Essays category: 9344 books

In this collection of 20 essays—including a number of recipes—by some of the country’s finest writers, food is the central player in memories both exquisite and excruciating. Food isn’t just a gustatory pleasure; it is the stuff of life. At its best and most memorable, a meal becomes...

Featuring the work of more than 28 writers from upwards of 20 countries, this collectiontransports us to the frontiers of twenty-first century literature.   In these pages, some of the most accomplished writers in world literature–among them Edwidge Danticat, Ha Jin, Cynthia Ozick,...

Spanning four decades and four continents, this magisterial volume brings together the essential shorter works of reflection and reportage by our most sensitive, literate, and undeceivable observer of the post-colonial world. In its pages V. S. Naipaul trains his relentless moral intelligence on societies...

Winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction From Chicago to Mexico, the places Sandra Cisneros has lived have provided inspiration for her now-classic works of fiction and poetry. But a house of her own, a place where she could truly take root, has eluded her. In this...

In the tumultuous late 60s and early 70s, a social movement known as the "New Left" emerged as a major cultural influence, especially on the youth of America. It was a movement that embraced "flower-power" and psychedelic "consciousness-expansion," that lionized Ho Chi...

“The ultimate gadlfly of the epidemic . . . here’s one book that truly deserves a place in a time capsule.”—Armistead Maupin   "This is as close to the truth as I can get," writes David Feinberg in what he calls his "personal Portrait of the Artist as a Young Diseased Jew Fag...

In March 1986, while living in Brooklyn, Chris Bohjalian and his wife were cab-napped on a Saturday night and taken on a forty-five-minute joy ride in which the driver ignored all traffic lights and stop signs. Around midnight he deposited the young couple on a near-deserted street, where police officers...

“There is never going to be anyone else like Cooke, a chronicler of amazing times.” —The Daily Telegraph As the voice of the BBC’s Letter from America for close to six decades, Alistair Cooke addressed several millions of listeners on five continents. They tuned in every Friday evening...

“Thoughtful, candid” essays from the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Sophie’s Choice (The Christian Science Monitor). This Quiet Dust is a compilation of William Styron’s nonfiction writings that confront significant moral questions with precision and vigor. He examines topics...

Hypatia of Alexandria. Who was she? A brilliant young mathematician and scientist, murdered by a religious mob? An aging academic taken out by a rival political force? A sorceress who kept the Prefect and people of Alexandria in thrall through satanic wiles? Did she discover that the earth circled...

A collection of some of Freud's most famous essays, including ON THE INTRODUCTION OF NARCISSISM; REMEMBERING, REPEATING AND WORKING THROUGH; BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE; THE EGO AND THE ID and INHIBITION, SYMPTOM AND FEAR.

This time Read Forward brings you a great great text by Mark Twain. You know him for the timeless adventures of Tom & Huck, but Mark Twain also wrote some wonderfully witty essays. One of them is particularly powerful, it’s called: What is man? It’s a dialogue between an Old Man...

"Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom...

An extraordinary collection of thematically linked essays, including THE UNCANNY, SCREEN MEMORIES and FAMILY ROMANCES. Leonardo da Vinci fascinated Freud primarily because he was keen to know why his personality was so incomprehensible to his contemporaries. In this probing biographical essay...