Essays Life

In Fires Which Burned Brightly, Faulks, a reluctant memoirist, offers readers a series of detailed snapshots from a life in progress. They include a post-war rural childhood – ‘cold mutton and wet washing on a rack over the range’ – the booze-sodden heyday of Fleet Street and a career as one of the country’s most acclaimed novelists.

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 ...

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, ...

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.

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 ...

When I wrote my first monthly blog post in November of 2016, I didn’t really have a grip on my purpose, what my central theme or message was, or what the blog would become. I was simply and spontaneously moving pen across page. Now, looking back eight and a half years later, I realize: “Oh! I was home on the roam.” That first post doesn’t mention this, but I wrote it from Sunyani, Ghana. After a somewhat random and uncertain start, I quickly get it in gear, sitting down once a month (occasionally twice) to write about what moved me the most during the preceding weeks. Almost always ...

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.

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.

Jiordan's family was never quite like everyone else's, with her father's mood swings, her mother's attempts at normalcy, and her two older sisters with a different last name. But on the surface, they fit in. Until the day the FBI came knocking on the door. After that, her father's mood plunged to a dangerous new low. After that, there was an investigation into his business and a sentencing in court. Soon Jiordan's father would have to leave home, and her family would change forever.

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.

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.

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.

And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again takes its title from the last line of Dante's Inferno, when the poet and his guide emerge from hell to once again behold the beauty of the heavens. In that spirit, the stories, essays, and poems in this collection - from beloved authors including Jhumpa Lahiri, Mario Vargas Llosa, Eavan Boland, Daniel Alarcón, Jon Lee Anderson, Claire Messud, Ariel Dorfman, and many more - detail the harrowing experiences of life in the pandemic, while pointing toward a less isolated future.

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.

From childhood to retirement, the author reflects on a life through the lens of faith and, at times, doubt, focusing on life and death and the joys in between. From the Introduction: “What follows are reflections on the past, on life experiences, on faith, and on death. I’d like to think that, despite different pasts, different personalities, much of what we learn, and experience is universal. The following essays mirror my experience and what I think is the human experience. "In his poem, The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot wrote, “These fragments I have shored against my ruin.” These words...