Literary essays Books

A bold collection of creative pieces and theoretical essays by women of color.Making Face, Making Soulincludes over 70 works by poets, writers, artists, and activists such as Paula Gunn Allen, Norma Alarcn, Gloria Anzalda, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Barbara...

Taking in turn a scientific, feminist, economic and public-health perspective, this book gleefully demolishes much of the received wisdom surrounding processed food. Anastacia Marx de Salcedo argues that most of these foods are fairly healthy, and their...

Openings & Outings brings together over forty pieces from the long and distinguished career of the writer and commentator David Pryce-Jones. Taking us from a meeting with Rudolf Hess's widow, to the slums of Tangier, to the front lines of the...

A selection of the greatest sentences by the master, Ernest Hemingway. Sentences that can take a reader's breath away and are not easily forgotten. Each sentence has been selected and examined by authors such as Elizabeth Strout, Sherman Alexie, Paula...

Uncovering the pernicious narratives white people create to justify white supremacy and sustain racist oppressionThe police murders of two Black men, Philando Castile and George Floyd, frame this searing exploration of the historical and fictional...

In a combination of discourse and lyric, paragraph and couplet, Bay Area poet and novelist Laura Moriarty explicates the poetics of a group of writers that resists categorization. This book-length essay uses the work of the California Tonalist painters...

How can poetry engage with a global ecosystem under duress? How do poetic languages, forms, structures, syntaxes, and grammars contend or comply with the forces of environmental disaster? Can innovating languages forward the cause of living sustainably...

"We can read The Magician of Vienna not just as a work of literature but as one of the Holy Books in which we store humanity's imaginary." - Mario Bellatin, author of Beauty SalonThe heartbreaking final volume in Sergio Pitol's groundbreaking...

In a series of playful and startling prose meditations, celebrated writer Lorna Crozier brings her rapt attention to the small matter of household objects: everything from doorknobs, washing machines, rakes, and zippers to the kitchen sink. Operating as...

Like the answer to a riddle, status is all around us, but it can't always be seen or heard. The silent switchboard behind our professional and personal interactions, status dictates our place on the guest list, in the room, at the table; through its...

Frank Norris is a seminal figure in the history of American literary naturalism despite the brevity of his career. Frank Norris and American Naturalism brings together in one volume Donald Pizer's lifelong exploration of the naturalist's work, ranging...

In Casting Quiet Waters, some of North America's most respected literary writers take us on a fishing trip and use that as an opportunity to explore issues of the human condition. A little more than five centuries ago an odd English nun named Dame...

Tolstoy's view on spirituality has not received the needed attention in the secondary literature. There is no book on Tolstoy that is as interdisciplinary as this collection.An outstanding quality of contributors.

The first of a three-volume series, this book contains Eva Jospe's previously unpublished study, "The Concept of Encounter in the Philosophy of Martin Buber," together with several of her published articles on Buber and on modern Jewish thought, as well...

What is the best way to tell a story?In this anthology, the first-ever collection of essays by innovative, cutting-edge writers on the theme of narration, forty of the continent's top experimental writers describe their engagement with language,...

A revealing look at the Japanese through the window of their contemporary culture.

A book of Allen Ginsberg's literary conversations 1967-1977, including his encounters with Ezra Pound and an exposition of William Carlos Williams' poetic practice.

Pier Paolo Pasolini (19221975) was a major cultural figure in post-WWII Italy, well-known as a poet, novelist, communist intellectual, and filmmaker. In Danger is the first anthology in English devoted to his political and literary essays, with a...

Based on the author's life as a gay man and a poet, King of Shadows is a collection of twenty-one autobiographical essays that circle in and around San Francisco since the 1960s. The three longest pieces deal with Aaron Shurin's coming into poetry and...

This complete collection of writings published for the first time in English includes "Story of a Little Girl," about the Catholic priest who sexually molested her sister; "The Sacred," a collection of poems and fragments on mysticism and eroticism;...

Alms for Oblivion was first published in 1967. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.This volume makes...

From the controversy in 1995 that heralded Blasted, to her death in February 1999, Sarah Kane built a reputation as an established playwright of international stature. This is the first volume of collected essays by some of the leading scholars in their...

Andrew Bennett argues in this fascinating book that ignorance is part of the narrative and poetic force of literature and is an important aspect of its thematic focus: ignorance is what literary texts are about. He sees that the dominant conception of...

Julia Kavanagh was a popular and internationally published writer of the mid-nineteenth century whose collective body of work included fiction, biography, critical studies of French and English women writers, and travel writing. In this critically...

Hailed by some feminists as the single most important theoretical work of this century, but ignored or reviled by others, Simone de Beauvoir's "The second sex" (1949) occupies an anomalous and even uneasy place in the feminist 'canon'. Yet it has had an...

Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams", published in 1900, has been one of the most influential texts of the 20th century, fundamentally changing the ways in which people think about their waking lives as well as their dreams. The book, more than any...

First published in 1776, Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" is much more than a handbook on the principles of free-market economies; it is a founding text for the organization of Western society in its broadest sense. In order to understand the impact of...

Suzanne Joinson grew up in a 1980s council estate in Crewe, where her parents were followers of The Divine Light Mission cult. This clash of class and counterculture destroyed her family, leaving a legacy of turmoil and poverty.Years later, she attempts...

An extraordinary memoir of anticipatory grief, seventy-two minutes of life and a silent maternity leave, from artist and academic Tamarin Norwood.A few months into pregnancy, Tamarin Norwood learned that the baby she was carrying would not live. Over the...

The never-before-published novel by Charmian Clift.'In those days the end of the morning was always marked by the quarry whistle blowing the noon knock-off.Since everybody was out of bed very early, morning then was a long time, or even, if you came to...

An evocative collection of vignettes and essays from Ukraine's "voice" of classical antiquity, now available in English for the first time.Inspired by Virgil's exquisitely ambivalent phrase "sunt lacrimae rerum" (there are tears of/for/in things), Andriy...

Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes is a revelatory collection of personal essays that subverts the stereotypes and transcends the platitudes of family life to examine motherhood with blistering insight.Documenting the birth and early life of her three...

This volume includes many of the best essays by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy (1951-2015), one of the most original scholars of Russian culture of her generation. Nepomnyashchy's broad interests ranged from Pushkin to contemporary Russian popular...

The past, famously, is a foreign country - but in the twenty-first century, it's one in which we increasingly seek solace. No matter the relentless pace of technological innovation and the digitisation of everything from money to media our appetites for...

A profound and honest anthology in which twenty-two writers share everyday experiences from their pursuit of parenthood.No One Talks About This Stuff is a support group for almost-parents: it is a place to share journeys of loss and limbo, to confront...

Just as Odin's ravens, named Huginn and Muninn (translated to Thought and Memory), would whisper everything he couldn't see, so too do these and other mythical ravens-of Athena, the Biblical Eve and Noah, Coronis, and others-function in Jamison's essay...

"The author puts forward a bracing theory of partial empathy....Johnston's searching book of thought-probes goes a long way toward allowing the reader the grounding that would allow him to make empathic contacts with the animals over which he ponders......

"Coles is a true original." Tom SleighThe Stranger I Become probes the permeable boundary between inner life and outer, thought and action, science and experience. Poet Katharine Coles begins her lyric essays with a meditation on "the urge to move...

In fluid prose, Julien Gracq navigates again&mdash this time in memory/&mdashthe magical Evre and the terrain through which it coursed in his youth. The Narrow Waters is a synaptic meditation on Begining and Ending whose inquiries and visions...

Eight authors' works of personal nonfiction join with ten stories by Karen Tei Yamashita to illuminate the hidden histories of places large and small.Faced with a scant historical record, Karen Tei Yamashita turns to fiction to animate the secrets of...

In his new collection of essays Subhash Jaireth traverses the globe in an exploration of the personal and collective memory held within natural and built landscapes.His roving curiosity takes us from his early life in Delhi to his years as a student in...

'Wade Davis is a true wayfinder, and these essays offer new insight into his visionary approach to culture, landscape, and the planet he loves as fiercely as any writer working today.' John Vaillant, author of Fire WeatherThe essays in...

Whether it's man's best friend or the king of the jungle, animals occupy a central place in our social, emotional and cultural lives. We're happy as clams or pigs in mud; we hold our horses or take a lion's share of what we want; we avoid the elephant in...

Collecting the best of the underground blog Weird Sister, these unapologetic and insightful essays link contemporary feminism to literature and pop culture.Launched in 2014, Weird Sister proudly staked out a corner of the internet where feminist writers...

Having stormed mainstream literature from the outskirts, Lethem has won a readership both wide and deep, all of whom appreciate his literary excellence, his mordant but compassionate humor, and the cultish attentiveness of his SF origins. He has earned...

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...

This rich volume begins with a major new essay by renowned short story critic and theorist Charles E. May, "Returning to the Source: Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty," followed by a major new essay by one of Munro's most long-standing and...