Essays category: 9344 books

Gary Indiana is one of America's leading cultural critics-a public intellectual who has written key essays on every aspect of American culture. Utopia's Debris comprises selections of his very best work, revealing him to be an enormously acute, frequently scabrous, and always brilliant observer of...

In John Updike’s second collection of assorted prose he comes into his own as a book reviewer; most of the pieces picked up here were first published in The New Yorker in the 1960s and early ’70s. If one word could sum up the young critic’s approach to books and their authors it would be “generosity”:...

Anyone who loves France (or just feels strongly about it), or has succumbed to the spell of Julian Barnes’s previous books, will be enraptured by this collection of essays on the country and its culture. Barnes’s appreciation extends from France’s vanishing peasantry to its hyper-literate...

A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist: A wide-ranging collection of essays on the Mexican American experience by the acclaimed Chicano author.   Once a struggling journeyman carpenter, Dagoberto Gilb has won widespread acclaim as a crucial and compelling voice in contemporary American letters....

A collection of Bennett’s diaries and essays, covering 2005 to 2015 Alan Bennett’s third collection of prose, Keeping On Keeping On, follows in the footsteps of the phenomenally successful Writing Home and Untold Stories. Bringing together the hilarious, revealing, and lucidly intelligent...

This book recalls an era when criticism could change the way we look at the world. In the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson, James Wood reads literature expansively, always pursuing its role and destiny in our lives. In a series of essays about such figures as Melville, Flaubert, Chekhov,...

This is a collection of essays on Essays on Smollett, Lawrence, Austen, Dickens & others, by a man who went on to write a number of hugely popular novels. The classic book on the craft of writing, this is Norman Collins' first published work.

In this collection of her finest and best-known short essays, Natalia Ginzburg explores both the mundane details and inescapable catastrophes of personal life with the grace and wit that have assured her rightful place in the pantheon of classic mid-century authors. Whether she writes of the loss...

In the hands of award-winning writer Scott Russell Sanders, the essay becomes an inquisitive and revelatory form of art. In 30 of his finest essays—nine never before collected—Sanders examines his Midwestern background, his father's drinking, his opposition to war, his literary inheritance, and...

**The essays in this inspiring collection analyze the craft of writing and the art of living and loving    ** Jane Rule shares her insights into the creative process, sexual fidelity, feminist politics, and the transformative power of love.        Part I—“On Writing”—dispenses...

This carefully crafted ebook is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was an English novelist, playwright, and author of short stories. His best-known works are The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale, and The Moonstone. Table of Contents:...

Karl Miller is one of the greatest literary critics of the last fifty years, the founder of the London Review of Books and Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, London. In this last book of essays he turns his attention to appreciate certain writers...

'Somewhere in this world, in this lifetime, there is a place of simple things, of sitting beside a fire with friends, good company, quietly talking, no formidable decisions, no explanations, no threat, no guilt, no anguish. These are the days for walking on country roads.' From iconic author and patron...

Manny Farber (1917–2008) was a unique figure among American movie critics. Champion of what he called "termite art" (focused, often eccentric virtuosity as opposed to "white elephant" monumentality), master of a one-of-a-kind prose style whose jazz-like phrasing and incandescent...