Essay Essays

With this collection of more than 50 pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today’s most powerful and original voices. Moment after moment, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram.

After a violent coup in the United States overthrows the Constitution and ushers in a new government regime, the Republic of Gilead imposes subservient roles on all women. Offred, now a Handmaid tasked with the singular role of procreation in the childless household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife, can remember a time when she lived with her husband and daughter and had a job, before she lost everything, even her own name.

This is an extensive collection of short essays and other pieces by C. S. Lewis that have been brought together in one volume for the first time. As well as his many books, letters, and poems, Lewis also wrote a great number of essays and shorter pieces on various subjects. He wrote extensively on Christian theology and the defense of faith but also on various ethical issues and on the nature of literature and storytelling. In this essay collection we find a treasure trove of Lewis' reflections on diverse topics.

These essays are channeled messages to assist you in your ascension. The Ascended Masters, the Archangels, and all of the Highest Order of the Light have provided wisdom, practices, and processes to help you to grow in your awareness and understanding of the truths of God. You will be guided to release yourself from the confusion of the ego consciousness in order to ascend into the Golden Age.

The first new collection of essays by Christopher Hitchens since 2004, Arguably offers an indispensable key to understanding the passionate and skeptical spirit of one of our most dazzling writers, widely admired for the clarity of his style, a result of his disciplined and candid thinking. Topics range from ruminations on why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men to the enduring legacies of Thomas Jefferson and George Orwell.

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.

In sixteen dazzling, expansive essays, the acclaimed essayist and poet Elisa Gabbert explores a life lived alongside books of all kinds: dog-eared and destroyed, cherished and discarded, classic and clichėd, familiar and profoundly new. She turns her witty, searching mind to the writers she admires, from Plath to Proust, and the themes that bind them―chance, freedom, envy, ambition, nostalgia, and happiness. She takes us to the strange edges of art and culture, from hair metal to surf movies to party fiction.

Donna Leon’s wildly popular novels starring Venetian Commissario Guido Brunetti have often been praised for their insight into culture, politics, family life, and the history of Venice, one of the world’s most treasured cities and her home for over thirty years. My Venice and Other Essays collects over fifty of Leon’s funny, charming, and passionate essays on subjects that range from battles over garbage in the canals to troubles with rehabbing Venetian real estate.

Karl Kraus gilt als einer der bedeutendsten Aphoristiker deutscher Sprache. Ob berühmte Schriftsteller oder die Presse - nichts und niemand wurde von der Kritik seiner Feder verschont. Bekannte Künstler wie Stefan Zweig, Georg Trakl, Thomas Mann und andere zollten ihm Respekt, aber die Zahl seiner Feinde in Kunst und Gesellschaft war enorm. Als Vorleser hinterließ er aufgrund seiner Sprachgewalt und Persönlichkeit angeblich einen äußerst außergewöhnlichen Eindruck.

Blending literature and memoir, Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto examines her deepest commitments: to writing, family, friends, dogs, books, and her husband in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Together, these essays, previously published in The Atlantic, Harper, Vogue, and The Washington Post, form a resonant portrait of a life lived with loyalty and with love.

While millions face hunger, malnutrition, and starvation, the world's population is increasing by over 225,000 people per day, 80 million per year. In many countries, supplies of food and water are inadequate to support the population, so the world falls deeper and deeper into what economists call the "Malthusian trap". Here, Malthus examines the tendency of human numbers to outstrip their resources, and argues that poverty, disease, and starvation are necessary to keep societies from moving beyond their means of subsistence.

“Any story that starts will also end.” As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart.

Tom Segura is known for his twisted takes and irreverent comedic voice. But after a few years of crazy tours and churning out podcasts weekly, all while parenting two young children, he desperately needs a second to himself. It’s not that he hates his friends and family — he’s not a monster — he’s just beat, which is why his son’s (ruthless) first full sentence, “I’d like to play alone, please,” has since become his mantra.

Here, in this unusual collection, are some of the greatest essays in Western literature. Witty, informative and imaginative, the topics vary from starvation in Ireland, fine China, the extension of railways in the Lake District, and the tombs in Westminster Abbey. A little like after-dinner monologues, they are passing thoughts expressed as journalism. Neville Jason reads with urbane clarity.

In Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on an exhilarating tour of our popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight of Joan Didion, Sullivan shows us - with a laidback, erudite Southern charm that's all his own - how we really (no, really) live now.

These essays are ultimately designed for long term members of 12 step fellowships to help them be better sponsors and to help them be of service to others without allowing it to become their whole identity. In recovery, we get a chance to help others, but, in attempting to do so, we end up making mistakes, and coming face to face with our own characters defects. Service to other is a chance for us to exercise our own personal demons.

Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as "The Harper's Essay," Franzen's controversial 1996 investigation of the fate of the American novel. This essay is reprinted for the first time in How to be Alone, along with the personal essays and the dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Corrections.

Collected Essays contains nearly 80 essays, reviews and occasional pieces composed between novels, plays and travel books over four prolific decades. From Henry James and Somerset Maugham to Ho Chi Minh and Kim Philby, the range of subjects is eclectic and stimulating, his subjects brought vividly to life. The resulting collection is as revealing as autobiography and characteristically rich in humour, insight and doubt.

"The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently," wrote David Graeber. A renowned anthropologist, activist, and author, Graeber was as well-known for his sharp, lively essays as he was for his iconic role in the Occupy movement and his paradigm-shifting tomes. Today we live amidst converging political, economic, and ecological crises, and yet our politics are dominated by either a "business as usual" attitude or nostalgia for a mythical past.

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, first published in 1690, John Locke (1632-1704) provides a complete account of how we acquire everyday, mathematical, natural scientific, religious and ethical knowledge. Rejecting the theory that some knowledge is innate in us, Locke argues that it derives from sense perceptions and experience, as analysed and developed by reason. While defending these central claims with vigorous common sense, Locke offers many incidental - and highly influential - reflections on space and time, meaning, free will and personal identity.