Essays Letters category: 7676 books

In these ten intertwined essays, one of our most provocative young novelists proves that she is just as stylish and outrageous an art critic. For when Jeanette Winterson looks at works as diverse as the Mona Lisa and Virginia Woolf's The Waves, she frees them from layers of preconception and restores...

Richard Howard has been writing stylish, deeply informed commentary on modern culture and literature for more than four decades. Here is a selection of his finest essays, including some never before published in book form, on a splendid range of subjects--from American poets like Emily Dickinson and...

From the author of the international bestseller What I Loved, a provocative collection of autobiographical and critical essays about writing and writers. Whether her subject is growing up in Minnesota, cross-dressing, or the novel, Hustvedt's nonfiction, like her fiction, defies easy categorization,...

Marilynne Robinson has built a sterling reputation as a writer of sharp, subtly moving prose, not only as a major American novelist, but also as a rigorous thinker and incisive essayist. In When I Was a Child I Read Books she returns to and expands upon the themes which have preoccupied her work with...

From one of the greatest writers of the modern era, an intimate and essential collection of personal essays on home, identity, and colonialism Chinua Achebe’s characteristically eloquent and nuanced voice is everywhere present in these seventeen beautifully written pieces. From a vivid portrait...

One of the most provocative and original voices in contemporary literature, Chinua Achebe here considers the place of literature and art in our society in a collection of essays spanning his best writing and lectures from the last twenty-three years. For Achebe, overcoming goes hand in hand with eradicating...

One of Henry Miller's most luminous statements of his personal philosophy of life, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, provides a symbolic title for this collection of stories and essays. Many of them have appeared only in foreign magazines while others were printed in small limited editions which...

Every now and then, readers find themselves fortunate enough to come across a writer whose work fits their lifestyle and belief systems so well that the relationship between writer and reader seems familial. Though geographically estranged, perhaps, it’s as if both author and reader hail from the...

One of France's great Renaissance thinkers, Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) invented the essay as a literary form. This compilation features the best of his brief, highly readable reflections on poetry, philosophy, theology, law, literature, education, and world exploration. Remarkably modern in their...

This powerful selection of essays proposes practices of reading and criticism to make the field of postcolonial studies more fully attentive to historical circumstances and socio-material conditions. Benita Parry points to 'directions and dead ends' in the discipline she has helped to shape, with...

In his 1827 essay "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," Thomas De Quincey proposed that murder should be examined from an aesthetic, rather than ethical or sociological perspective. In one of his most brilliant essays he applauded murder as one of the finer “arts” of life: e.g....

Volume 3 of a new selection of the best works of William Hazlitt (1778-1830), an energetic and unique essayist with much to offer the modern reader. He writes compellingly on many topics. Edited by Abeecy Deffh.

A new assemblage of masterly essays from a foremost scholar of American history and culture Alan Trachtenberg has always been interested in cultural artifacts that register meanings and feelings that Americans share even when they disagree about them. Some of the most beloved ones—like the...

Imagine sitting across from a member of the German Secret State Police and negotiating with him to allow for the release of Jewish youngsters and for the establishment of a Jewish school. What can a teenager do when forced to march past the gallows and see how two of his campmates were hung? These are...