Essays Letters category: 7676 books

National Book Award-winning poet and author of the internationally best-selling Iron John, Robert Bly revisits a selection of fairy tales and examines how these enduring narratives capture the essence of human nature. Few forms of storytelling have greater power to captivate the human mind...

“A creature from an alternative universe . . . wanting to understand what is on the American mind should rush to the nearest bookstore and buy a copy of this distinguished anthology . . . Exhilarating.” — Publishers Weekly The Best American Essays 2014 is selected and introduced by John...

Rainer Maria Rilke offers a compelling portrait of Parisian life, art, and culture at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1902, the young German writer Rainer Maria Rilke traveled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He returned many times over the course of his life,...

Heartfelt, earnest, and humorous, the essays in Everything We Don't Know examine the journey of growing up in contemporary America. Aaron Gilbreath contemplates the ocean-bound debris from Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster, his nostalgia for the demolished buildings of his youth, quitting smoking,...

Selfhood and the Soul is a collection of new and original essays in honour of Christopher Gill, Emeritus Professor of Ancient Thought at the University of Exeter. All of the essays in the volume contribute to a shared project - the exploration of ancient concepts of self and soul, understood in a...

The first collection of essays by the Nobel laureate. Derek Walcott has been publishing essays in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and elsewhere for more than twenty years. What the Twilight Says collects these pieces to form a volume of remarkable elegance, concision, and brilliance....

“Powerful” essays exploring the experience of the writer—and the nature of experience itself (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). Shortlisted for the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Award in Nonfiction Jenny Boully’s essays are ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections...

The more than two dozen personal essays in this new collection by one of Texas’s master storytellers range from travel pieces about Havana and London to stories about small-town exotics that are funny, nervy, outlandish, and all characterized by James Hoggard’s sly wit and his noted openness to...

Closer to Dylan Thomas than Matthew Arnold in his 'creative violence' and insistence on the sound of poetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins was no staid, conventional Victorian. On entering the Society of Jesus at the age of twenty-four, he burnt all his poetry and 'resolved to write no more, as not belonging...

A one-man think tank, Paul Goodman wrote more than 30 books, most of them before his decade of fame as a social critic in the 1960s. Goodman in those earlier days thought of himself mostly as an old-fashioned man of letters, and to do justice to his wide-ranging interests and growing activism, this...

Faulkner and Formalism: Returns of the Text collects eleven essays presented at the Thirty-fifth Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference sponsored by the University of Mississippi in Oxford on July 20-24, 2008. Contributors query the status of Faulkner's literary text in contemporary criticism...

Volume 11 of A Café in Space: The Anais Nin Literary Journal contains excerpts from the unpublished diary of Anais Nin, topics of which include living in 1950s America, Nin's hateful relationship with Helba Huara, and fears of the havoc that publishing her diary could bring. The lead article involves...

Volume 12 of A Café in Space features excerpts from Anais Nin's unpublished diary revealing the truth about the famous "come as your madness" party in 1953, at which Nin's daring costume caused a sensation and where Kenneth Anger got inspiration for his underground classic film "Inauguration...

Award-winning author and poet Michael Pollick grew up in the Midwestern town of Stow, Ohio during the 60s, 70s and 80s. His hilarious essays about growing up Stowbilly are all included in this special collection. Relive some of your own hometown memories as Pollick travels back to the land of Fourth...