English Essay

Fifteen years ago, Robert Fulghum published a simple credo that became the phenomenal #1 New York Times bestseller All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Now, seven million copies later, Fulghum returns to the book that was embraced around the world.

Step onto the gridiron with the greatest legends from Miami Dolphins football - newly updated! This unique and humorous look at life with the Dolphins brings fans onto the field and into the locker room through the eyes of Garo Yepremian, one of Miami’s most recognizable figures. From kicking in his first professional football game to being named “Kicker of the Decade”, Yepremian relives the Dolphins epic 1972 season and so much more.

From celebrated New York Times best-selling author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize Rick Bragg comes a poignant and wryly funny collection of essays on life in the South. Keenly observed and written with his insightful and deadpan sense of humor, Bragg explores enduring Southern truths about home, place, spirit, table, and the regions' varied geographies, including his native Alabama, Cajun country, and the Gulf Coast.

What’s it like to race across the blacktop of the nation’s most famous track? How does it feel to smash into a concrete wall while going over 200 miles per hour? This exciting, humorous, and poignant collection of tales takes listeners inside the most exciting race in America. Tales from the Indianapolis 500 captures horrific collisions and sweet victories from drivers past and present.

Edgar Allan Poe was a writer, poet, editor and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre, and is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and of American literature. Poe was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story and considered to be the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction.

Walter Benjamin was an icon of criticism, renowned for his insight on art, literature, and philosophy. This volume includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and Brecht’s epic theater. Illuminations also includes his penetrating study “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and his theses on the philosophy of history.

To overcome a crisis of melancholy after the death of his father, Montaigne withdrew to his country estates and began to write, and in the highly original essays that resulted he discussed themes such as fathers and children, conscience and cowardice, coaches and cannibals, and, above all, himself.

In her writing for Harper’s, the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, and elsewhere, Lauren Oyler has emerged as one of the most trenchant and influential critics of her generation, a talent whose judgments on works of literature—whether celebratory or scarily harsh—have become notorious. But what is the significance of being a critic and consumer of media in today’s fraught environment?

Few, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom, and empathy to public discourse as Jill Lepore. Arriving at The New Yorker in 2005, Lepore, with her panoptical range and razor-sharp style, brought a transporting freshness and a literary vivacity to everything from profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis to an unsparing scrutiny of the woeful affairs of the nation itself. The astonishing essays collected in The Deadline offer a prismatic portrait of Americans’ techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented—but armed—aimlessness.

As an undergraduate, Michele Filgate started writing an essay about being abused by her stepfather. It took her more than a decade to realize that she was actually trying to write about how this affected her relationship with her mother. When it was finally published, the essay went viral, shared on social media by Anne Lamott, Rebecca Solnit, and many others. This gave Filgate an idea, and the resulting anthology offers a candid look at our relationships with our mothers.

Stand-up comedian, actress, and host Michelle Buteau reflects on growing up Caribbean, Catholic, and thick in New Jersey, going to college in Miami (where everyone smells like pineapple), her many friendship and dating disasters, working as a newsroom editor during 9/11, getting started in stand-up opening for male strippers, marrying into her husband’s Dutch family, IVF and surrogacy, motherhood, chosen family, and what it feels like to have a full heart, tight jeans, and stardom finally in her grasp.

Through studious research into past civilizations, Burnham diagnoses the 20th century and finds it afflicted with destructive, even "suicidal" tendencies - all of which arise from the “Liberal syndrome” and its inherent applications. The book explores several important questions, including why Liberalism clashes with Christianity and how Liberalism is a root cause of race riots and the rapid growth in crime.

You may "know" Jenny Slate from her Netflix special, Stage Fright, as the creator of Marcel the Shell, or as the star of Obvious Child. But you don't really know Jenny Slate until you get bonked on the head by her absolutely singular writing style. To see the world through Jenny's eyes is to see it as though for the first time, shimmering with strangeness and possibility.

In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to ask: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, “Sick Woman Theory”, became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism—a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies—we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others.

Acclaimed essayist and bookseller Mary Laura Philpott presents a charmingly relatable and wise memoir in essays about what happened after she checked off all the boxes on her successful life’s to-do list and realized she might need to reinvent the list - and herself.

Arguably the most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection - a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades.

The holly-jolly holidays aren’t for everyone, least of all when you look back on that one Christmas when there were two definitely haunted dolls waiting for you and your sister under the tree. You have to assume that’s where it all started. And so it was for Jenny Lawson. Now, she lives in the land of eternal Halloween, as evidenced by her interior decor and general state of darkness. (Although, if you ask her, her taxidermy zoo is less dark, more delightful. But not everyone has taste, so what are you going to do?)

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) has influenced philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Oswald Spengler, George Grant, Emil Cioran, Albert Camus, Ayn Rand, Jacques Derrida, Leo Strauss, Max Scheler, Michel Foucault and Bernard Williams. His writings on aesthetics, language, truth, morality, cultural theory, history, nihilism, power, and the meaning of existence have exerted a vast influence on Western philosophy and intellectual history.

The popular Washington Post contributing opinion columnist challenges listeners to have uncomfortable conversations about race, drawing on the first-person perspectives of the author and Americans from diverse viewpoints and walks of life.

There is absolutely no logical reason why I am here. The life trajectory my nationality and class and circumstances portended for me was not even remotely close to the one I now navigate. But logic is a science and living is an art. The release I felt in writing my first memoir, Not My Father’s Son, was matched only by how my speaking out empowered so many to engage with their own trauma. I was reminded of the power of my words and the absolute duty of authenticity.