English Essay

Wang Xiaobo's Pleasure of Thinking is an essay collection as riotous as it is contemplative. Between rollicking anecdotes about living between the East and West and serious musings on the intellectual situations at home and abroad, Xiaobo examines modern life with the levity missing from so much of today's politico-cultural discourse.

In the three decades that Nobel prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk has devoted himself to writing fiction, he has also produced scores of witty, moving, and provocative essays and articles. He engages the work of Nabokov, Kundera, Rushdie, and Vargas Llosa, among others, and he discusses his own books and writing process. We also learn how he lives, as he recounts his successful struggle to quit smoking, describes his relationship with his daughter, and reflects on the controversy he has attracted in recent years.

A collection of the best stories about Oregon Ducks football - updated through the 2011 Championship game. Tales from the Oregon Ducks Sideline takes the listener on a fun-filled trip through Oregon’s gridiron history. Author Brian Libby brings Duck fans out to the 50 yard line and into the locker room as he tells colorful tales about the Oregon football program, from its start in 1894 to today, culminating in the hard-fought BCS Championship game against Auburn in January 2011.

In this unabridged audiobook of Walking in Wonder, John O’Donohue’s friend and frequent collaborator John Quinn collects a series of talks and essays from the poet-philosopher on humanity’s relationship with the land, the ache of absence, our place in an often mysterious universe, and the great adventure of death itself.

In this collection of interviews with survivors of suicide, individuals talk candidly and intimately about how their lives have been impacted by the suicide of a family member or close friend. Over 50 individuals were willing to share their personal tragedies as a way of helping others who face a similar loss as well as educating the public about the issues survivors of suicide face. Their willingness to share their stories is a testament to their endurance and strength in the face of adversity.

Anna Prushinskaya explores the deep life shifts of pregnancy, birth and motherhood in the United States, a world away from the author's Soviet homeland. Drawing from inspirations as various as midwife Ina May Gaskin, writer and activist Alice Walker, and frontierswoman Caroline Henderson, Prushinskaya captures the inherent togetherness of motherhood alongside its accompanying estrangement. She plumbs the deeper waters of compassion, memory and identity, as well as the humorous streams of motherhood as they run up against the realities of work and the ever-present eye of social media.

The international sensation that illuminates the experiences women are supposed to hide - from addiction, anger, sexual assault, and infertility to joy, sensuality, and love. In this dazzling debut, Emilie Pine speaks to the events that have marked her life - those emotional disruptions for which our society has no adequate language, at once bittersweet, clandestine, and ordinary. She writes with radical honesty on the unspeakable grief of infertility, on caring for an alcoholic parent, on taboos around female bodies and female pain, on sexual violence and violence against the self.

Video game sales as a whole have continued to grow, now raking in twice as much money per year as the entire film industry, and countless psychologists have turned their attention to the effects gaming has on us: our confidence, our identity, and our personal growth. The Psychology of Zelda applies the latest psychological findings, plus insights from classic psychology theory, to Link, Zelda, Hyrule, and the players who choose to wield the Master Sword.

One of the most influential works of this century, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays is a crucial exposition of existentialist thought. Influenced by works such as Don Juan and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide; the question of living or not living in a universe devoid of order or meaning.

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.

Fritjof Capra, scientist, educator, activist, and accomplished author, presents the evolution of his thought over five decades in Patterns of Connection. First introduced in the late 1950s to the work of Werner Heisenberg, a founder of quantum mechanics, Capra quickly intuited the connections between the discoveries of quantum physics and the traditions of Eastern philosophy - resulting in his first book, the best-selling The Tao of Physics.

At six years old, Terry was told by his headteacher that he would never amount to anything. He spent the rest of his life proving that teacher wrong. At 66, Terry had lived a life full of achievements: becoming one of the UK's best-selling writers, winning the Carnegie Medal and being awarded a knighthood for services to literature. Following his untimely death from Alzheimer's disease, the mantle of completing Terry's memoir was passed to Rob Wilkins, his former assistant, friend and now head of the author's literary estate.

Ten days after calling off her wedding, CJ Hauser went on an expedition to Texas to study the whooping crane. After a week wading through the gulf, she realized she'd almost signed up to live someone else's life. Hauser releases herself from traditional narratives of happiness and goes looking for ways of living that leave room for the unexpected, making plenty of mistakes along the way. She kisses Internet strangers and officiates at a wedding.

Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays "Self-Reliance" and "The Over-Soul". Together with "Nature", these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.

Part of John Muir's appeal to modern audiences is that he not only explored the American West and wrote about its beauties but also fought for their preservation. His successes dot the landscape and are evident in all the natural features that bear his name: forests, lakes, trails, and glaciers. Here collected are some of Muir's finest wilderness essays, ranging in subject matter from Alaska to Yellowstone, from Oregon to the High Sierra.

In his best-selling first book, Jeremy Wade, the star of the hit TV series River Monsters, memorably recounted his adventures on six continents in pursuit of fish of staggering proportions and terrifying demeanor. Now "the greatest angling explorer of his generation" (Independent on Sunday) returns to delight listeners with a book of an entirely different sort, the book he was always destined to write - the distillation of a life spent fishing. Thoughtful and funny, brimming with wisdom and above all, adventure, these are pitch-perfect reflections....

I grew up in the Southern Baptist church of the '90s during the height of the True Love Waits movement, accompanied by Joshua Harris’ best seller, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. If you don’t know what I am referring to, consider yourself blessed. Many of the ideas perpetuated by this culture were infused with fear and shame, offering no practical help or guidance in equipping young people to become healthy sexual human beings.

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.

Let Dan help you dig a little deeper into how life’s truths show up in the weight room and on the field of play. What you learn in this selection will get you thinking more broadly into how it all fits together - fitness, health, longevity, and easy strength.

Fasten your seatbelts as Formula 1's favourite underdog, Guenther Steiner, takes you on a wild ride through his ten years at Team Haas. From the first seeds of his idea to establish a new F1 team to the challenges of funding and building that team from the ground up, Guenther shares the real story of the origins of Team Haas, immerses readers in the high and lows of its first decade on the grid, and opens up about his departure from the team at the end of 2023.