Essays Life

In addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. “Ink is a generative fluid,” she explains. “If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all.” A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades.

Author Joni B. Cole worries that Vlad the Impaler may be a distant cousin. She feuds with a dead medium. She thinks (or overthinks) about insulting birthday cards, power trips, and the real reason writers hate Amazon. And she wishes, really wishes, all those well-meaning people would stop talking about Guatemala. At once irreverent and thought provoking, Cole's collection is a joy ride through eclectic essays that arrive smack on that sweet spot between soul searching and social commentary, between humor and heft.

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- recollections, reviews, and essays from the light-hearted to the serious, taken from a lifetime of published and unpublished work, and all with Cope's lightness of touch.

Grow Damn It! is a captivating work by Cheryl Oreglia, who uses uncommon honesty and arresting humor to draw you into her cantankerous life, forty-year marriage, and revolving empty nest. She claims the space between past and future is where our potential is created or destroyed. If you don't like where your life is going, dig deeper, and write a new story. By weeding out the things that clutter her life, she invites you into a refreshing space with some of her most popular posts from her beloved blog Living in the Gap.

Discover Hope, Healing, and Humanity in Every Page In a world shaken by pandemics, climate change, political division, and personal struggles, it’s easy to feel disconnected and overwhelmed. But bestselling author David Dye’s Tomorrow Together: Essays of Hope, Healing, and Humanity offers a much-needed antidote a collection of short, powerful essays that remind us of the beauty, strength, and resilience that connect us all. With warmth, vulnerability, and a touch of humor, Dye takes readers on a journey through the joys and challenges of modern life, exploring themes of personal growth,...

A hilarious, smart and incredibly singular debut from Raven Smith, whose exploration of the minutiae of everyday modern life and culture is totally unique and painfully relatable. Is being tall a social currency? Am I the contents of my fridge? Does yoga matter if you’re not filthy rich? Is a bagel four slices of bread? Are three cigarettes a meal?

Collection of 14 essays, and named after the most important essay in the collection. I hope you enjoy these reflections, and that they encourage you in your faith in Jesus Christ. (Matthew 6:22) www.1peter1three.weebly.com

Following in the tradition of Sara Ahmed (the originator of the concept "feminist killjoy"), Wunker brings memoir, theory, literary criticism, pop culture, and feminist thinking together in this collection of essays that take up Ahmed's project as a multi-faceted lens through which to read the world from a feminist point of view.

A sensational celebration of Annie Ernaux's work—Writing, the Other Life features collected writing by critics, journalists, and 24 previously unpublished pieces by the Nobel Prize winner herself—offering a full view of the author's life, writing style, reception by readers, and her thoughts and influence.

Featuring a brand new introduction by the author on how he willingly gave up his birthright as the heir apparent to a multi-million dollar commercial construction firm in order to pursue his writing passion, Pieces of Mind contains essays on topics as diverse as lost love, sex, divorce, coping with a child's severe depression, experiencing Carnival in Venice, to sharing a first beer with your teenage son. But every word is delivered under the umbrella of a full-time fiction writer and freelance journalist trying to make sense of the lush world that surrounds him.

How do we make a better life? That’s the question this collection of essays attempts to answer in various and, I hope, interesting ways. We know from the outset that a better life comes from a solid sense of self that can grow, contribute, appreciate, love fully, and parent well. A solid sense of self must be able to cope with stress and regulate uncomfortable emotions in ways that facilitate growth and well-being. It must be able to use emotional pain as a means of transcendence, not imprisonment. It must have an internal locus of control, a belief that one’s own actions can change ...

The "web" has become our most powerful ecological image of the interconnectedness of all creatures, yet this image predates science, it is present in every culture's anthology. Chief Seattle said "Whatever man does to the web, he does to himself." Award-winning journalist Richard Louv explores the fragile network that connects people and the strands that make it up: nature, childhood, adulthood, spirit, purpose, and community.

Which famous author died of caffeine poisoning? Why was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland banned in China? Who was the first British writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature? What was Truman Capote superstitious about? Here is a light-hearted book about books and the people who write them for all lovers of literature. A treasure trove of compelling facts, riveting anecdotes, and extraordinary characters, For the Love of Books is a book about books - and the inside stories about the people who write them.

"Laugh-out-loud funny!" - Publishers Weekly "An argument for joy.' - Foreword Reviews 2014 Silver Medal Winner for Humor - Independent Publisher Book Awards program First Place Winner for Humor - North American Book Awards Winner for Top Ten Idaho Authors - Idaho Book Extravaganza Welcome to Midlife Cabernet! This title is SO much better than the original working title of Elderly Wino. If you’re a feisty, robust female tumbling down the far side of fifty, grab a glass of cabernet (oh hell, grab the whole bottle), wear your rhinestone-studded reading glasses, and savor some witty words of ...

What would you get if the Seinfeld, Reiner, Crystal, and Kagan families got together for dinner? You’d get fatter, guiltier, and hoarser from trying to get a word in edgewise and suffer muscle cramps from laughing. When you get into My Shorts, you get all that and more. An uproarious collection of true stories featuring a chubby Cheetos-loving Jewish middle child with overactive sweat glands and an abundant imagination.

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.

Short Stuff is a compilation of both narrative and poetic forms. I have always loved writing, but it took some jolts from my life journey to lead to more introspection and more freedom to hone these writings into some publishable form.

D. Eric Williams lives in north-central Idaho with his wife, a whole passel of kids and a laptop computer. His latest offering Quasimodo On Skis is a collection of quirky, witty, personal and downright hilarious shorts guaranteed to raise a laugh from even the most jaded. Join D. Eric Williams on a humorous ride through life from a cockeyed point of view.

Embracing the possibilities and impossibilities of language, Kim rejoices in the similes of Korean, her mother tongue, and draws inspiration from K-dramas and writers across cultures who sustain her. As borders close in and nations enter lockdown, the journey that Kim traces is fraught-and at once illuminates that the act of remaining present has its own power, allowing boundless hope.

*Winner of the 2018 Gold Medal of Achievement for Best Overall Book from GardenComm: Garden Communicators International* Carol Michel, author of the award-winning blog May Dreams Gardens, has penned a delightful book of gardening stories recounting her years speed weeding, scolding plants for their poor manners, experiencing the magic of a clover lawn, searching for elusive "rare in cultivation" plants, narrowly avoiding tussles in the garden center, formally evicting drought from her garden, and offering advice for those new to gardening. Is it possible to be utterly charming and wickedly ...