Essays Life

Essays, observations and stories about Pattaya and Thailand - humorous, satiric, observational.

“One should be light like a bird and not like a feather,” wrote the French poet Paul Valéry. In this collection of personal and playful essays, J. E. Chadwick explores lightness – how to let go of whatever weighs you down. Chadwick discovers the art of walking around European cities and the surprising truth about cooking for forty silent strangers. He reveals how to survive a narcissist (especially if it’s you), when to fire and rehire one’s mind, and offers three words to live by. Readers will meet Hirayama, the toilet-cleaning protagonist of Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, and ...

From the author of Soul Deep in Horses: Memoir of an Equestrian Vagabond and the award-winning Tevis Cup Magic: Taking on the World’s Toughest 100 Mile Endurance Ride comes a collection of essays that take place in the present-day Wild West: southwest Idaho. In these keenly perceptive, and often humorous lyrical word portraits of nature, animals, local history, and horse rides and hiking adventures in the Owyhee country, Merri Melde gives readers a look at four seasons of a unique outdoor life. From experiencing wild thunderstorms, flash flood and wildfire, to horseback riding on cattle ...

In Time to Stand Up Bill Hull takes no prisoners. He makes fun of everyone from Don Henley and Jordan Peterson to philosopher Hannah Arendt and playwright David Mamet. Both the living and dead are targets for his satire, even G.K. Chesterton doesn’t escape. Just about the time you begin to laugh, he delves into the mind of Elon Musk and the fact that Musk wouldn’t mind being saved from his sins. Then Hull confesses to his own anxieties, faults, and fears. He points out that he has committed all the seven deadly sins and by the way, so have you. Bill possesses inside knowledge of pride, ...

Raised in Manhattan by her overly protective sex-therapist mother who wore "seven layers of shoulder pads" and her two doting grandparents, life in Wendy Spero's world has never been dull. As a child, she passed the time organizing impromptu "garage sales" on city sidewalks, sniffing fruit-scented magic markers to intoxication, parenting dozens of high-maintenance stuffed animals, and seeking out other "microthrills", which she writes about in this hilarious audiobook of odd but true stories.

This first book by Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Steinbach is an intimate, personal collection of essays, remembrances, and columns that follows in the creative non-fiction tradition of Anna Quindelen and Mary Sarton.

A selection from the John Updike audio collection. These extraordinarily evocative stories depict the generation born in a small-town America during the Depression and growing up in a world where the old sexual morality was turned around and material comforts were easily had. Yet, as these stories reflect so accurately, life was still unsettling, and Updike chronicles telling moments both joyful and painful.

In Summer over Autumn, Howard Mansfield sifts through the commonplace and the forgotten to discover stories that tell us about ourselves and our place in the world - in this case, Hancock, New Hampshire.

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.

This is the first of a series of essays to explore the age-old art of BS. What is BS? How can one master the art of BS? When, where, and how is BS appropriate? A tongue-in-cheek cultural and literary analysis of the history and nature of BS as an art form. Author and narrator Dan Sullivan tackles the subject in his customarily zany way, mixing anecdote, history, science, and of course, biology.

Richard Jefferies remains one of the most thoughtful and most lyrical writers on the English countryside. Best known for his articles and stories published in the Live Stock Journal, he draws from a wealth of knowledge of the rural community into which he had been born. Here he examines the habitats of the Downs and the birds and animals that live there. Written in Jefferies' highly descriptive style, the essay conveys a sense of wonder evoked by the natural world.

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.

In the best-selling and beloved tradition of Dave Barry, a coming-of-middle-age tale by Thurber finalist Dan Zevin, master of “Seinfeld-ian nothingness” ( Time) about a man’s inevitable transition into mid-life and fatherhood.

*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 ...

Author, critic and traveler, Marina Vaizey, in her third lockdown essay, reflects on the books of figures in the changing façade of English society and the establishment. Missing people, even with telephones and emails. And music and theatre even with the incredibly generous digital provision.

In this incisive collection, Sharon Butala reflects on the ways her life has changed as she's grown old. She knows that society fails the elderly massively, and so she tackles ageism and loneliness, friendship and companionship. She writes with pointed wit and acerbic humour about dinner parties and health challenges and forgetfulness and complicated family relationships and the pandemic—and lettuce. And she tells her story with the tremendous skill and beauty of a writer who has masterfully honed her craft over the course of her storied four-decade career.

In this new collection of poems, essays, and flash fiction, the author once again exhibits her ability to write about both the light and dark sides of life. There are numerous poems and stories about nature: its kindness, cruelty, and wonder. There are frank expressions of the sadness and frustration she felt at the progressive loss of her eyesight and a poem about the social isolation that disability can bring. Other pieces, though, sing of joys as diverse as family closeness, the love of dogs, the delights of scents, and the power of the muse.

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.

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.

Within each chapter, you’ll find an un-airbrushed selection of advice, comment and opinion. These are intimate stories from bad sex to bad boys, from workplace inequality to the sheer joy of learning something new, that will spark hope, triumph and occasionally outrage. In Life Honestly you will find fresh perspectives on everything from age milestones to friendship, motherhood and weddings, and why you should always, always, tell someone when you like their earrings.