Art Essays

An essay by James J. Caterino, the author of Girl Pop, Dreams, True Stories, To Meghan, I Want to Believe, Ghost Stories, The Geek Girl and the Quarterback, The Last Neanderthal, Pop Star, The Girl from the Stars, and Watch the Skies.

“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.

Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of essays on the experience of lockdown, by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time. Crafted with the sharp intelligence, wit and style that have won Zadie Smith millions of fans and suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these unprecedented times, Intimations is a vital work of art, a gesture of connection and an act of love - an essential book in extraordinary times.

What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction gathers the best-selling novelist Alice McDermott’s pithiest wisdom about her chosen art, acquired over a lifetime as an acclaimed writer and teacher of writing.

Born and raised in New York to a food-phobic mother and food-fanatical father, Elissa was trained early on that fancy is always best. After a childhood spent dining everywhere from Le Pavillion to La Grenouille, she devoted her life to all things gastronomical, from the rare game birds she served at elaborate dinner parties in an apartment so tiny that guests couldn’t turn around to the eight timbale molds she bought while working at Dean & DeLuca, just so she could make tall food.

Serving as the sequel to Gene Roddenberry's original television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation pushed the boundaries of the "final frontier." At the same time, the show continued the franchise's celebrated exploration of the human experience, reflecting current social and political events. ST: TNG became immensely successful, spawning four feature films and several television spin-offs. This collection of new essays explores both the series' characters and its themes.

Even as our world has suffered through successive upheavals, Jesse McCarthy contends, "something was happening in the world of culture: a surging and unprecedented visibility at every level of Black art making". Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? reckons with this resurgence, arguing for the central role of art and intellectual culture in an age of widening inequality and moral crisis. McCarthy reinvigorates the essay form as a space not only for argument but for experimental writing that mixes and chops the old ways into new ones.

From Scandihoovian Spanglish to snickering chickens, New York Times best-selling author and humorist Michael Perry navigates a wide range of topics in this collection of brief essays drawn from his weekly appearances on the nationally syndicated Tent Show Radio program. Fatherhood, dumpster therapy, dangerous wedding rings, Christmas trees, used cars, why you should have bacon in your stock portfolio, loggers in clogs - whatever the subject, Perry has a rare ability to touch both the funny bone and the heart.

With His gentle hand He wounded my neck And caused all my senses to be suspended. Part poetic masterpiece, part mystic treatise, The Dark Night of the Soul by 16th century Carmelite monk, St. John of the Cross, addresses the feeling of being forgotten by the Presence of the Almighty that every Christian, desirous of walking more closely with God must pass through in order to learn to walk by faith and not by sight.

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.

A welcome surprise: more than 50 prose pieces, gathered together for the first time, by one of America's most revered and admired novelists and short-story writers, whose articles, essays, and cultural commentary - appearing in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Harper's Magazine, and elsewhere - have been parsing the political, artistic, and media idiom for the last three decades.

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.

Helen Garner visits the morgue, and goes cruising on a Russian ship. She sees women giving birth, and gets the sack for teaching her students about sex. She attends a school dance and a gun show. She writes about dreaming, about turning 50 and the storm caused by The First Stone. Her story on the murder of the two-year-old Daniel Valerio wins her a Walkley Award.

Although Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee had been reading each other’s books for years, the two writers did not meet until February 2008. Not long after, Auster received a letter from Coetzee, suggesting they begin exchanging letters on a regular basis and, “God willing, strike sparks off each other.” Here and Now is the result of that proposal: the epistolary dialogue between two great writers who became great friends. Over three years their letters touched on nearly every subject, from sports to fatherhood, film festivals to incest, philosophy to politics....

Inspired by Saeed Jones and Maggie Smith’s conversations in the wake of the 2024 election, this is a collection of poems, essays, and visual art on what we—individually and collectively—can hold onto, and what we can work towards. In times of difficulty, with a government working against its own people, we must turn to our friends and loved ones to provide context, language, energy, and hope. The People’s Project offers a range of perspectives, drawing wisdom from their communities and histories.

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.

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.

These days, the road to success can feel jampacked with scheduling, networking, nonstop hustle, and flat-out absurdity. And no one knows that better than Al Roker - beloved cohost of The Today Show, weatherperson extraordinaire, and the man we all secretly wish we could turn to for wisdom and wisecracks in our everyday lives. Al has learned worthwhile lessons over a long, successful career. And now, for the first time, Al is ready to unleash savvy advice on how to embrace happiness.

Considered "the world's most popular cult novelist" (The Guardian), Haruki Murakami has written books that have galvanized millions around the world. Many of his fans know about his 10,000-vinyl-record collection, and his obsession with running, but few have heard about a more intimate, and perhaps more unique, passion: his T-shirt-collecting habit.

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.