Art Essays

At the center of The Dark Night of the Soul (La noche oscura del alma) is a poem written by the 16th century Spanish poet and mystic St John of the Cross. Consisting of eight stanzas, each of five lines, the poem outlines the journey in pursuit of divine union, within which the only source of light comes from the soul. This recording in English includes the poem itself and St John's two accompanying treatises (1584-1585), essentially commentaries, which offer line-by-line explanations of the poem. Many modern listeners have found guidance and consolation in this work.

From the wind-swept, snowy ranges of Wyoming to Florida beaches glowing with Christmas lights, All American Christmas traces holiday traditions across the United States. Rachel Campos-Duffy and Sean Duffy present a dazzling collection of emotional stories and homegrown Christmas recipes from some of Fox News’ most beloved personalities.

Everyone has a story, and helping people tell their stories has been Nancy Slonim Aronie’s life mission. Building on her acclaimed Memoir as Medicine, this new guide tackles the short personal essay. With warmth and humor, Nancy provides prompts, inspiration, and hard-won wisdom to empower you to write an unforgettable narrative. You’ll learn to begin with an irresistible hook (“kill ’em with the first line”) and employ compelling direct quotes, drama, vulnerability, universal themes, and self-reflection to get readers into your corner.

One of the most famous of all literary dogs, Flush was the golden cocker spaniel belonging to Elizabeth Barrett. In this charming and heartfelt biography, Viginia Woolf tells his story: his early days as Miss Mitford's puppy running across the fields in wild abandon and fathering another, then the years spent in his invalid mistress' bedroom in Wimpole Street.

A book unlike any other, Women in Clothes is essentially a conversation among hundreds of women of all nationalities - famous, anonymous, religious, secular, married, single, young, old - on the subject of clothing, and how the garments we put on every day define and shape our lives. It began with a survey. The editors composed a list of more than 50 questions designed to prompt women to think more deeply about their personal style.

Meryl Streep, Marlon Brando, Anthony Hopkins, Carey Mulligan. When we watch these remarkable actors in a performance, we see only Sophie, Stanley Kowalski, Hannibal Lecter, or Cassie from Promising Young Woman. How are they able to transform our world in this way? How and why do they do what they do? In Acting Naturally, David Thomson sheds light on the actors who have shaped the film industry. He shrewdly analyzes these stars, revealing how a sly smile, an extra-long pause, even a small gesture of the hand can draw in an audience.

Salman Rushdie is celebrated as “a master of perpetual storytelling” (The New Yorker), illuminating truths about our society and culture through his gorgeous, often searing prose. Now, in his latest collection of nonfiction, he brings together insightful and inspiring essays, criticism, and speeches that focus on his relationship with the written word and solidify his place as one of the most original thinkers of our time.

Have you ever read a suspense novel so good you had to stop and think to yourself, "How did the author come up with this idea? Their characters? Is some of this story real?" For more than five years, Mark Rubinstein, physician, psychiatrist, and mystery and thriller writer, had the chance to ask the most well-known authors in the field just these kinds of questions in interviews for the Huffington Post. Collected here are interviews with 47 accomplished authors, including Michael Connelly, Ken Follett, Meg Gardiner, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman, and Don Winslow.

Although Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee had been reading each other’s books for years, the two writers did not meet until February 2008. Not long after, Auster received a letter from Coetzee, suggesting they begin exchanging letters on a regular basis and, “God willing, strike sparks off each other.” Here and Now is the result of that proposal: the epistolary dialogue between two great writers who became great friends. Over three years their letters touched on nearly every subject, from sports to fatherhood, film festivals to incest, philosophy to politics....

You'll be wincing in recognition and scratching your head in incredulity, but like Marian herself you won't be able to stop laughing at the sheer delightful absurdity that is modern life - because each and every one of us is clearly making it up as we go along. She has wonderful and tickling words of advice for those fast approaching 50.

Known for his meaty seriocomic novels–expansive works that are simultaneously lowbrow and highbrow–Tom Robbins has also published over the years a number of short pieces, predominantly nonfiction. His travel articles, essays, and tributes to actors, musicians, sex kittens, and thinkers have appeared in publications ranging from Esquire to Harper’s, from Playboy to the New York Times, High Times, and Life.

Forty essays on history, art, and literature to lift your mind and spirit. Guy Davenport serves as the listener's guide through history and literature, providing links between music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present-pointing out the values and avenues of thought that have shaped our ideas and our thinking.

Throughout his 25-year journalistic career, David Carr was noted for his sharp and fearless observations, his uncanny sense of fairness and justice, and his remarkable compassion and wit. His writing was informed both by his own hardships as an addict, and his intense love of the journalist's craft. His range - from media politics to national politics, from rock-n-roll celebrities to the unknown civil servants who make our daily lives function - was broad and often timeless.

From graffiti gangs and Grand Theft Auto to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing. Starting with Hodson’s own work experience, which ranges from the mundane to the bizarre - including modeling and working on a NASA Mars mission - Hodson expands outward, looking at the ways in which the human will submits, whether in the marketplace or in a relationship.

Deborah Levy invites us into the interiors of her world, sharing her most intimate thoughts and experiences, as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her. From Marguerite Duras to Colette and Ballard, and from Lee Miller to Francesca Woodman and Paula Rego, we can relish here the richness of their work and, in turn, the richness of the author’s own. Each moment draws upon Levy’s life in exalting ways, encapsulating the wonderful precision and astonishing depth of her writing,.

Award-winning author Colm Tóibín turns his incisive gaze to three of the world's greatest writers, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce, and their earliest influences: their fathers. In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, Colm Tóibín illuminates not only the complex relationships between three of the greatest writers in the English language and their fathers, but also illustrates the surprising ways they surface in their work.

This is the remarkable and tragic story of Oscar Wilde, legendary wit and conversationalist, author of perhaps the most perfect comedy in the English language, yet seemingly doomed by his own flawed temperament to suffer at the hands of a censorious and hypocritical society...

Written between A.D. 413 and 426, The City of God is one of the great cornerstones in the history of Christian thought, a book which is vital to the understanding of modern Western society. Augustine originally intended it to be an apology for Christianity against the accusation that the Church was responsible for the decline of the Roman Empire, which had occurred just three years earlier. Indeed, Augustine produced a great amount of evidence to prove that paganism was responsible for this event. However, by the time the work was finished, the book had taken on a larger theme.

In this self-portrait by an American genius, Kurt Vonnegut writes with beguiling wit and poignant wisdom about his favorite comedians, country music, a dead friend, a dead marriage, and various cockamamie aspects of his all-too-human journey through life. This is a work that resonates with Vonnegut's singular voice: the magic sound of a born storyteller mesmerizing us with truth.

R. Eric Thomas didn’t know he was different until the world told him so. Everywhere he went - whether it was his rich, mostly White, suburban high school, his conservative Black church, or his Ivy League college in a big city - he found himself on the outside looking in. In essays by turns hysterical and heartfelt, Thomas reexamines what it means to be an "other" through the lens of his own life experience.