English Essay

In 1958, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was published in the United States to immediate controversy and best-sellerdom. More than 60 years later, this phenomenal novel generates as much buzz as it did when originally published. Central to countless issues at the forefront of our national discourse - art and politics, race and whiteness, gender and power, sexual trauma - Lolita lives on, in an afterlife as blinding as a supernova.

In this definitive collection of essays, including the poignant title essay "Self-Reliance," Ralph Waldo Emerson expounds on the importance of trusting your soul, as well as divine providence, to carve out a life. A firm believer in nonconformity, Emerson celebrates the individual and stresses the value of listening to the inner voice unique to each of us—even when it defies society's expectations.

Sontag's most important critical writings from 1972 to 1980 are collected in Under the Sign of Saturn. One of America's leading essayists, Sontag's writings are commentaries on the relation between moral and aesthetic ideas, discussing the works of Antonin Artaud, Leni Riefenstahl, Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, and others. The collection includes a variety of her well-known essays. Sontag's writings are famously full of intellectual range and depth, and are at turns exhilarating, ominous, disturbing, and beautiful.

In his debut essay collection, award-winning poet Jaswinder Bolina meditates on "how race," as he puts it, "becomes metaphysical": the cumulative toll of the microaggressions and macro-pressures lurking in the academic market, on the literary circuit, in the dating pool, and on the sidewalks of any given US city. Training a keenly thoughtful lens on questions that are never fully abstract, Of Color is a bold, expansive, and finally optimistic diagnosis of present-day America.

Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American writers of the last hundred years. Since her death in 1965, her place in the landscape of twentieth-century fiction has grown only more exalted. As we approach the centenary of her birth comes this astonishing compilation of fifty-six pieces—more than forty of which have never been published before. Two of Jackson’s children co-edited this volume, culling through the vast archives of their mother’s papers at the Library of Congress, selecting only the very best for inclusion.

“What's most compelling about a scientific story is the way it challenges us to think about the concepts we take for granted,” writes guest editor Carl Zimmer in his introduction. The essays in this year’s Best American Science and Nature Writing probe at the ordinary and urge us to think more deeply about our place in the world around us.

This book is a series of short essays seeking to answer life's most enduring question: Does God exist? I have attempted to craft a book that is well-researched but also easy to listen to and understand. Each essay can be listened to in less than 10 minutes. In the end, it is important to know whether God exists or does not exist. There is no third option. Which of these beliefs is true, and which one is not?

So, this is me. Lily Allen. I am a woman. I am a mother. I was a wife. I drink. I have taken drugs. I have loved and been let down. I am a success and a failure. I am a songwriter. I am a singer. I am all these things and more. When women share their stories, loudly and clearly and honestly, things begin to change - for the better. This is my story.

A beautifully presented and uplifting collection of contemplative, wry, sometimes funny essays about living thoughtfully and with care amidst life's challenges. If you're struggling to maintain grace and good humor amidst daily potholes and pitfalls, Brigid Lowry may be just the warm, wise, and witty companion you need.

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.

In this updated 2021 edition of The Entheological Paradigm, leading nondual entheogenic advocate, Martin W. Ball, presents a naturalistic, rational, and objective view on the nature of reality as seen through the lenses of DMT and 5-MeO-DMT when appreciated from a nondual perspective. In stark contrast to popularized views of psychedelic experience, Dr. Ball directly addresses the nature of reality and perception.

Number-one New York Times best-selling author Cassandra Clare created the Mortal Instruments in 2004 with City of Bones (Simon & Schuster, 2007). Since then, the series has grown to five books, with a sixth due in 2014, and been joined by two spinoff trilogies and an upcoming film starring Jamie Campbell Power and Lily Collins. Featuring stories by Holly Black, Kendare Blake, Gwenda Bond, Sarah Rees Brennan, Rachel Caine, Sarah Cross, Kami Garcia, Michelle Hodkin, Kelly Link, Kate Milford, Diana Peterfreund, Sara Ryan, Scott Tracey, and Robin Wasserman.

Stealing Indiana Jones is the true story of these two boys and how they discover a monstrous secret: that George Lucas stole his ideas for both Star Wars and Indiana Jones. As they struggle to make sense of what this horrifying truth means for all of us fans, they find redemption along the way.

In this emotionally powerful and intellectually provocative blend of memoir, cultural criticism, and theory, scholar and essayist Samira Mehta reflects on many facets of being multiracial. Born to a white American and a South Asian immigrant, Mehta grew up feeling more comfortable with her mother’s family than with her father’s—they never carried on conversations in languages that she couldn’t understand or blamed her for finding the food was too spicy.

When Marya Hornbacher published her first book, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, she did not yet have the piece of shattering knowledge that would finally make sense of the chaos of her life. At age 24, Hornbacher was diagnosed with type I rapid-cycle bipolar, the most severe form of bipolar disorder. In Madness, in her trademark wry and utterly self-revealing voice, Hornbacher tells her new story.

In the chapters of Never Sniff a Gift Fish, McManus will teach you the wisdom that is usually shared only in the close ranks of modern-day hunters and gatherers. To complete your arsenal, McManus also includes "The Hunter's Workout Guide" and a special "Family Camper's Dictionary". Exercises like the hindquarter shuffle will make you move like a hunter. And phrases like "Yip-yip-yip-Owoooooo!" will help you sound like one, too.

Inside the Mind of a Visionary: Emerson’s Essays on Life, Nature, and the Human Spirit. Essays, First & Second Series is a collection that encapsulates Ralph Waldo Emerson’s vision of a life lived authentically, in harmony with one's deeper values and the natural world.

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.

Who needs philosophy? Ayn Rand's answer: Everyone. This collection of essays was the last work planned by Ayn Rand before her death in 1982. In it, she summarizes her view of philosophy and deals with a broad spectrum of topics. According to Ayn Rand, the choice we make is not whether to have a philosophy, but which one to have: a rational, conscious, and therefore practical one, or a contradictory, unidentified, and ultimately lethal one.

Andrew Murray (1828-1917) was a South African writer, teacher, and Christian pastor. This Best Of collection comprises seven of his most trenchant books.