Essays Life

He Never Came Home is a collection of 22 personal essays written by girls and women who have been separated from their fathers by way of divorce, abandonment, or death. The contributors to this collection come from a wide range of different backgrounds in terms of race, socioeconomic status, religion, and geographic location. Their essays offer deep insights into the emotions related to losing one’s father, including sadness, indifference, anger, acceptance—and everything in between.

With humor and self-deprecation, poignancy and bite, this audiobook presents observations on my life before the law, my forty-one years in the law, and my life after I left. If you are considering a career pivot, you will find that these essays are both funny and on point; and you will experience a sense of community—you are not alone.

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.

Of a Happy Life is an essay written by Seneca around the year 58 AD. It was intended for his older brother Gallio, to whom Seneca also dedicated his dialogue entitled De Ira (On Anger). It is divided into 28 chapters that present the moral thoughts of Seneca at their most mature. Seneca explains that the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of reason - reason meant not only using logic, but also understanding the processes of nature.

En su antigua condición de tutor y consejero del emperador Nerón, el filósofo y hombre de Estado Séneca era tremendamente consciente de la brevedad de la vida, la suya propia se vio truncada cuando el emperador le ordenó que se suicidara, por su presunta implicación en una conspiración. Y Séneca demostró ser consecuente con lo que predicaba, y el compromiso a lo largo de toda su vida con el estoicismo le permitió conducirse con dignidad hasta el final.

A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life by Pat Conroy is a new nonfiction collection of letters, interviews, and magazine articles spanning Conroy's long literary career, supplemented by touching pieces from the beloved author's many friends. The book collects some of Conroy's most charming pieces of short nonfiction, many of them addressed directly to his listeners, with his habitual greeting: "Hey, out there".

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), 1st Viscount St Albans, Attorney General and then Lord Chancellor of England, was an immensely learned, clever and ambitious man, with considerable political influence. However, he was also a philosopher with a wide interest in science, medicine and the classification of knowledge. Throughout his life he wrote a series of essays - following the manner set particularly by Montaigne, though extending back to Aristotle and others - the first 10 of which appeared in 1597.

No matter what was happening in Jennifer Weiner's life - whether good, bad, or very, very ugly - her mother, Fran, would say the same thing: It's all material. Now the number-one New York Times best-selling author and "one of the biggest names in popular fiction" ( USA Today), beloved on Twitter and hailed as "an unlikely feminist enforcer" ( The New Yorker), takes the raw stuff of her personal life and spins it into a collection of personal essays as uproariously funny and heartfelt as the best of Tina Fey and Nora Ephron.

Pulling Weeds and Patching Life: Confessions from a Crooked Garden What do tangled hoses, runaway chickens, and zucchini the size of toddlers have in common? Apparently—your emotional wellbeing. In this laugh-out-loud and deeply relatable collection of essays, author and accidental philosopher Debbie Danielsen digs into the messy joy of tending both garden beds and soul wounds. With dirt under her nails and humor in her heart, she explores how compost can teach you about grief, mint about boundaries, and why talking to your tomatoes isn’t all that weird (especially if they talk back). ...

One of Barbara Ehrenreich's most classic and prophetic works, Fear of Falling closely examines the insecurities of the American middle class in an attempt to explain its turn to the right during the last two decades of the 20th century. Weaving finely-tuned expert analysis with her trademark voice, Ehrenreich traces the myths about the middle class to their roots, determines what led to the shrinking of what was once a healthy percentage of the population, and how, in its ambition and anxiety, that population has retreated from responsible leadership.

When Hurricane Helene roared ashore, it didn’t just take houses, cars, and power lines—it took normalcy, leaving an entire community to pick up the pieces. When Life Gives You Floods, Bring the Ham is a raw, heartfelt, and unexpectedly humorous account of surviving the storm, losing nearly everything, and discovering what truly matters in the aftermath. Through vivid storytelling, this book blends memoir, humor, and resilience, offering a deeply personal yet universally relatable journey of displacement, devastation, and the small moments of joy that keep us going. From evacuating at ...

Fifteen years ago, Robert Fulghum published a simple credo that became the phenomenal #1 New York Times bestseller All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Now, seven million copies later, Fulghum returns to the book that was embraced around the world.

A rollicking journey through the wild world of real estate, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House is the story of "a very imperfect life lived among very imperfect houses" and one woman's obsession with the search for four walls (along with, preferably, a roof not in need of replacing) to call home. In the six houses and many states where Meghan Daum spent her suburban childhood, for the Daum family, "if there was anything that came close to a regular weekend activity it was attending open houses."

From the New York Times bestselling author of The History of White People and Old in Art School, a finalist for the NBCC Award, comes a comprehensive new collection of essays spanning art, politics, and the legacy of racism that shapes American history as we know it. These essays resist easy answers in favor of complexity, the inescapable sense of our country’s potential thwarted by its failures. This collection will surely solidify Painter’s place among the finest critics and writers of the last half century.

When Marya Hornbacher published her first book, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, she did not yet have the piece of shattering knowledge that would finally make sense of the chaos of her life. At age 24, Hornbacher was diagnosed with type I rapid-cycle bipolar, the most severe form of bipolar disorder. In Madness, in her trademark wry and utterly self-revealing voice, Hornbacher tells her new story.

What draws our species to war? What makes us see violence as a kind of sacred duty, or a ritual that boys must undergo to "become" men? Newly reissued, Blood Rites takes listeners on an original journey from the elaborate human sacrifices of the ancient world to the carnage and holocaust of 20th-century "total war." Ehrenreich sifts deftly through the fragile records of prehistory and discovers the wellspring of war in an unexpected place - not in a "killer instinct" unique to the males of our species, but in the blood rites early humans performed.

“I am a recluse and I love books more than I love people.” – So begins Fiza Pathan, the self-proclaimed Reclusive Writer and Reader of Mumbai. In this charming collection of personal essays, Fiza recalls important phases of her life, along with the books she was reading at the time and where she read them. Revealed along the way are Fiza’s personal struggles, from the father who didn’t want a girl child to the years she believed she wanted to be a nun to the college friends who shamed her for gaining weight. Her greatest victories are found here as well, among them the publication...

A much-loved classic of nature writing from environmentalist and the author of Waterlog, Roger Deakin, Wildwood is an exploration of the element wood in nature, our culture and our lives. From the walnut tree at his Suffolk home, he embarks upon a quest that takes him through Britain, across Europe, to Central Asia and Australia, in search of what lies behind man's profound and enduring connection with wood and trees.

The COVID pandemic propelled many people to change their lives in ways large and small. Some adopted puppies. Others stress-baked. Peggy Orenstein, a lifelong knitter, went just a little further. To keep herself engaged and cope with a series of seismic shifts in family life, she set out to make a garment from the ground up: learning to shear sheep, spin and dye yarn, then knitting herself a sweater.

Each essay illuminates the life of a single species and its relationship to humans, and how these species can help us understand birds in general. A dedicated birdwatcher and teacher, Gedney finds wonder not only in the speed and glistening beauty of the Anna's hummingbird, but also in her nest building. He acclaims the turkey vulture's and red-tailed hawk's roles in our ecosystem, and he venerates the inimitable California scrub jay's work planting acorns.