Essays category: 9344 books

A single volume of the most beautiful texts by Herman Hesse including intimate memories of his final years. Hesse collected life sketches, poems, aphorisms and short essays dedicated to the ultimate challenge of a writer who had already accomplished a celebrated body of work — that of accepting his final years and the approach of death with grace.

An avant garde set of improvisational essays, Richard Grossinger’s The Bardo of Waking Life is a meditation on the Tibetan Buddhist bardo realm which, in popular culture, is viewed as the bridge between lives, the state people enter after death and before rebirth. This book examines waking life...

Are some of the world's most talented children's book authors essentially children themselves? In this engaging series of essays, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alison Lurie considers this theory, exploring children's classics from many eras and relating them to the authors who wrote them, including...

As a prominent novelist, critic and editor, William Dean Howells played an essential role in shaping the American literary sensibility of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly the shift toward naturalism and realism. In this, his most widely read series of essays on literature, Howells lays out his view of the superiority of realistic fiction.

Asheville is a town with a strong sense of place--architecture, mountain views, a creative locus. a history as complicated as any Southern town. Now twenty-seven (and then some) of the legions of writers who call Asheville home create a literary landscape of this fabled Southern mountain town. 27...

At the Dreamland, women and girls flicker from the shadows to take their proper place in the spotlight. In this lyrical collection, Sonja Livingston weaves together strands of research and imagination to conjure figures from history, literature, legend, and personal memory. The result is a series...

Winner of the 2011 Independent Publisher Book Award for Creative Non-Fiction. In a sequence of rivetingly personal essays, Europe's premier contemporary poet and essayist, Durs Grünbein, reflects on his own evolution as an artist and on the meaning and importance of poetry for life in general. "What...

"I wonder if Judy Blume really knows how many girls' lives she affected. I wonder if she knows that at least one of her books made a grown woman finally feel like she'd been a normal girl all along..." —from Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume Whether...

The great pessimist who believed in the best and expected the worst from writers here applies his caustic wit to literature and the literary scene. Schopenhauer's piercing analyses of style, critics, literary values, learning, and genius make this volume a handbook on writing ― illuminated by the...

**WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD ** How does a literary historian end up thinking in terms of z-scores, principal component analysis, and clustering coefficients? The essays in Distant Reading led to a new and often contested paradigm of literary analysis. In presenting them...

Collection of humorous and satirical essays. According to Wikipedia: "Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken (1880 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, acerbic critic of American life and culture, and a student of American English. Known as the "Sage of Baltimore", he is regarded...

In February 1956, a remarkable young woman named Christina McCall began her working life as an editorial secretary at Maclean's magazine. It was a legendary time there, when the likes of Pierre Berton, Robert Fulford, June Callwood, Peter Gzowski, and Peter C. Newman graced the magazine's pages. McCall...

Though Baptist preacher Frank W. Boreham was born and educated in England and first rose to prominence as a religious thinker there, he spent many of his later years working as a missionary in New Zealand, Tasmania, and Australia. The essays in the collection Faces in the Fire are largely autobiographical in nature, drawing on lessons Boreham learned during his travels.

The essays in this inaugural volume were commissioned from a number of outstanding writers (many of them national prize winners). Some are professional naturalists, others are poets, filmmakers, dancers, philosophers, activists. All write with passion, originality and humour about the natural world,...