Essays Letters category: 7676 books

Graywolf reissues one of its most successful essay collections with two new essays and a new foreword by Charles Baxter As much a rumination on the state of literature as a technical manual for aspiring writers, Burning Down the House has been enjoyed by readers and taught in classrooms for...

Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul brings his signature gifts of observation, his ferocious impatience with received truths, and his masterfully condensed prose to these eleven essays on reading, writing, and identity—which have been brought together for the first time. Here the subject is Naipaul’s...

Part memoir, part handbook, part survey of the contemporary literary scene, Joan Frank’s Because You Have To: A Writing Life is a collection of essays that, taken together, provide a walking tour of the writing life. Frank’s aim is to form a coherent vision, one that may provide some communion...

Why should one half be free to live, while the other is doomed to watch silently from the sidelines? In this visionary collection, Virginia Woolf leads us on a transformative journey through the liberating powers of the mind. From an exploration of why women were barred from writing and under what...

Virginia Woolf began writing reviews for the Guardian 'to make a few pence' from her father's death in 1904, and continued until the last decade of her life. The result is a phenomenal collection of articles, of which this selection offers a fascinating glimpse, which display the gifts of a dazzling...

From the author of The Tunnel comes a new collection of essays, his first in eight years, on art, writing, nature and culture. This book is by one of the most important and briliant thinkers at work today.

Founder of the detective genre and author of works on cryptography, Edgar Allan Poe possessed what Shawn Rosenheim called a “cryptographic imagination.” Not only was Poe’s work influenced by secret writing, it inspired future critics to search his texts for secret clues and that fostered new...

Twenty-five years of essays from one of America’s most prolific and acclaimed writers, the New York Times–bestselling author of Legends of the Fall.   The bestselling author of thirty-nine books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—including Dalva and Returning to Earth—Jim Harrison was one...

An English poet, literary critic and philosopher. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking...

This Memorial Volume is being published to mark the centenary year of George Saintbury's birth. It contains essays, hitherto uncollected in book form, on authors such as Dryden, Herrick, Ben Jonson, Browning, Coleridge; studies of Carlyle, Jane Welsh Carlyle, Shelley, Disraeli; and papers on subjects...

In this collection of essays, ten leading writers from different countries consider the conflicts  that have informed their own literary lives. 1914-Goodbye to All That borrows its title from Robert Graves's "bitter leave-taking of England" in which he writes not only of the First World...

“The general reader, turning over the pages, will learn many things that are not of the slightest importance to him, but which he may, nevertheless, wish to know because other people occasionally write or speak of them.” —Bernard Shaw, 1885 Critical Shaw: Literature is a comprehensive...

In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called “the Casanova of reading,” argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. “We come into the world intent on finding narrative in everything,” writes Manguel, “landscape,...

"Let me tell you, America, of the hopes I had for you," Dorfman writes after the fall of the Twin Towers, remembering back to an earlier September 11 in 1973, when he was on the staff of Salvador Allende, then president of Chile, the day he was removed from office and murdered in a coup...