Literary essays Books

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes spelt out a vision of the impending utopia. Work, he said, will become a thing of the past. 'For the first time since creation,' he predicted, 'man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to occupy the...

In this one-of-a-kind book, novelist and academic Nicholas Royle brings together two remarkably different creative figures: Enid Blyton and David Bowie. His exploration of their lives and work delves deeply into questions about the value of art, music...

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...

'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...

Reckon, "Black Joy: 2022 Best of Books""Those of us who have been following her work for a while have known Reid would come flying out of the gates and, well, here is the emphatic proof."-Laird Hunt, National Book Award finalist for Zorrie Thotis a...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

'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...