Essays category: 9344 books

Portraits and Prayers is a collection of early essays and word portraits by the American writer Gertrude Stein. Her subjects often provide a description of what she observed in her Saturday salons.

'The problem of the twentieth-century is the problem of the color-line.' Originally published in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk is a classic study of race, culture, and education at the turn of the twentieth century. With its singular combination of essays, memoir, and fiction, this book vaulted W....

The interviews, essays, and articles collected here span a quarter century of Philip Roth's distinguished career and "reveal [a] preoccupation with the relationship between the written and the unwritten world." Here is Roth on himself and his work and the controversies it has engendered....

“Intelligent but accessible, and often poignant . . . [by] the biggest talents on the essay and blog beat.” —Publishers Weekly (on Vol. 2) Anyone still asking, “What is creative nonfiction?” will find the answer in this collection of artfully crafted, true stories. Selected by Lee...

"Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created." This famous observation appears inWilla Cather on Writing, a collection of essays and letters first published in 1949. In the course of it Cather writes, with grace and piercing clarity,...

"You people come into the market—the Greenmarket, in the open air under the down pouring sun—and you slit the tomatoes with your fingernails. With your thumbs, you excavate the cheese. You choose your stringbeans one at a time. You pulp the nectarines and rape the sweet corn. You are something...

Marjorie Williams knew Washington from top to bottom. Beloved for her sharp analysis, elegant prose and exceptional ability to intuit character, Williams wrote political profiles for the Washington Post and Vanity Fair that came to be considered the final word on the capital's most powerful figures....

From the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, an inspired, thoughtful, and deeply personal book about reading and writing novels.   In this fascinating set of essays, based on the talks he delivered at Harvard University as part of the distinguished Norton Lecture series, Pamuk presents a comprehensive...

The late Michael King was one of New Zealand's most respected and popular historians. The author of the bestselling The Penguin History of New Zealand and many other significant works, he was a writer of remarkable skill, sensitivity and importance. The Silence Beyond is a wide-ranging and often personal...

Journey through the subject of melancholia in an easily accessible volume touching on topics from love and sex to religion and geography Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy is one of the great but unclassifiable prose works in English literature: diverting, delightfully rambling, and filled...

'Our finest living essayist. Maurice Craig's exquisite collection... is at once literary, erudite and mechanical: poppet-valves and cams, Yeats's inability to spell, bookbindings and motor-car design, the Tichborne scandal and airships, raised foc's'les and the particularity of certain words - all...

First published in 1985, the essays in this edited collection offer a representative sample of the descriptive and systematic approach to the study of literary translation. The book is a reflection of the theoretical thinking and practical research carried out by an international group of scholars...

Kisses from Nick Flynn, Rebecca Makkai, Pico Iyer, Ilyse Kusnetz, Andre Dubus III, Christian Kiefer, Camille T. Dungy, Major Jackson, Bich Minh Nguyen, Terrance Hayes, Ada Limón, Honor Moore, Téa Obreht and Dan Sheehan, Kazim Ali, Beth Ann Fennelly, and others In this wide-ranging collection...

John Updike’s first collection of nonfiction pieces, published in 1965 when the author was thirty-three, is a diverting and illuminating gambol through midcentury America and the writer’s youth. It opens with a choice selection of parodies, casuals, and “Talk of the Town” reports, the fruits...