Art Essays

The one and only Zadie Smith, prize-winning, best-selling author of White Teeth, is back with a second unmissable collection of essays. No subject is too fringe or too mainstream for the unstoppable Zadie Smith. From social media to the environment, from Jay-Z to Karl Ove Knausgaard, she has boundless curiosity and the boundless wit to match. In Feel Free, pop culture, high culture, social change and political debate all get the Zadie Smith treatment, dissected with razor-sharp intellect.

The Good Story is an exchange between a writer with a long-standing interest in moral psychology and a psychotherapist with training in literary studies. Coetzee and Kurtz consider psychotherapy and its wider social context from different perspectives, but at the heart of both their approaches is a fascination with narrative. Working alone, the writer is in control of the story he or she tells.

There are moments throughout our lives when we discover an artist, an album, a film, or a cultural artifact that leaves a lasting impression, helping inform how we understand the world, and ourselves, moving forward. In No Sense in Wishing, Lawrence Burney explores these profound interactions with incisive and energizing prose, offering us a personal and critical perspective on the people, places, music, and art that transformed him.

As a young woman, Kate Betts nursed a dream of striking out on her own in a faraway place and becoming a glamorous foreign correspondent. After college—and not without trepidation—she took off for Paris, renting a room in the apartment of a young BCBG (bon chic, bon genre) family and throwing herself into the local culture. She was determined to master French slang, style, and savoir faire, and to find a job that would give her a reason to stay.

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

Fun, bright, and playful, power pop is a sometimes adored, sometimes maligned, often misunderstood genre of music. From its heyday in the '70s and '80s to its resurgence in the '90s and '00s, power pop has meant many things to many people. In Go All the Way, today's best and brightest writers go deep on what certain power pop bands and songs mean and have meant to them. Whether they love or hate it, Go All the Way is a dive into the Beatles-inspired pop rock of the last five decades.

'Any story that starts will also end.' As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth as she explores family, friendship, marriage, failure, success and what it all means. Ranging from the personal to the sublime, each essay transforms the particular into the universal, letting us all see our own worlds anew.

India has unmatched talent and ambition with an inherent tendency to work hard; then what is it that keeps India from overtaking the world? Why does India as a nation settle for the ordinary when the extraordinary is well within reach? Dr. Kalam shares his dream of a nation that is unrivaled, he discusses how he has, from his experience, met such skilled people whose visions can transform the nation.

“I don’t want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude or for the Nobel Prize, but rather for my journalism,” Gabriel García Márquez said in the final years of his life. And while some of his journalistic writings have been made available over the years, this is the first volume to gather a representative selection from across the first four decades of his career - years during which he worked as a full-time, often muckraking, and controversial journalist, even as he penned the fiction that would bring him the Nobel Prize in 1982.

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.

A book unlike any other, Women in Clothes is essentially a conversation among hundreds of women of all nationalities - famous, anonymous, religious, secular, married, single, young, old - on the subject of clothing, and how the garments we put on every day define and shape our lives. It began with a survey. The editors composed a list of more than 50 questions designed to prompt women to think more deeply about their personal style.

Have you ever read a suspense novel so good you had to stop and think to yourself, "How did the author come up with this idea? Their characters? Is some of this story real?" For more than five years, Mark Rubinstein, physician, psychiatrist, and mystery and thriller writer, had the chance to ask the most well-known authors in the field just these kinds of questions in interviews for the Huffington Post. Collected here are interviews with 47 accomplished authors, including Michael Connelly, Ken Follett, Meg Gardiner, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman, and Don Winslow.

Critical Mass is a treasure trove of sparkling, spiky prose and a fascinating portrait of our lives and cultural times over the past decades. In an age where a great deal of back scratching and softball pitching pass for criticism, James Wolcott’s fearless essays and reviews offer a bracing taste of the real critical thing.

In August 2014 Jenny Diski was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and given 'two or three years' to live. She didn't know how to react. All responses felt scripted, laden with cliché. Being a writer, she decided to write about it (grappling with the unoriginality even of this) and to tell a story she had not yet told: that of being taken in, aged 15, by the author Doris Lessing and the subsequent 50 years of their complex relationship.

Flailing in jobs, failing at love, getting addicted and un-addicted to people, food, and drugs - I'll Tell You in Person is a disarmingly frank account of attempts at adulthood and all the less than perfect ways we get there. Chloe Caldwell has an unsparing knack for looking within and reporting back what's really there, rather than what she'd like you to see.

This audiobook includes unabridged recordings of Leo Tolstoy's 4 greatest works of non-fiction in one audiobook. The essays included here are: What is Art?, The Inevitable Revolution, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, A Confession.

In June 2015 Alberto Manguel prepared to leave his centuries-old village home in France's Loire Valley and reestablish himself in a one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Packing up his enormous, 35,000 volume personal library, choosing which books to keep, store, or cast out, Manguel found himself in deep reverie on the nature of relationships between books and readers, books and collectors, order and disorder, memory and reading.

Los diarios de José Donoso han sido, por años, fuente de especulaciones y comentarios acerca de su carácter polémico y controversial. Este libro rescata una importante sección de esos diarios olvidados, y nos enfrenta como lectores a algunos de los secretos y obsesiones más profundos del gran narrador chileno.

This is the remarkable and tragic story of Oscar Wilde, legendary wit and conversationalist, author of perhaps the most perfect comedy in the English language, yet seemingly doomed by his own flawed temperament to suffer at the hands of a censorious and hypocritical society...

With this collection of more than 50 pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today’s most powerful and original voices. Moment after moment, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram.