Literary essays Books

What can we learn about learning?Australians have one of the highest levels of educational attainment in the world, but not every Australian has access to a world-class education. What represents a 'good' education in a country with an...

"This book is a fascinating cri de coeur and made me question Alan CummingA book for those who can't stand musicals, those who love them, and every theatregoer, academic, practitioner and student in between.Breaking Into Songexplores theatre's most...

'Peppered with humour, empathy and kindness' - Sunday PostEver since her pet sheep Lulu accompanied her to school at the age of seven, animals and nature have been at the heart of Polly Pullar's world. Growing up in a remote corner of the Scottish West...

**One of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2023****Esquire's August 2023 Book Club Pick** 'If books are important to you because you're a reader or a writer, then how books are sold should be important to you as well...

Selected by editor Mireille Silcoff, the 2023 edition ofBest Canadian Essaysshowcases the best Canadian nonfiction writing published in 2021."Our current, tumultuous age" writes editor Mireille Silcoff, "is an important time for essayists, because in...

Why do we read? What do we cherish in a book? What is the nature of a masterpiece? What do Alice Munro, Albert Camus, and the great Polish experimentalist Witold Gombrowicz have in common? In the tradition of Nabokov, Calvino, and Kundera, Douglas...

Through the pages of Casting Back Peter McMullan takes the reader from his youthful Irish beginnings in the 1940s to his time as a young journalist in Northern Ireland during the mid-1950s, through the 1960s and into today's western Canada and a totally...

'Genuine radicalism provides hope. It provokes through a scandalous insistence that life can be otherwise, that we aren't doomed to economic and environmental decline, and that we can make our future better than our past.'Why did politicians think an...

'I know it's a daring suggestion, but I'll make it anyway.'Charmian Clift was a writer ahead of her time. Lyrical and fearless, her essays seamlessly blended the personal and the political.In 1964, Charmian Clift and her husband George Johnston returned...

** Winner, Victoria Premier's Literary Awards 2023, Non-fiction ** I have come to see that I am an argumentative person who is frequently convinced that my angle, my take, on a matter, is the right one. This kind of delusional self-belief is not rewarded...

'I fellin love with my first misfit at the age of three. He was a disabled man in a wheelchairwho sold newspapers every afternoon outside the Empire Hotel in Annandale.Whenever I glimpsed him in the distance I would break into a run, jump onto hislap,...

"There's a fresh coating of snow on the ground outside our cabin as I look to see who's coming to the fourteen feeders, we keep filled with black oil sunflower seeds year-round." So begins A Year of Moons: Stories from the Adirondack Foothills, a...

A poetry collection where personal is inevitably political and ecological, Motherfield is a poet's insistence on self-determination in authoritarian, patriarchal Belarus.Julia Cimafiejeva was born in an area of rural Belarus that became a Chernobyl zone...

WINNER of the 2022 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction! WINNER of the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction! "Plastic is powerful and moving, a deep, personal exploration of the modern world."-Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize recipient...

The color green is at the center of the spectrum. For earlier writers like Emily Dickinson or William Blake, the green world was a space of haunting, irreconcilable, opposites: life and death, human and vegetal, innocence and experience. In these essays,...

ALibrary Journal Best Social Science title of 2022Black women continue to have a complex and convoluted relationship with their hair.From grammar and high schools to corporate boardrooms and military squadrons, Black and Afro Latina natural hair...

J.A. Adande, ESPN personality and Director of Sports Journalism at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, has curated an essential anthology showcasing incredible feats and diverse perspectives across the world of sports.Selected from a...

From the Introduction: "The goal with this anthology is to represent that full range of contemporary expressions of Islam, as well as a full range of genres-poetry, fiction, essay, memoir, political writing, cultural writing, and of course plenty of...

In this rich, eye-opening, and uplifting anthology, dozens of esteemed writers, poets, artists, and translators from more than thirty countries send literary dispatches from life during the pandemic. A portion of proceeds benefit booksellers in need.As...

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023Jon Fosse said farewell to theory early in his career, choosing poetry, fiction, and drama as his mediums of choice. Here, however, in a selection from his two books of essays, we see just how incisive a...

"Another View" examines the impact of the foreign in the context of non-native prose writing and its implications for literature in translation. Containing significant debut translations into English from such authors as Herta M?ller and Yoko Tawada, "...

Prolific, award-winning translator of classical and modern Japanese poetry Hiroaki Sato recorded his thoughts on American society in mainly two columns across 30-plus years, collected here for the first time.This anthology of over 60 of Sato's...

"[Guernica] punches way above its weight class."-NPR Book News"Guernica stands out like, well, the intimidating cultural, artistic, and political force it is."-Bustle"The world, that terrible heaving gorgeous impossibility, is to be found shining in...

A rich banquet at the cutting edge of the arts, rooted in California's eclectic cultural gumbo, by one of America's most gifted critics, who died young in 2019."A perfect journalistic valediction from one of LA's finest commentators."-Richard...

When you stray from a trail and strike out into the woods, you are bushwhacking. The term implies a physical thrashing about-pushing past branches, slicing through thickets, leaping across downed trees-but it also implies a certain fortitude and...

In (Don't) Stop Me If You've Heard This Before, Peter Turchi combines personal narrative and close reading of a wide range of stories and novels to reveal how writers create the fiction that matters to us. Building on his much-loved Maps of the...

Scottish poet Meade's second volume of poems reflecting on the lives of animals as photographed by award-winning photographer Jo-Anne McArthur. Following on from Zoospeak, Scottish poet Gordon Meade's reflections on the lives of animals in zoos and...

An engaging, moving, and poignant book of poetry from a well-known leader, educator, and writer with notable endorsements from Reverend Billy Talen (Church of Stop Shopping), Carolyn Martin (poetry editor at Kosmos Journal), and Alice Reys (Singer...

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2023 Recommended Read for 2023 A Ms. Magazine Most Anticipated Book of 2023A vibrant collection of personal and lyric essays in conversation with archival objects of Black history and memory.What are the politics...

As the Amazon burns, Fbio Zuker shares stories of resistance, self-determination, and kinship with the land.In 2007, a seven-ton minke whale was found stranded on the banks of the Tapajs River, hundreds of miles into the Amazon rainforest. For days,...

T's first book, Szygy, Beauty, was a lovely and surprise success and grappled with a lot of the same issues of identity, sexuality, love, and loss. This book signals a more deeply considered and more narratively coherent approach, in line with both the...

"Through the spaces between people in these beguiling fictions, love wanders like a ghost, offering whispered hints of solace against a backdrop of isolating divisions. In the spirit of the enigmatic stories of Lydia Davis, Isak Dinesen, Yasunari...

"Wright shrinks back from nothing."-The Village Voice"Wright belongs to a school of exactly one."-The New York Times Book Review"Wright has found a way to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle."-The New...

Isherwood's lectures on writing and writers, now all available for the first timeIn the 1960s, Christopher Isherwood gave an unprecedented series of lectures at California universities about his life and work. During this time Isherwood, who would...

The Spirit of Japanese Poetry (1914) is a collection of essays by Yone Noguchi. Although he is widely recognized as a leading poet in English and Japanese of the modernist period, Noguchi was also a dedicated literary critic who advocated for the...

The Experimental Novel (1880) is an essay by French author mile Zola. Written at the height of his career as a leading proponent of Naturalism, The Experimental Novel serves to illuminate the author's approach to the practice and purpose of writing while...

In this collection of thirty-four essays and short stories, Washington Irving explores the personality of his pseudonym, Geoffrey Crayon, while providing a study on human behavior. Rip Van Winkle introduces the famed literacy title character, an...

The New Negro (1925) is an anthology by Alain Locke. Expanded from a March issue of Survey Graphic magazine, The New Negro compiles writing from such figures as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, and Locke himself...

At a young age, author Jerome K. Jerome found a hobby that he was extremely skilled at, and very passionate about-idleness. He was thrilled at the amount of time he could waste doing nothing, frustrating those around him. However, when Jerome falls ill...

Intentions consists of multiple essays in which Wilde combats the popular argument that art must adhere to a moral standard and serve a benevolent purpose. It's a direct contrast to longstanding tradition in contemporary literature.Oscar Wilde delivers...

Featuring twelve simple yet profound essays, Jerome K. Jerome's Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow is a humorous and clever collection. Each essay is crafted around a timeless and relatable issue, such as the unfortunately common inability to make...

William Shakespeare (1864) is an experimental biography by Victor Hugo. Written while the poet was living in exile on the island of Guernsey, William Shakespeare was doomed to fail at its conception. Condemned by critics who expected Hugo to focus on the...

In 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into a cabin in the woods at Walden Pond to record a philosophical experiment in living: to simplify his life, to support himself entirely by his own labor, and to draw spiritual sustenance from his surroundings. The...

Almustafa, the chosen and the beloved, who was a dawn unto his own day, had waited twelve years in the city of Orphalese for his ship that was to return and bear him back to the isle of his birth. And in the twelfth year, on the seventh day of Ielool,...

This hard-hitting collection of creative essays explores the beauty and pain embedded in some of our favorite rough-and-tumble pastimes-roller derby, mixed martial arts, and teaching. Carlo Matos ties it all together with gusto, in a book that will send...

From Dinty W. Moore, founding editor of the popular journal Brevity and prolific and pioneering author of several books of creative nonfiction, including Between Panic and Desire, Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy, and Crafting the Personal Essay, and Tom...

A monumental event in American poetry, Get the Money!brings together the essential prose writings of iconic New York School poet Ted Berrigan."Ted Berrigan was a leader of the New York School; his crazy energy embodied that movement and the city itself...

Iconic French novelist, playwright and essayist, Jean-Paul Sartre (19051980) is widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, whose work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull...