Essay Essays

Andrew Sean Greer can’t wait to get home to San Francisco after a writer’s residency in Kansas. But when his mother, Sandra, decides to come along for the ride, he has a new goal: get her to crack a smile at every stop, whether breathtaking or breathtakingly kitschy. He’s always known his mother to be as efficient and serious as a chemist (which she happens to be), always in gray, eyebrow cocked, and handling challenges with grace. To mix things up, Andrew develops an elaborate itinerary of planned chaos.

The Armenian enclave of the Catskills as told both as a general guide and essays of the enchanted purple mountains that helped heal the survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and their descendants like an elixir of Mother Nature.

What if we can make ourselves, our communities, and our planet healthier all at the same time by moving our bodies more? Movement Matters is a collection of essays in which biomechanist Katy Bowman continues her groundbreaking investigation of the mechanics of our sedentary culture and the profound potential of human movement. Here she widens her message and invites us to consider our personal relationship with sedentarism, privilege, and nature.

A gorgeously illustrated collection of essays written by today’s queer heroes - featuring contributions from Elton John, Tan France, Gus Kenworthy, Paris Lees, Russell Tovey, Munroe Bergdorf, and many others. The Queer Bible is a celebration of LGBTQ+ history and culture, edited by model, performer, and GQ contributing editor Jack Guinness.

A unique survivor memoir. Essays that range from heartwarming to brutal. Individual trigger warnings (TW) allow listeners to practice self-care. Washington State native Mary Knight, MSW, experienced various forms of child sex trafficking, sometimes in her own home. Her parents were her pimps. Knight's current life is filled with safety, love, joy, and children. Happily married, she is a child advocate, a foster parent, and a grandmother.

With the eyes of a scientist and the vision of a poet, Kingsolver writes about notions as diverse as modern motherhood, the history of private property, and the suspended citizenship of humans in the animal kingdom.

The essays in this collection came about during the unhurried months when one who had traveled incessantly was obliged to stay still, even as events flared on all sides in a world that never stops moving. Wade Davis brings his unique cultural perspective to such varied topics as the demonization of coca, the sacred plant of the Inca; the Great War and the birth of modernity; the British conquest of Everest; the endless conflict in the Middle East; reaching beyond climate fear and trepidation; on the meaning of the sacred.

"Stories, both my own and those I've taken to heart, make up whoever it is that I've become," Peter Orner writes in this collection of essays about reading, writing, and living. Orner reads and writes everywhere he finds himself: a hospital cafeteria, a coffee shop in Albania, or a crowded bus in Haiti. The result is a book of unlearned meditations that stumbles into memoir.

Salman Rushdie is celebrated as “a master of perpetual storytelling” (The New Yorker), illuminating truths about our society and culture through his gorgeous, often searing prose. Now, in his latest collection of nonfiction, he brings together insightful and inspiring essays, criticism, and speeches that focus on his relationship with the written word and solidify his place as one of the most original thinkers of our time.

Is our democracy corroding? In this original, eloquent essay, Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens explore the ethics and politics of public debate—and the threat it now faces. In a healthy society we need the capacity to disagree. Yet Aly and Stephens note a growing tendency to disdain and dismiss opponents, to treat them with contempt. This toxic partisanship has been imported from the United States, where it has been a temptation for both left and right.

Beneath the self-assured and serious faces we wear, every human life is full of longing, guesswork, and confusion—a scramble to do the best we can and make everything up as we go along. In these wide-ranging essays, Jon Mooallem chronicles the beauty of our blundering and the inescapability of our imperfections.

In prose that is evocative and sensual, unabashedly queer and visceral, raw and autobiographical, Joshua Whitehead writes of an Indigenous body in pain, coping with trauma. Deeply rooted within, he reaches across the anguish to create a new form of storytelling he calls "biostory"—beyond genre, and entirely sovereign. Through this narrative perspective, Making Love with the Land recasts mental health struggles and our complex emotional landscapes from a nefarious parasite on his (and our) well-being to kin, even a relation, no matter what difficulties they present to us.

Poker is a game of many skills and to become an expert poker player you need to master them all. This includes concepts such as hand selection, position, proper image projection, and reading hands. However, there are many players who have mastered most of these skills yet they still do poorly in the games ? at best they are only small winners. And when they step up in limit and challenge the better players, they almost always fail. You see, knowing the concept is one thing, putting it all together is another. As the text will show, winning poker is a process that requires a lot of thinking ...

The writing of Death of a President, William Manchester's award-winning account of President Kennedy's assassination, is the topic of the title essay in this collection, as it was a controversy like few others, pitting one of the most prominent historians of the day against Jackie Kennedy, the most famous and private widow in the world. The essay provides an insider's account of the struggle to see the book published.

When Abbi Jacobson announced to friends and acquaintances that she planned to drive across the country alone, she was met with lots of questions and opinions: Why wasn't she going with friends? Wouldn't it be incredibly lonely? The North route is better! Was it safe for a woman? The Southern route is the way to go! You should bring mace! And a common one... why? But Abbi had always found comfort in solitude and needed space to step back and hit the reset button. As she spent time in each city on her way to Los Angeles, she mulled over the big questions: What do I really want?

The best of the Minimalists! This book by Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus collects the most relevant essays - some short, some long - from their popular website, TheMinimalists.com. This collection has been edited and organized to create an experience that's considerably different from reading individual selections online. From simple living, decluttering, and finances to passion, health, and relationships, Essential is for anyone who desires a more intentional life.

Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as "The Harper's Essay," Franzen's controversial 1996 investigation of the fate of the American novel. This essay is reprinted for the first time in How to be Alone, along with the personal essays and the dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Corrections.

The death of Christopher Hitchens in December 2011 prematurely silenced a voice that was among the most admired of contemporary writers. For more than 40 years, Hitchens delivered to numerous publications on both sides of the Atlantic essays that were astonishingly wide ranging and provocative.

Jill Gutowitz’s life—for better and worse—has always been on a collision course with pop culture. There’s the time the FBI showed up at her door because of something she tweeted about Game of Thrones. The pop songs that have been the soundtrack to the worst moments of her life.

This is a collection of 21 essays on a variety of occult-themed topics, covering the full spectrum of classic esoteric and related subjects, which include Hermeticism, alchemy, magic, the Kabbalah, ancient wisdom and philosophy, the Tarot, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Theosophy, and spiritualism, by some of the most notable and prominent names in the history of those subjects.