Art Essays

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.

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.

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.

Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays and articles. Here is one such draft that traces a road trip she took with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in June 1970, through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. She interviews prominent local figures, describes motels, diners, a deserted reptile farm, a visit with Walker Percy, a ladies' brunch at the Mississippi Broadcasters' Convention.

Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, examining its role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keefe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body.

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.

Inspired by a real-life encounter, Believe It or Not: My Hollywood Pitch Meeting is a short story about possibilities, from James J. Caterino, the author of True Stories, My Encounter with the Partridge Family, sort of, California Dreaming: How Not to Become a Hollywood Screenwriter, What If, Why I Don’t Drink, and much more.

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!

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.

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.

Chapters from My Autobiography is a collection of twenty-five pieces of autobiographical work published by American author Mark Twain in the North American Review between September 1906 and December 1907. Rather than following the standard form of an autobiography, they comprise a typically Twain-esque collection of rambling anecdotes and ruminations.

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.

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.

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.

El mundo que habitó Ramón López Velarde, quebrado por la Revolución mexicana y por la separación sibilina entre la provincia y la metrópoli fingida oposición entre costumbre y decadencia-, es uno de los periodos más complejos de la historia de México. Contubernio de voces, reflejo plural de una época convulsa, elaboración de la provincia "diamantina".

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.

Jonathan Franzen’s best seller Freedom was the most-discussed novel of 2010, an ambitious and searching engagement with life in America in the 21st century. The New York Times Book Review proclaimed it “a masterpiece of American fiction.” Now a new collection of Franzen’s non-fiction brings fresh evidence of that moral intelligence, confirming his status not only as a great American novelist but also as a keen observer, social critic and self-investigator.