Essays Social

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader is Vivian Gornick’s celebration of passionate reading, of returning again and again to the books that have shaped her at crucial points in her life. In nine essays that traverse literary criticism, memoir, and biography, one of our most celebrated critics writes about the importance of reading - and re-reading - as life progresses. Guided by Gornick’s trademark verve and insight, Unfinished Business is a masterful appreciation of literature’s power to illuminate our lives from a peerless writer and thinker.

This essay comes from the NPR series This I Believe, which features brief personal reflections from both famous and unknown Americans. The pieces that make up the series compel listeners to rethink not only what and how they have arrived at their beliefs, but also the extent to which they share them with others.

“And, at the center of it all, am I actually nice or am I just performing a role I think I’m expected to play?” Mia Mercado is a razor-sharp cultural critic and essayist known for her witty and hilarious dissections of the uncomfortable truths that rule our lives. In this thought-provoking collection of new essays, Mercado examines what it means to be “polite,” “agreeable,” and “nice.” She covers topics from the subtleties of the “Bad Bitch” and why women dominate the ASMR market, to what makes her dog an adorable little freak and how you know if you’re shy.

Milan Kundera has established himself as one of the great novelists of our time with such books as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In Testaments Betrayed, he proves himself a brilliant defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due to a work of art and its creator's wishes. The betrayal of both - often by their most passionate proponents - is the principal theme of this extraordinary work. Listeners will be particularly intrigued by Kundera's impassioned attack on society's shifting moral judgments and persecutions of art and artists.

What does it mean to be a body behind a screen, lost in the hustle of an online world? In our age of digital hyper-connection, Athena Dixon invites us to consider this question with depth, heart, and ferocity, investigating the gaps that technology cannot fill and confronting a lifetime of loneliness.

Joel Golby's writing for Vice and The Guardian, with its wry observation and naked self-reflection, has brought him a wide and devoted following. Now, in his first book, he presents a blistering collection of new and newly expanded essays - including the achingly funny viral hit "Things You Only Know When Both Your Parents Are Dead." In this audiobook, he travels to Saudi Arabia, where he acts as a perplexed bystander at a camel pageant; offers a survival guide for the modern dinner party (i.e. how to tactfully escape at the first sign of an adult board game); and more.

Iceland is home to only 330,000 people but more than 265 museums and public collections, ranging from the intensely physical, like the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which collects the penises of every mammal known to exist in Iceland, to the vaporously metaphysical, like the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, which poses a particularly Icelandic problem: how to display what can't be seen?

Opposites and borders are never as clear as we think. With a novelist's eye for the unexpected, author Hari Kunzru takes listeners into the gray zone between life and death, public and private, black and white, and more. Along the way he meets philosophers and punk musicians, New Age gurus and space explorers, and together they investigate liminal spaces around the world. Into the Zone: Audio Essays includes a new foreword and afterword providing bookends to a series of brilliantly crafted intersections on history and the evolution of identity.

This essay comes from the NPR series This I Believe, which features brief personal reflections from both famous and unknown Americans. The pieces that make up the series compel listeners to rethink not only what and how they have arrived at their beliefs, but also the extent to which they share them with others.

Solo integral es la modalidad más extrema de escalada. En su práctica, el escalador se juega la vida en cada uno de sus movimientos. Este conjunto de artículos (cien publicados y otros cien inéditos) reflejan el espíritu crítico y a contracorriente de Fernando Savater. El autor se pone a prueba en esta revisión de sus ideas no solo porque puede llegar a contradecirse, sino porque, al ser textos independientes, que no están adscritos a un medio de comunicación, puede pensar, escribir y opinar de una forma totalmente libre.

Are Australian schools safe? And if they're not, what happens when kids are caught in a bleak collision between ill-equipped school staff and a confected media scandal? In 2016, the Safe Schools program became the centre of an ideological firestorm. In QE67, Benjamin Law explores how and why this happened. He weaves a subtle, gripping account of schools today, sexuality, teenagers, new ideas of gender fluidity, tabloid media scares and mental health.

Es famoso el pesimismo de Schopenhauer, pero también su intachable honestidad. Para él, la filosofía tenía un fin específico: evitar que el ser humano le tema a la muerte. Estos Ensayos selectos agrupan los temas y territorios que más le interesaron: conocimiento, muerte, destino, arte.

The intersection of motherhood and creative life is explored in these writings on mothering that turn the spotlight from the child to the mother herself. Here, in memoirs, testimonials, diaries, essays, and fiction, mothers describe firsthand the changes brought to their lives by pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o was a towering figure in African literature, and his novels A Grain of Wheat; Weep Not, Child; and Petals of Blood are modern classics. Emerging from a literary scene that flourished in the 1950s and '60s during the last years of colonialism in Africa, he became known not just as a novelist—one who, in the late '70s, famously stopped writing novels in English and turned to the language he grew up speaking, Gĩkũyũ—but as a major postcolonial theorist.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) had a profound influence on the shape of 19th-century thought and political discourse. His view of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to the unrestricted state. Mill favoured decentralised forms of socialism because he thought that a centralised model would discourage competition, neglect talent, and disregard freedom.

The Challenge of Things joins earlier collections like The Reason of Things and Thinking of Answers but this time to collect Grayling's recent writings on the world in a time of war and conflict. In describing and exposing the dark side of things, he also explores ways out of the habits and prejudices of mind that would otherwise trap us forever in the deadly impasses of conflicts of all kinds.

The Burden, edited by award-winning Detroit newspaper columnist Rochelle Riley, is a powerful collection of essays that create a chorus of evidence that the burden is real. The Burden expresses the voices of well-known Americans, such as actor/director Tim Reid who compares slavery to a cancer diagnosis, and former Detroit News columnist Betty DeRamus who recounts the discrimination she encountered as a young Black Detroiter in the south.

Becoming Los Angeles, a new collection by the author of the acclaimed memoir Holy Land, blends history, memory, and critical analysis to illuminate how Angelenos have seen themselves and their city. Waldie’s particular concern is commonplace Los Angeles, whose rhythms of daily life are set against the gaudy backdrop of historical myth and Hollywood illusion. It’s through sacred ordinariness that Waldie experiences the city’s seasons.

Nanjala Nyabola is constantly exploring the world, working with migrants and confronting complex realities challenging common assumptions - both hers and others’. From Nepal to Botswana, Sicily to Haiti, New York to Nairobi, her sharp, humane essays ask tough questions and offer surprising, deeply shocking, and sometimes funny answers. It is time we saw the world through her eyes.

True heroism does not seek applause. It does not wear armor or demand recognition. It walks quietly, steady in its purpose, untouched by fear or flattery. In Heroism, Ralph Waldo Emerson strips away the illusions of grandeur and reveals the essence of courage: a quiet, unwavering commitment to one's own principles. This is not a celebration of warriors or conquerors but of those who face the world with integrity, who move through life unshaken by its storms.