English Essay

Few sports combine adrenaline, precision, and athletic skill like fishing. Now fans of this timeless activity can celebrate their passion with celebrities across the globe in Celebrity Fish Talk. In this unique treasure trove of stories, author David Strege will amuse and amaze listeners while feeding the public’s insatiable appetite for peeking into the private lives of stars from Hollywood, TV, music, and sports.

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.

Originally published in 1966, Susan Sontag's first collection of essays is a modern classic and includes the famous essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation", as well as, her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought.

His fiction is known to be some of the most terrifying in the genre of supernatural horror, but Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction book may be even scarier. Drawing on philosophy, literature, neuroscience, and other fields of study, Ligotti takes the penetrating lens of his imagination and turns it on his audience, causing them to grapple with the brutal reality that they are living a meaningless nightmare, and anyone who feels otherwise is simply acting out an optimistic fallacy.

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.

In this exuberantly praised book - a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner - David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction.

So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.

Ross Gay’s essays have been called “exquisite” (Tracy K. Smith), “imperative” (the New York Times Book Review), and “brilliant” (Ada Limón). Now, in this new collection of genre-defying pieces, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight.

Originally published in 1979, the first volume of the best-selling "Gonzo Papers" is now back in print. The Great Shark Hunt is Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's largest and, arguably, most important work, covering Nixon to napalm, Las Vegas to Watergate, Carter to cocaine. These essays offer brilliant commentary and outrageous humor, in signature Thompson style. Thompson's razor-sharp insight and crystal clarity capture the crazy, hypocritical, degenerate, and redeeming aspects of the explosive and colorful '60s and '70s.

Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life. Disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. Sitting Pretty challenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practical and imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write a different story.

In Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman is more entertaining and incisive than ever. Whether he's dissecting the boredom of voyeurism, the reason why music fan's inevitably hate their favorite band's latest album, or why we love watching can't-miss superstars fail spectacularly, Klosterman remains obsessed with the relationship between expectation, reality, and living history. It's amateur anthropology for the present tense, and sometimes it's incredibly funny.

Walking in My Joy is a collection of electric stories by the one and only, super hilarious Jenifer Lewis. Her commentary on what’s happening in the world today, told through her outrageous real-life adventures, will have you laughing out loud, while her insightful messages touch your soul. A self-described “traveling fool and nature freak,” Jenifer takes listeners with her all over the world, from Cape Town to Bali; Washington, DC, to the Serengeti; Mongolia to St. Petersburg; and Argentina to Antarctica to demonstrate how she walks in her joy by seeking pleasure in everyday encounters.

Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, renowned marine biologist and co-founder of the All We Can Save climate initiative, compiles the best science and nature writing of the year.

With the virtuosic synthesis of memoir, criticism, and journalism for which she has become known, Leslie Jamison offers us 14 new essays that are by turns ecstatic, searching, staggering, and wise. In its kaleidoscopic sweep, Make It Scream, Make It Burn creates a profound exploration of the oceanic depths of longing and the reverberations of obsession. Among Jamison's subjects are 52 Blue, deemed "the loneliest whale in the world"; the eerie past-life memories of children; the devoted citizens of an online world called Second Life; and more...

Every summer for two decades, Ted Leeson and a maverick group of close companions have returned to an old ranch house on the bench-land overlooking the Madison River. Trout and fly fishing may be at the heart of their ritual return, but their experience goes far beyond the fishing. Leeson contemplates both the human and natural landscape brilliantly....

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.

Remarkably relevant, beautifully written, and filled with wit and wisdom, these three essays by Bertrand Russell allow the listener to test the concepts of the good life, morality, the existence of God, Christianity, and human nature. "What I Believe" was used prominently in the 1940 New York court proceedings in which Russell was judicially declared "unfit" to teach philosophy at City College of New York. "Why I Am Not a Christian" concludes that churches throughout history have retarded progress and states that we should instead "look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in." Finally, "A Free Man's Worship", perhaps the most famous single essay written by Russell, considers whether humans operate from free will.

From the author of Infinite Jest and Consider the Lobster: A collection of five brilliant essays on tennis, from the author's own experience as a junior player to his celebrated profile of Roger Federer at the peak of his powers. A "long-time rabid fan of tennis," and a regionally ranked tennis player in his youth, David Foster Wallace wrote about the game like no one else. On Tennis presents David Foster Wallace's five essays on the sport, published between 1990 and 2006, and hailed as some of the greatest and most innovative sports writing of our time.

Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality - or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it?

White is Bret Easton Ellis's first work of nonfiction. Already the bad boy of American literature, from Less Than Zero to American Psycho, Ellis has also earned the wrath of right-thinking people everywhere with his provocations on social media, and here he escalates. Eschewing convention, he embraces views that will make many in literary and media communities cringe, as he takes aim at anti-Trump fixation, coastal elites, corporate censorship, Hollywood, identity politics, Generation Wuss, "woke" cultural watchdogs, and more.