Essays category: 9344 books

For fans of John Jeremiah Sullivan, Leslie Jamison, Geoff Dyer, and W. G. Sebald, the twenty-one essays in David Searcy’s debut collection are captivating, daring—and completely unlike anything else you’ve read before. Forging connections between the sublime and the mundane, this is a work of...

Collectors Edition! Ralph Waldo Emerson is America's greatest essayist and one of its greatest orators. To call him an essayist indeed sells him rather short and is very misleading. Most think of essays as interminable, dry, and academic, full of jargon, polysyllables, and other esoterica making them...

‘Wonky, idiosyncratic, fragmentary, paradoxical, drunk on words, the essay has … a uniquely human thumbprint.’ —Geordie Williamson In The Best Australian Essays 2015, Geordie Williamson compiles the year’s outstanding short non-fiction. Read Helen Garner on condescension, DBC Pierre...

David Hume (1711-1776) is regarded as one of the most significant literary figures in the history of the Scottish Enlightenment and Western philosophy. A Scottish born historian, philosopher, economist, and essayist, Hume is especially known for his concentration in philosophical empiricism and skepticism....

A true essay is “something hazarded, not definitive, not authoritative; something ventured on the basis of the author’s personal experience and subjectivity,” writes guest editor Jonathan Franzen in his introduction. However, his main criterion for selecting The Best American Essays 2016 was,...

‘When a group of essays get together in a room they start talking to each other, often in surprising ways … The existence of these voices – stylish, vital frequently wise – is a source of hope.’ —Anna Goldsworthy The Best Australian Essays showcases the nation’s most eloquent,...

David Hume (1711-1776) is regarded as one of the most significant literary figures in the history of the Scottish Enlightenment and Western philosophy. A Scottish born historian, philosopher, economist, and essayist, Hume is especially known for his concentration in philosophical empiricism and skepticism....

Citizen-Scholar comprises essays written in honor of Walter Edgar, South Carolina’s preeminent historian and founding director of the University of South Carolina (USC) Institute for Southern Studies. In the opening overview of Edgar’s impressive academic career, editor Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.,...

The Essays (French: Essais) of Michel de Montaigne are contained in three books and 107 chapters of varying length. Montaigne's stated design in writing, publishing and revising the Essays over the period from approximately 1570 to 1592 was to record for the 'private benefit of friends and kinsmen...

“Excellent.”—Studies: An Irish Quarterly “A handy anthology of key articles, twelve in all, excavated from the trove of Joyce interpretation, analysis and scholarship. . . . Each piece marks a moment of departure subsequent studies have built on, extended, or reacted against, but which nonetheless...

"Adrienne Rich's new prose collection could have been titled The Essential Rich."—Women's Review of Books These essays trace a distinguished writer's engagement with her time, her arguments with herself and others. "I am a poet who knows the social power of poetry, a United...

Fifty-two essays exploring identity, literature, immigration, and politics by one of the godfathers of Chicano literature In his essay “The New World Man,” Rudolfo Anaya writes, “I stand poised at the center of power, the knowing of myself, the heart and soul of the New World man alive...

What I have presented in the essays is neither wrong-viewed nor right-viewed. It is but ones viewing. It is open to criticism, alteration of intent, changing of purpose, and laughter at my try at them all. My views are not fixed in stone because I am not. They are attempts at outposts as I keep on...

This early work by William Lyon Phelps was originally published in 1910 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'Essays on Modern Novelists' is a collection of essays of notable modern novelists, including Thomas Hardy, Mark Twain, and Robert Louis Stevenson. William...