Literary essays Books

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,...

Similar to how songs become familiar and welcoming earworms, these essays will imprint themselves on readers' minds.A Mind Full of Music contemplates and celebrates the mysterious, powerful, dynamic relationship between ourselves and the songs we love:...

"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...

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...

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...

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,...

"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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Prolific essayist, translator, and critic Pascal Quignard has described his Last Kingdom series as something unique. It consists, he says, "neither of philosophical argumentation, nor short learned essays, nor novelistic narration," but comes, rather,...

A controversial figure of the postwar French literary and cultural scene, Marguerite Duras has exerted a powerful hold on readers around the world. This volume of interviews - hailed on its French publication as Duras's 'secret...

Postcolonialism has become one of the most exciting, popular and stimulating fields of literary and cultural studies in recent years. Yet the variety of approaches, the range of debate and the critical vocabularies often used may make it challenging for...

In this volume, leading Burke scholars offer new and challenging essays which allow us to reconsider the historical context in which Reflections on the Revolution in France was written. The essays consider its reception, its engagement in the discourses...

Named one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time by the Modern LibraryAnne Carson's remarkable first book about the paradoxical nature of romantic loveSince it was first published, Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson's lyrical meditation on love in...

A vivid historical imagining of life in the early United States.Set amid the glimmering lakes and disappearing forests of the early United States, The Forest imagines how a wide variety of Americans experienced their lives. Part truth, part fiction, and...

From the Nobel Prizewinning writer, a new collection of literary and personal essaysOld Truths and New Clichs collects nineteen essays-most of them previously unpublished in English-by Isaac Bashevis Singer on topics that were central to his artistic...

A translation of selected non-English texts included in Volume 16 is available in paperback. Since this supplementary paperback includes only select portions of Volume 16, it is not recommended for purchase without the main volume.Every document in The...

From a devoted reader and lifelong bookseller, an eloquent and charming reflection on the singular importance of bookstoresDo we need bookstores in the twenty-first century? If so, what makes a good one? In this beautifully written book, Jeff Deutsch-the...