Art Essays

For the September 2016 issue of GQ, Michael Chabon wrote a piece about accompanying his son Abraham Chabon, then 13, to Paris Men's Fashion Week. Possessed with a precocious sense of style, Abe was in his element chatting with designers he idolized and turning a critical eye to the freshest runway looks of the season; Chabon Sr., whose interest in clothing stops at "thrift-shopping for vintage western shirts or Hermès neckties," sat idly by, staving off yawns and fighting the impulse that the whole thing was a massive waste of time.

Twenty-seven-year-old Nell Stevens was determined to write a novel, but life kept getting in the way. Then came a game-changing opportunity: she won a fellowship that would let her spend three months, all expenses paid, anywhere in the world to research and write a book. Would she choose a glittering metropolis, a romantic village, an exotic paradise? Not exactly. Nell chose Bleaker Island, a snowy, windswept pile of rock in the Falklands. There, in a guesthouse where she would be the only guest, she could finally rid herself of distractions and write.

An endlessly entertaining collection of wayward autobiographical tales about a search for a richer life thwarted at every turn by beagles, bureaucrats, and ill-advised love affairs. The unlikely story of how a failed dishwasher, tour guide, cabinet maker, bus driver, bookseller and literary journal publisher became one of Australia's hottest humor essayists.

A group of notable writers - including UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, Margaret MacMillan, and Jenny Uglow - celebrate our fascination with the houses of famous literary figures, artists, composers, and politicians of the past.

In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, Colm Tóibín turns his incisive gaze to three of Ireland's greatest writers, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, and their earliest influences: their fathers.

Un viaggio, per quanto terribile possa essere, nel ricordo si trasforma in qualcosa di meraviglioso. La vita è un viaggio, e come tutti i viaggi si compone di ricordi. In questo audiolibro, Banana Yoshimoto raccoglie preziosi frammenti di memoria e ci porta con sé, lontano nel tempo e nel mondo. Dalle emozioni del primo amore alla scoperta della maternità, dalle piramidi egiziane alla Tokyo degli anni settanta.

In Bookends, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon offers a compilation of pieces about literature - age-old classics as well as his own - that presents a unique look into his literary origins and influences, the books that shaped his taste and formed his ideas about writing and reading.

Wife | Daughter | Self investigates identity and the writing life through the perspective of one of the nation’s top memoir teachers and critics.

Ya desde el comienzo del siglo XX, Walter Benjamin reflexionaba sobre lo que supondría la masificación del arte que las nuevas técnicas de reproducción hicieron posible, y proponía que en un futuro -sin duda, el que vivimos hoy- las nuevas técnicas tenderían a la politización y ganarían un poder creciente sobre el destino de los pueblos.

In this “inspiring, determined work of personal narrative and cultural criticism” (Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight for Our Lives), essayist and award-winning voice actor Tajja Isen explores the absurdity of living in a world that has grown fluent in the language of social justice but doesn’t always follow through.

Just in time for Christmas comes a collection of the very best holiday essays from the best-selling mother/daughter writing duo. Whether they're shopping for matching reindeer dog sweaters or having second helpings of egg nogg, Lisa Scottoline and Francesca Serritella will keep you warm with their humor and heart. So give yourself some holiday cheer in the midst of all the shopping, cooking, wrapping, and baking madness.… You deserve to get a little Happy and Merry!

Wendy Cope has long been one of the nation's best-loved poets, with her sharp eye for human foibles and wry sense of humour. For the first time, Life, Love, and the Archers brings together the best of her prose - recollections, reviews, and essays from the light-hearted to the serious, taken from a lifetime of published and unpublished work, and all with Cope's lightness of touch.

Previously published as A Private War, Marie Brenner’s Richard Jewell tells a gripping true story of heroism and injustice. In the early morning hours of July 27, 1996, three pipe bombs exploded at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, killing one person and injuring 111 others. Hundreds more potential casualties were prevented by the vigilance and quick actions of security guard Richard Jewell, who uncovered the bombs and began evacuating the area. But no good deed goes unpunished. Investigators and journalists pursued Jewell as a potential suspect.

The Amputee’s Guide to Jules Verne is a listener's guide to every novel Jules Verne wrote; in that respect alone, there is no other book like it on the market. But it’s more than that. Nick DiMartino has included several essays evaluating Verne’s overall approach as a writer and the values embodied in his work. He has included as well a number of deeply personal essays about his struggles with the loneliness, pain, and lack of mobility that came with being an amputee.

Acclaimed Cave Canem poet and essayist Remica Bingham-Risher interweaves personal essays and interviews she conducted over a decade with 10 distinguished Black poets, such as Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, and Patricia Smith, to explore the impact of identity, joy, love, and history on the artistic process. Each essay is thematically inspired, centered on one of her interviews, and uses quotes drawn from her talks to showcase their philosophies. Each essay also delves into how her own life and work are influenced by these elders.

In his essay about the life of Irish writer John McGahern, Tóibín reveals the tones of melancholy and amusement within both art and the artist. In his extraordinary essay on his cancer diagnosis, Tóibín unpicks the word 'battle', and illuminates the distress, horror and blankness of his experiences. From the shades of light and dark in a Venice without tourists, to the streets of Buenos Aires riddled with disappearances and tied up with dictators and politics, we find ourselves considering law and religion in Ireland as well as in Marilynne Robinson's fiction.

An essay from Things I've Learned From the Women Who've Dumped Me.

Ann Beattie, a master storyteller, has been delighting readers since the publication of her short stories in the 1970s and her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter. But as her literary acclaim grew and she was hailed “the voice of her generation,” Beattie was also moonlighting as a nonfiction writer.

Embodiment is not an easy business. From violence to illness, sexuality to racism, the fact of a body can be impossibly hard to inhabit. Olivia Laing draws on her own background in protest and alternative medicine to investigate the reasons why. Laing’s exploration of the complexities of bodily life takes in some of the most significant and beguiling figures of the past century, among them the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, the painters Francis Bacon and Agnes Martin and the singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone.

Time Lived, Without Its Flow is an astonishing, unflinching essay on the nature of grief from critically acclaimed poet Denise Riley. From the horrific experience of maternal grief Riley wrote her lauded collection Say Something Back, a modern classic of British poetry. This essay is a companion piece to that work, looking at the way time stops when we lose someone suddenly from our lives.