Literary Essays

From Pulitzer Prize - winning book critic Michael Dirda comes a collection of his most personal and engaging essays on the literary life - the perfect companion for any lover of books. Dirda's latest volume collects fifty of his witty and wide-ranging reflections on literary journalism, book collecting, and the writers he loves. Reaching from the classics to the postmoderns, his allusions dance from Samuel Johnson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and M. F. K. Fisher to Marilynne Robinson, Hunter S. Thompson, and David Foster Wallace.

A partir de siete preguntas que funcionan como disparadores, ¿A qué llamamos literatura? intenta responder cuestiones centrales en los estudios literarios: cómo se clasifican las obras, por qué las valoramos, qué valoramos en ellas, cómo representan mundos posibles, cómo las leemos, cómo circulan en la vida social, cómo se insertan en los conflictos que atraviesan nuestra cultura. Dirigido por José Luis de Diego, el presente volumen es el resultado de convertir -obligado por las restricciones sanitarias de 2020- las clases orales en clases escritas.

Ghalib's poetic trajectory begins from Urdu, then moves to composing almost entirely in Persian and finally swings back to Urdu. It is nearly as complex as his poetry. However, his poetic output in Persian is far more than what he wrote in Urdu. More important is that he gave precedence to Persian over Urdu. Ghalib's voice presents us with a double bind, a linguistic paradox. Exploring his life, works and philosophy, this authoritative critical biography of Ghalib opens a window to many shades of India and the subcontinent's cultural and literary tradition.

Fun, bright, and playful, power pop is a sometimes adored, sometimes maligned, often misunderstood genre of music. From its heyday in the '70s and '80s to its resurgence in the '90s and '00s, power pop has meant many things to many people. In Go All the Way, today's best and brightest writers go deep on what certain power pop bands and songs mean and have meant to them. Whether they love or hate it, Go All the Way is a dive into the Beatles-inspired pop rock of the last five decades.

The Ukraine is a collection of twenty-six pieces that deliberately blur the line between nonfiction and fiction, conjuring the essence of a beloved country through its tastes, smells, and sounds, its small towns and big cities, its people and their compassion and indifference, simplicities and complications. The Ukraine conveys to listeners a place that Chapeye and his countrymen are currently fighting for with their lives. The book features a preface by the author, which he composed on his phone from the front lines.

Whether writing about the genesis of his plays, such as Aunt Dan and Lemon; discussing how the privileged world of arts and letters takes for granted the work of the “unobtrusives”, the people who serve our food and deliver our mail; or describing his upbringing in the sheltered world of Manhattan’s cultural elite, Shawn reveals a unique ability to step back from the appearance of things to explore their deeper social meanings.

A selection from the John Updike audio collection.

Presented here are 3 short works by Virginia Woolf, each a unique consideration of the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The essays included are: The Father: Woolf's ruminations of family and, particularly, the father within the works of Dostoyevsky. More Dostoyevsky: Further thoughts on Dostoyevsky's work, an author of whom she once wrote “It is directly obvious that he is the greatest writer ever born." In Cranford: A comedic exploration of Dostoyevsky's work where Woolf transplants the great master into English provincial life to explore the unique nature of his work and the English nature.

The fiction and reportage included in The Last Carousel, one of the final collections published during Nelson Algren’s lifetime, was written on ships and in ports of call around the world, and includes accounts of brothels in Vietnam and Mexico, stories of the boxing ring, and reminiscences of Algren’s beloved Chicago White Sox, among other subjects. In this collection, not just Algren’s intensity but his diversity are revealed and celebrated.

In a volume he describes as "a series of covert and not-so-covert autobiographical pieces", Jonathan Lethem explores the nature of cultural obsession, in his case, with examples as diverse as western films, comic books, the music of Talking Heads and Pink Floyd, and the New York City subway. Along the way, he shows how each of these "voyages out from himself" have led him home, home to his father's life as a painter, and to the source of his beginnings as a writer.

Will Self is one of the most important British novelists of his generation, and he is as acclaimed in the UK for his outstanding, daring journalism as he is for his fiction. Now finally available in America, Junk Mail is an original selection of pieces from Self's nonfiction and journalism that will introduce American listeners to Self as a literary journalist par excellence.

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".

As any fan of Jo Walton's Among Others might guess, Walton is both an inveterate reader of SF and fantasy, and a chronic rereader of books. In 2008, then-new science fiction mega-site Tor.com asked Walton to blog regularly about her rereading—about all kinds of older fantasy and SF, ranging from acknowledged classics, to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. These posts have consistently been among the most popular features of Tor. Now this volume presents a selection of the best of them, ranging from short essays to long reassessments of some of the field's most ambitious series.

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 cultural icon Margaret Atwood comes a brilliant collection of essays - funny, erudite, endlessly curious, uncannily prescient - which seek answers to burning questions. In over 50 pieces Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humour at the world, and reports back to us on what she finds. This roller-coaster period brought the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump, and a pandemic.

Kendra Allen’s first collection of essays—at its core—is a bunch of mad stories about things she never learned to let go of. Unifying personal narrative and cultural commentary, this collection grapples with the lessons that have been stored between parent and daughter. These parental relationships expose the conditioning that subconsciously informed her ideas on social issues such as colorism, feminism, war-induced PTSD, homophobia, marriage, and “the n-word,” among other things.

まったくウルサイおやじである。 素晴らしいマグロがないとお話にならないとか（私はマグロはあったら食うけどなくてもいい）、飯に昆布や砂糖をいれたのはだめだとか（入れてました）。 店の経営方法やら、大正の人格やら、客の格やら、下世話で遠慮がない。 そこがおもしろいのが悔しい。 偉そうに！･･･と思いながら耳をそらせない。 寿司の人気の理由は「肴と飯が安直にいっしょに食べられるところが時代の人気に投じたものだろう。」などと日本料理の横綱かたなしだ。

歴史に名を刻む人は、安楽な人生を送れないようになっているのか。 貧しい家に生まれ、両親は離婚、そののち父は自殺、養子に出されるが、画家 を志して決別、生母に巡りあうも拒絶され・・・這い上がるように名を成すも 戦争・敗戦・不遇な日々がーー 運命が人を選ぶのか。 人が運命を選ぶのか。 「人が運命を選ぶのだ。」と魯山人ならいうだろう、と、確信する。 本作品をしれば貴方もそう思われることだろうと思う。 これは単なる料理の書ではない、人生の書である。

こうるさいおやぢが目にみえるようである。 小煩い名を成した食通のセンセイが、眉間にシワをよせ、足を組み、指をたて て振り回しながら講釈を垂れている。 真剣に。 心の底から真剣に、横丁のおばさんにむかって。 横丁のおばさんにむかって、料理人たちに語りかけるときとおなじくらい心の 底から真剣に。 だしの素つかっているワタクシにそんなこと言われてもな。 苦笑いである。 でも、今晩は、ちょっとだしの素の説明書読んでから出汁を取ろうかな・・

明治から昭和初期にかけて活躍した物理学者、随筆家、俳人である寺田寅彦の随筆作品。

初出は「東京帝国大学新聞」［1929（昭和4）年4月］。「日本の名随筆89　数」［作品社、1990（平成2）年］に収録。

それぞれに苦手意識をもつ学生諸君に、数学にも語学にも案外共通項があるということに気づかせ、好きなものに対する方法を利用して嫌いなものを征服する道程を暗示したいと考え、書き綴った作品。