Essays Letters category: 7676 books

This collection of essays exemplifies the range, depth, and erudition that have made Daniel Mendelsohn “required reading for anyone interested in dissecting culture” (The Daily Beast). Here Mendelsohn once again casts an eye at literature, film, television, and the personal essay, filtering his...

Karen Tei Yamashita’s novels, essays, and performance scripts have garnered considerable praise from scholars and reviewers, and are taught not only in the United States but in at least half a dozen countries in Asia, South America, and Europe. Her work has been written about in numerous disciplines...

To celebrate The American Scholar's thirtieth anniversary, Hiram Haydn and Betsy Saunders brought together fifty representative selections published throughout those years. These selections include the best essays that appeared throughout the life of one of the leading publications of the country....

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish author who is considered to be one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century.  With classics such as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson is still one of the most widely read authors today.  This edition of Lay Morals and Other Essays includes a table of contents.

In Joyce Carol Oates’s story “The Translation,” a traveler to an Eastern European country falls in love with a woman he gets to know through an interpreter. In Lydia Davis’s “French Lesson I: Le Meurtre,” what begins as a lesson in beginner’s French takes a sinister turn. In the essay...

After reading a few outstanding books on Taoist immortals over the years in the midst of other things, I had just moved to a new place with access to a backyard. I ended up getting myself an alchemy starter kit at Home Depot, and started communicating with the universe; I met the sun and moon, and...

Born and raised in Kashmir, Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001) came to the United States in the mid-1970s to pursue graduate study in literature; by the mid-1980s, he had begun to establish himself as one of the most important American poets of the late 20th century.   Mad Heart Be Brave:...

In the tradition of John Jeremiah Sullivan and David Foster Wallace, Cheston Knapp’s Up Up, Down Down “is an always smart, often hilarious, and ultimately transcendent essay collection” (Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See) that brilliantly explores authenticity...

**A Single Tree assembles the raw material underpinning Don Watson's award-winning The Bush.These diverse and haunting voices span the four centuries since Europeans first set eyes on the continent. Each of these varied contributors - settlers, explorers, anthropologists, naturalists, stockmen, surveyors,...

Ashok Rajamani, award-winning author of The Day My Brain Exploded, returns with IMAGINE CARNIVALESQUE, his explosive first book of bold and insightful literary criticism. Uncover the unconscious in South Asian literature through two psychoanalytical essays that deconstruct gender codes and sexuality...

"Walmart to Wolf House: Sonoma County Essays" is a collection of writing from 1983-2015. It's concerned with family, Jack London, shopping at Walmart, beer, cancer, Bonsai, writing, impact craters, Homer Simpson, and Marathon running. Rob Loughran has published 23 books and over 300 articles...

Welcome to a world of insanity, wicked monks, sublime landscapes, romantic heroines, golems, vampires, and wanderers.... Essays on the relationship between fantasy fiction and the Gothic, including the Gothic classics Bram Stoker's Dracula, Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, Ann Radcliffe's...

The true story of "Shakespeare's Mulberry Tree" of Stratford-upon-Avon is not generally known, even though it was seminal to the development of William Shakespeare as the cultural icon he is today. Keir Cutler, who possesses a PhD in theater, tells the fascinating real life account in this...

Keyboard Jihad is an attempt to rectify some of the misperceptions and misrepresentations of Islam and Muslims that resulted from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This book is a collection of original essays that were written over the years by Abdul Karim Bangura. These essays were not...