English Essay

C. S. Lewis was a profound thinker with the rare ability to communicate the philosophical and theological rationale of Christianity in simple yet amazingly effective ways. God in the Dock contains 48 essays and 12 letters written by Lewis between 1940 and 1963 for a wide variety of publications.

Casey Wilson has a lot on her mind and she isn’t afraid to share. In this dazzling collection, each essay skillfully constructed and brimming with emotion, she shares her thoughts on the joys and vagaries of modern-day womanhood and motherhood, introduces the not-quite-typical family that made her who she is, and persuasively argues that lowbrow pop culture is the perfect lens through which to examine human nature.

In Unconscious Putting, Stockton shows how players at every handicap level - from pros to weekend golfers - can putt effortlessly and with confidence by integrating a new mental approach with a few simple physical routines that will keep them locked on target. Listeners will also gain invaluable advice on reading greens and equipment.

Are you a sensible, universally competent individual? Are you tired of the crushing monotony of leaping gracefully from one lily pad of success to the next? Are you sick of doing everything right? In this brutally honest and humorous debut, musician and artist George Watsky chronicles the small triumphs over humiliation that make life bearable and how he has come to accept defeat as necessary to personal progress. The essays in How to Ruin Everything range from the absurd (how he became an international ivory smuggler) to the comical, to the revelatory.

Lane Moore is a rare performer who is as impressive onstage - whether hosting her iconic show Tinder Live or being the enigmatic front woman of It Was Romance - as she is on the page, as both a former writer for The Onion and an award-winning sex and relationships editor for Cosmopolitan. But her story has had its obstacles, including being her own parent, living in her car as a teenager, and moving to New York City to pursue her dreams. Through it all, she looked to movies, TV, and music as the family and support systems she never had.

Does time exist? What is infinity? Why do mirrors reverse left and right but not up and down? In this scintillating collection, Holt explores the human mind, the cosmos, and the thinkers who’ve tried to encompass the latter with the former. With his trademark clarity and humor, Holt probes the mysteries of quantum mechanics, the quest for the foundations of mathematics, and the nature of logic and truth. Along the way, he offers intimate biographical sketches of celebrated and neglected thinkers, from the physicist Emmy Noether to the computing pioneer Alan Turing and the discoverer of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot.

Gare Joyce, a sportswriter with the soul of poet and a penchant for trouble, has penned a tell-all memoir that is laugh-out-loud hilarious, savage—and tender at the quick. The media has their stock narratives, but Joyce tells the undiluted, unfiltered truth about the stars and also about his fellow messengers up in the press box.

Stephen A. Smith has never been handed anything, nor was he an overnight success. Growing up poor in Queens, the son of Caribbean immigrants and the youngest of six children, he was a sports-obsessed kid who faced struggles, from undiagnosed dyslexia to getting enough cereal to fill his bowl. As a basketball player at Winston-Salem State University, he got a glimmer of his true calling when he wrote a newspaper column arguing for the retirement of his own Hall of Fame coach, Clarence Gaines.

Since the publication of the groundbreaking Bad Feminist and Hunger, Roxane Gay has continued to tackle big issues embroiling society—state-sponsored violence and mass shootings, women’s rights post-Dobbs, online disinformation, and the limits of empathy—alongside more individually personalized matters: can I tell my co-worker her perfume makes me sneeze? Is it acceptable to schedule a daily 8 am meeting? In her role as a New York Times opinion section contributor and the publication’s “Work Friend” columnist, she reaches millions of readers with her wise voice and sharp insights.

America's most hilarious sportsman returns with this collection of insights about youth, the great outdoors, and the philosophy of fileting fish. When best-selling author Patrick McManus looks at a subject, you're sure to come away with an outrageously new perspective.

Whether Samantha Irby is talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making “adult” budgets; explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette; detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father’s ashes; sharing awkward sexual encounters; or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms (hang in there for the Costco loot!); she’s as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.

A graphic and biting polemic that still holds a fierce political relevance and impact despite being written over half a century ago. First published in 1937 it charts George Orwell's observations of working-class life during the 1930s in the industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire. His depictions of social injustice and rising unemployment, the dangerous working conditions in the mines amid general squalor and hunger also bring together many of the ideas explored in his later works and novels.

After her plane crashes, a 17-year-old girl spends 11 days walking through the Peruvian jungle. Against all odds, with no food, shelter, or equipment, she gets out. A better equipped group of adult survivors of the same crash sits down and dies. What makes the difference?

Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other?

Edgar-award winning author Dana Stabenow is best known for her Kate Shugak novels, but the unifying protagonist of almost all her writing - be it crime, fantasy, horror, or science fiction - is Alaska. This genre-spanning collection of 16 short stories features familiar characters like Kate and Jim, Liam and Wy, and Bill and Moses, but also ranges farther afield than many listeners will expect.

Baseball has been defaced and consumed by corporate America. As Moneyball-thinking and Ivy League graduates grabbed hold of the sport, the Astros set out to build a cost-efficient winning machine on the principles of the outside business world, squeezing every dollar out of every transaction, player and employee. In less than a decade, Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow helped revolutionize the game and create an environment that led to one of the worst cheating scandals in baseball history, a Shakespearean tragedy of innovation and failed change management.

One in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible, others less apparent - but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Now, just in time for the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, activist Alice Wong brings together this urgent, galvanizing collection of contemporary essays by disabled people.

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.

As former tutor and adviser to Emperor Nero, philosopher and statesman Seneca was acutely aware of how short life can be - his own life was cut short when the emperor ordered him to commit suicide (for alleged involvement in a conspiracy). And Seneca proved true to his words - his lifelong avowal to Stoicism enabled him to conduct himself with dignity to the end. During his rich and busy life, Seneca wrote a series of essays that have advised and enriched the lives of generations down to the present day.

In We Learn Nothing, satirical cartoonist Tim Kreider turns his funny, brutally honest eye to the dark truths of the human condition, asking big questions about human-sized problems: What if you survive a brush with death and it doesn't change you? Why do we fall in love with people we don't even like? How do you react when someone you've known for years unexpectedly changes genders?