as a means of...

With exuberant wit, Elena Passarello casts her gaze on famous historical animals, crafting an essay collection organised as medieval bestiary.Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000 year old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each...

The Society for Textual Scholarship Richard J. Finneran Award, Honorable Mention, 2023.For the best edition or book about editorial theory and/or practice published in the English language during 2021-2022.Beginning with Tolstoy's first extant records of...

Drawing on the prose, poetry, and criticism of a broad range of Russian writers and critics, including Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bakhtin, Gorky, Nabokov, and Solzhenitsyn, Close Encounters: Essays on Russian Literature explores...

This bilingual collection in honor of the great scholar and writer Alexander Zholkovsky brings together new work from forty-four leading scholars in nine countries. Like Zholkovsky's oeuvre, this volume covers a broad range of subjects and employs an...

Since the dawn of the Space Age, when the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite and sent the first human into the cosmos, science fiction literature and cinema from Russia has fascinated fans, critics, and scholars from around the world...

'A faker,' said Orson Welles, 'makes fools of the experts. So, who's the expert? Who's the faker?'Griffith Review 79 lifts the curtain on fakes, frauds and forgeries. Treading the tightrope between art and...

A powerful and provocative collection of essays that offers poignant reflections on living between society's most charged, politicized, and intractably polar spaces - between black and white, rich and poor, thin and fat.Savala Nolan knows what...

In Drawing/Breath: Inhales and Exhales on Body and Word, PEN/Bellwether Prize-winning writer Gayle Brandeis' essays explore both the writing life and the embodied life, along with potent intersection between the two. From the title essay investigating...

A literary meditation on sex. Sam Heaps is a millennial Anas Nin, exploring their most intimate power struggles with a raw and artful voice.Each partner is a new mask through which the narrator discovers themselves, creating a song through each personal...

Cops on bikes, undercover security in the supermarket, TSA agents wondering why there appears to be a gun in his bag, Keith Lowell Jensen has a lot of run-ins with all manner of cops. Sometimes they arrest him. Sometimes they beat him up and arrest him...

Through the lens of horror - from Halloween to Hereditary - queer and trans writers consider the films that deepened, amplified, and illuminated their own experiences.Horror movies hold a complicated space in the hearts of the queer community:...

Winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize, The Loved Ones presents an intimate portrait of family grief, for fans of Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder and Kristin Prevallet's I, AfterlifeThere are so many ways to bury the dead. In an autobiographical series of...

In Farewell Transmission, Will McGrath guides us on a rambling quest into the enlightenment of other lives. Funny and heartbreaking, intimate and galvanizing, these essays venture from Yemen to Lesotho to the Bronx and beyond. We find Caravaggio at an...

Winner of the 2023 CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative NonfictionWinner of the Pegasus Award for Poetry CriticismOptic Subwoof is a collection of talks that poet and National Book Award finalist Douglas Kearney presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture...

"Toft adeptly shows this to be the legacy Ron Lyle left behind, one that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with a boxing legacy that is nothing short of remarkable."--Rafael Garcia, The Fight City "[Ron Lyle's] life was a remarkable one and the story of it...

Nonwhite and Woman celebrates how women of color live and thrive in the world, and how they make their lives their own. The anthology's title is from Lucille Clifton's luminous poem, "won't you celebrate with me," which serves as the anthology's epigraph.

Fresh off the success of Flash Nonfiction Funny comes a piping-hot new take on the flash genre: Food. Working within a 750-word limit, each of these nonfiction pieces is driven by a hunger for something filling. Memories of an ill-fated birthday cake,...

Winner, 2021 Foreword INDIES award"Every man should read this book." -Jay Heinrichs, author ofThank You for Arguing75 women writers, ages 20 to 89, were invited by editor Gina Barreca to make a party out of their life's most unnerving, challenging,...

At a time when American identity is increasingly fractured, LaRue Cook explores a deeply personal journey through love, loss, and self-discovery, using the lens of a physical journey across the United States, and abroad, by a former corporate...

In her opening, Amy Wright explains: "This essay anchors a central thread of dialogue over a dizzying divide. It weaves a decades-plus-worth of questions and answers from a range of discussions I've had with artists, activists, scientists, philosophers,...

This amazingly wise and nimble collection investigates the horrors inflicted on so-called 'witches' of the pastThe Witch of Eye unearths salves, potions, and spells meant to heal, yet interpreted by inquisitors as evidence of evil. The author describes...

A colorful, lively, and informed celebration of all things bookish in L.A. past and present, including interviews with current L.A. writers; day trips in search of favorite fictional characters, from Marlowe to Weetzie Bat; author quotes galore; curated...

Life is never peaceful in Chris Erskine's house, what with the four kids, 300-pound beagle, chronically leaky roof, and long-suffering wife, Posh. And that's exactly the way he likes it, except when he doesn't. Every week in the Los Angeles Times and...

Winner of the PEN Translation Prize"Pondering revolutionary Cuba, the Berlin Wall, and the caves of Cappadocia, these essays explore themes of memory, war, movement, and home."-The New Yorker"A thoughtful, roving meditation on migration, language, and...

Radically imaginative and intense, challenging language to be slow and fast, soft and hard, drunk and sober, What Are You performs its own destruction and recreation.Hypnotic, dreamlike, lyrical essays tell the story of a woman trapped in a destructive...

Reporters and sociologists occasionally make headlines by going "undercover" in the working class economy, taking low-paying jobs and "trying to survive."The results are almost always (unintentionally) laughable. Kaleita doesn't need to go undercover to...

One of The Smithsonian Magazine's Best Science Books of the Year The future is here and, frankly, it sucks. Without doubt, our culture is at a crossroads. Political strife and economic crises are byproducts of a larger looming challenge, one in which we...

A collection of linked essays concerned with the life and mind of the writer by one of the most original voices in contemporary literature. Each essay takes a day as its point of inquiry, observing the body as it moves through time, architecture, and...

From editors David Joy and Eric Rickstad comesGather at the River, an anthology of twenty-five remarkable essays on fishing from an ensemble of contemporary authors. Their experiences explore the ways we come to water, for renewal and reverie, or to...

This long overdue anthology of New Narrative includes both classic New Narrative texts and rare supplementary materials, allowing the movement fueled by punk, pop, porn, French theory, and social struggle to bound back to life, ripe with dramatic...

The Estrangement Principle argues for a wider range of possible associations with art made by queer people by unraveling the difficulties of the queer art label. Goldberg invokes the lives and works of artists Renee Gladman, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Jack...

In 2017, Australians made it clear that their understanding of equality included formal recognition of the most intimate relationships. The parliament responded to the voice of the people and passed legislation to allow same-sex marriage. A year...

Sometimes, we all need to get away...Griffith Review 74: Escape Routes plots the course of our daydreams, our transformations and our jailbreaks. It takes us across borders and through open and opening minds to places once out of reach. As restrictions...

Coined by Sir Thomas More in the sixteenth century, the word 'utopia' is a play on the Greek for no place and good place. But is an ideal society unattainable - or optimal?This edition of Griffith Review visits utopias old and new, near and far, to...

The works in Brave New Words: The Power of Writing Now articulates 'brave new words' at the heart of battles against limitations on fundamental rights of citizenship, the closure of national borders, fake news, and an increasing reluctance to...

Critically acclaimed author Malachy Tallack returns in the Autumn of 2016 with a brand new excursion into the beautiful, mysterious and mythical landscapes of the world with Un-Discovered Islands. Gathered in this book are over twenty...

The best jobs in Britain today are overwhelmingly done by the offspring of privileged parents. Meanwhile, it is increasingly difficult for bright but poor children to transcend their circumstances. This state of affairs should not only worry the poor. It...

Late Victorian Orientalism is a work of scholarly research pushing forward disciplines into new areas of enquiry. This collection of essays tries to redefine the task of interpreting the East in the nineteenth century taking as a starting point...

The highly anticipated, first full-length essay collection from acclaimed poet Kiki Petrosino.Bright: A Memoir, the first full-length essay collection from acclaimed poet Kiki Petrosino, is a work of lyric nonfiction, offering glimpses of a life lived...

A harrowing and heartfelt essay collection weaving narratives about family, gun violence, art, and the American Dream.Two weeks before her grandfather purchased a gun, Ashley Marie Farmer's grandmother tripped as she walked across their living room. It...

Inspired by the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and featuring outstanding Indigenous writers, First Things First is an urgent, nuanced and robust call to listen, hear and respond to questions of constitutional recognition. Published in partnership with...

Food is more than a matter of taste. From the comfort of the kitchen to the theatre of the restaurant, the glamour of the TV studio to the gloss of the cookbook page, the ways we frame and consume stories about food shape our cultural histories as much...