Essays category: 9344 books

"I had a real romance with this book." —Miranda July A highly anticipated collection, from the writer Maggie Nelson has called, “bracingly good…refreshing and welcome,” that explores the myriad ways in which desire and commodification intersect. From graffiti gangs...

In this extraordinary and unpredictable cross-section of the work of one of the most influential free spirits of German letters, Peter Wortsman captures the breathlessness and power of Heinrich von Kleist’s transcendent prose. These tales, essays, and fragments move across inner landscapes, exploring...

Virginia Woolf introduced us to the “Angel in the House”, now prepare to meet... The Bitch In the House. This e-book includes an exclusive excerpt from The Bitch is Back: Older, Wiser, and Getting Happier, a second collection of essays from nine of the contributors featured in The Bitch...

A "fascinating" (MetroSource) collection of uncensored, confessional, and at times outrageously funny essays about coming of age, coming out, and the wildest experiences that define us. Collecting the most celebrated stories from the hit podcast RISK!, along with all-new true tales...

From the National Book Award–winning author of The Moviegoer: “These essays . . . have a way of quickening the spirit and cleansing the sight” (The New Republic). Before winning the National Book Award for fiction in 1962, Walker Percy was an established scholar of science, philosophy,...

"A writer is someone who pays attention to the world," Susan Sontag said in her 2003 acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, and no one exemplified this definition more than she. Sontag's incisive intelligence, expressive brilliance, and deep curiosity about art,...

In essays on matters literary, social, cultural, and personal, Mary Gaitskill explores date rape and political adultery, the transcendentalism of the Talking Heads, the melancholy of Björk, and the playfulness of artist Laurel Nakadate. She celebrates the clownish grandiosity and the poetry of Norman...

In this stunning new collection of personal essays, distinguished author Phillip Lopate weaves together the colorful threads of a life well lived and brings us on an invigorating and thoughtful journey through memory, culture, parenthood, the trials of marriage both young and old, and an extraordinary...

Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) was an American writer, philosopher, publisher and artist, who founded the Roycroft Arts and Crafts community in East Aurora, New York. Hubbard set up a small printing shop next to his family home, where he began printing "The Philistine" magazine. The publication, quite popular...

The autobiographical essays in The Girls in My Town create an unforgettable portrait of a family in Los Angeles. Reaching back to her grandmother’s childhood and navigating through her own girlhood and on to the present, Angela Morales contemplates moments of loss and longing, truth and beauty,...

A Defence of Poetry is an essay by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, written in 1821 and first published posthumously in 1840. It contains Shelley's famous claim that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. TABLE OF CONTENTS:...

An NYRB Classics Original Simon Leys is a Renaissance man for the era of globalization. A distinguished scholar of classical Chinese art and literature and one of the first Westerners to recognize the appalling toll of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Leys also writes with unfailing intelligence,...

My Misspent Youth is an incisive collection that marked the start of a new millennium and became a cult classic, from the editor of Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed and the author of The Unspeakable An essayist in the tradition of Joan Didion, Meghan Daum is one of the most celebrated nonfiction...

A New York Times Critic's Top Pick of the Year This essential, enlightening, truly delightful collection shows one of our greatest writers parsing the political, artistic, and media landscape of the past three decades. These sixty-six essays and reviews, culled from the pages of The New York...