Literary Essays

In this deeply personal reflection, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri explores the art of the book jacket from the perspectives of both reader and writer. Probing the complex relationships between text and image, author and designer, and art and commerce, Lahiri delves into the role of the uniform; explains what book jackets and design have come to mean to her; and how, sometimes, "the covers become a part of me".

With great originality and wit, Orwell unfolds his views on subjects ranging from a revaluation of Charles Dickens to the nature of Socialism, from a comic yet profound discussion of naughty seaside postcards to a spirited defense of English cooking. Displaying an almost unrivalled mastery of English plain prose, Orwell’s essays created a unique literary manner from the process of thinking aloud and continue to challenge, move, and entertain.

“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...

C. S. Lewis: Views From Wake Forest is a collection of sixteen insightful essays that will delight both Inklings scholars and C. S. Lewis readers of all ages and opinions. Walter Hooper, for example, the man most responsible for preserving, publishing, and promoting Lewis' many works after Lewis' death in 1963, shares stories from his work with Lewis, Owen Barfield, Lady Collins, and other friends of Lewis in his essay 'Editing C. S. Lewis,' an inspiring tale as well as a landmark event in Lewis scholarship. James Como, author of Why I Believe in Narnia and a Keynote Speaker at the ...

For over six decades, Gay Talese has told New York stories. They are the stories of daring bridge builders, disappearing gangsters, intrepid Vogue editors, unassuming doormen who’ve seen too much. They are set in the star-studded salons of George Plimpton’s apartment, in the tense newsroom of a still burgeoning New York Times, in an electric studio session with Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga recording their debut. With the wit, elegance, and depth of insight that has long characterized his work, Talese’s New York reporting showcases a master of the form at his finest.

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them.

"The Writing of Essays" by H. G. Wells is a short essay. H. G. Wells once different, humorous social satire and ironic. The art of the essayist is so simple, so entirely free from canons of criticism, and withal so delightful, that one must needs wonder why all men are not essayists. Perhaps people do not know how easy it is.

These masterpieces (along with several previously uncollected stories) are available in one volume, which presents an indelible collective portrait of an unsuspected New York and its odder citizens - as depicted by one of the great writers of this or any other time.

Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

Salman Rushdie is celebrated as “a master of perpetual storytelling” (The New Yorker), illuminating truths about our society and culture through his gorgeous, often searing prose. Now, in his latest collection of nonfiction, he brings together insightful and inspiring essays, criticism, and speeches that focus on his relationship with the written word and solidify his place as one of the most original thinkers of our time.

The Tashkent-born Russian-American literary critic, editor, essayist, and journalist Vladislav Davidzon has been covering post-Soviet Ukraine for the past ten years, a tumultuous time for that country and the surrounding world. In late 2015, a year and a half after the 2014 Revolution swept away the Moscow-leaning kleptocratic President Viktor Yanukovich, Davidzon and his wife founded a literary journal, The Odessa Review. This eagerly anticipated debut tells the real story of what happened in Ukraine from the keen and resilient perspective of an observer at its center.

SEX AND THE CITY offers a tantalizing glimpse of the openings, launch parties, and celebrity affairs that keep society amused. Throughout, a cast of characters - the troubled writer, the successful businessman, the famous underwear model, and others - searches for true love...or at least someone to go home with at the end of the night. It's a chronicle of the true-life adventures of the "in" crowd that is often hilarious and sometimes terrifying, but always mesmerizing.

Arguably the most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection - a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades.

Shocked and distressed by a male writer's vilification of women, Christine de Pizan has a powerful dreamlike vision in which she is visited by three personified Virtues: Reason, Rectitude and Justice. They tell her she has been chosen to write a book which will be like a city, housing virtuous women and protecting them from feminist attack. Partly myth, partly fact, The Book of the City of Ladies is an extraordinary, pioneering and impassioned defense of women that set out to shatter misogynist cliches and serve to instill self-worth in its female listeners of the time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a leader in the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He is best known for his political philosophy and ideological thoughts on the moral worth of the individual and his work greatly influenced many of the great thinkers of his time, including Henry David Thoreau.

A striking and nuanced collection, bringing to life awkward college students, disgraced public figures, raunchy grandparents, and mystical godmothers. To listen to these stories is to experience the transporting joys of discovery and affirmation, and to realize that story writing in America continues to flourish.

“What's most compelling about a scientific story is the way it challenges us to think about the concepts we take for granted,” writes guest editor Carl Zimmer in his introduction. The essays in this year’s Best American Science and Nature Writing probe at the ordinary and urge us to think more deeply about our place in the world around us.

In sixteen dazzling, expansive essays, the acclaimed essayist and poet Elisa Gabbert explores a life lived alongside books of all kinds: dog-eared and destroyed, cherished and discarded, classic and clichėd, familiar and profoundly new. She turns her witty, searching mind to the writers she admires, from Plath to Proust, and the themes that bind them―chance, freedom, envy, ambition, nostalgia, and happiness. She takes us to the strange edges of art and culture, from hair metal to surf movies to party fiction.

One of the most highly acclaimed and best-selling authors of our time now gives us a book that charts the history of his own enchantment with story - from his own books to those of Blake, Milton, Dickens, and the Brothers Grimm, among others - and delves into the role of story in education, religion, and science. At once personal and wide-ranging, Daemon Voices is both a revelation of the writing mind and the methods of a great contemporary master and a fascinating exploration of storytelling itself.

Video game sales as a whole have continued to grow, now raking in twice as much money per year as the entire film industry, and countless psychologists have turned their attention to the effects gaming has on us: our confidence, our identity, and our personal growth. The Psychology of Zelda applies the latest psychological findings, plus insights from classic psychology theory, to Link, Zelda, Hyrule, and the players who choose to wield the Master Sword.