Essays category: 9344 books

**“*Attention *reveals a fresh, vital literary voice as it covers seemingly every imaginable topic relating to modern life.”—Entertainment Weekly   ** “Joshua Cohen may be America’s greatest living writer.”—The Washington Post NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY WIRED One...

An intellectually thrilling and emotionally wrenching investigation of otherness: the need for one person to understand another person completely, the impossibility of any such absolute knowing, and the erotics of this separation. Can one person know another person? How do we live through other...

From a dazzling array of well-known African American women, short fiction, poems, and personal essays that describe with warmth and humor their experiences as mothers and as daughters. A sparkling anthology devoted to exploring the lives of African American mothers, Rise Up Singing presents...

In his too-short life, Aaron Swartz reshaped the Internet, questioned our assumptions about intellectual property, and touched all of us in ways that we may not even realize. His tragic suicide in 2013 at the age of twenty-six after being aggressively prosecuted for copyright infringement shocked...

Only a farmer could delve so deeply into the origins of food, and only a writer of Wendell Berry’s caliber could convey it with such conviction and eloquence. Long before Whole Foods organic produce was available at your local supermarket, Berry was farming with the purity of food in mind. For the...

Penguin's yearly offering of outstanding essays and poetry on faith and spirituality. Every year, the acclaimed Best Spiritual Writing series offers readers the opportunity to explore the most intriguing work on spirituality published in the past year. Featuring a splendid and varied selection,...

One of the Web’s most celebrated high-tech culture mavens returns with this second collection of essays and polemics. Discussing complex topics in an accessible manner, Cory Doctorow’s visions of a future where artists have full freedom of expression is tempered with his understanding that creators...

In these inspiring essays about why we read, Proust explores all the pleasures and trials that we take from books, as well as explaining the beauty of Ruskin and his work, and the joys of losing yourself in literature as a child. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have...

“How could ‘old age’ be a medical diagnosis when I wasn’t even forty?” —Lolly Winston “… if aging is difficult for those of us who were only sometimes cute,” she says, “just imagine how hard it must be for the aging knockouts, the living dolls.” —Rebecca McClanahan “I...

In twenty-two original essays, leading historians reveal the radical impulses at the founding of the American Republic. Here is a fresh new reading of the American Revolution that gives voice and recognition to a generation of radical thinkers and doers whose revolutionary ideals outstripped those...

This collection, first published by New Directions in 1939, contains a number of Henry Miller's most important shorter prose writings. They are taken from the Paris books Black Spring (1936) and Max and the White Phagocytes (1938) and were for the most part, written at about the satire time...

Whittaker Chambers is one of the most controversial figures in modern American history a former Communist spy who left the party, testified against Alger Hiss before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and wrote a classic autobiography, Witness. Dismissed by some as a crank, reviled by others...

Thomas De Quincey was an English author during the Romantic movement, associating with writers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Best known for his command of the psychological fantasy story, De Quincey produced stories of the curious and obscure, but always with the traditional Romantic...

A great American writer's confrontation with a great European critic—a personal and intellectual awakening A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and farsighted writers in Europe. In his self-published magazine, Die Fackel, Kraus brilliantly attacked...