Essay Essays

Written by one of the most revered surfers of his generation, Gerry Lopez's Surf Is Where You Find It is a collection of stories about a lifetime of surfing. But more than that, it is a collection of stories about the lessons learned from surfing. It presents 38 stories about those who have been influential in the sport - surfing anytime, anywhere, and in any way.

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.

A companion volume to Illuminations, the first collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin.

Like so many women, Sophia spent her formative years struggling to do the “right” thing - to make others comfortable, to take minimal and calculated risks, to live up to society’s expectations - only to realize that there was so little payoff to this tiresome balancing act. Tired of trying so hard, Sophia finally let go of the crushing pressure to be perfect.

Il faut prêter attention aux analyses d'Amin Maalouf : ses intuitions se révèlent des prédictions, tant il semble avoir la prescience des grands bouleversements de l'Histoire. Il s'inquiétait il y a vingt ans de la montée des "identités meurtrières" ; il y a dix ans du "dérèglement du monde".

This Leibniz collection contains some of the philosopher’s most important works and ideas, spans three decades and illuminates the fascinating intellectual journey undertaken by him in his quest for truth. A prodigious polymath, Leibniz was a mathematician, philosopher, physicist and statesman and engaged with a sweeping range of ideas and disciplines, striving throughout his life to be at the cutting edge of scientific thinking. These Principal Essays are arranged in chronological order.

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.

Chicken Soup for the Soul has gathered some great storytellers to document the mishaps and misadventures of everyday life and celebrate humanity’s ability to laugh at itself. There’s no holding back in this book, so prepare for lots of good, clean (and not so clean) fun. This is storytelling at its funniest! No one is safe in these true stories—from spouses to parents to children to colleagues to friends. And the funniest stories are the ones about the writers’ own mishaps and most embarrassing moments.

You Don’t Know Us Negroes is the quintessential gathering of provocative essays from one of the world’s most celebrated writers, Zora Neale Hurston. Spanning more than three decades and penned during the backdrop of the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, Montgomery bus boycott, desegregation of the military, and school integration, Hurston’s writing articulates the beauty and authenticity of Black life as only she could. Collectively, these essays showcase the roles enslavement and Jim Crow have played in intensifying Black people’s inner lives and culture rather than destroying it.

In a series of intimate and humorous dispatches, McOuat examines her identity as a queer woman, and as a mother, through the lens of the pop culture moments in the '80s and '90s that molded her identity. McOuat stirs the ingredients required to conjure an unsettled spirit: the horrors of pregnancy and motherhood, love and loss, the supernatural, kaleidoscopic sexuality, near-miss experiences, and the unexplained moments in life that leave you haunted.

All Things Are Too Small is brilliant cultural and literary critic Becca Rothfeld’s plea for derangement: imbalance, obsession, gluttony, and ravishment in all domains of life, from literature to romance. In a healthy culture, Rothfeld argues, economic security allows for wild aesthetic experimentation and excess, yet in our contemporary world, we’ve got it flipped. The gap between rich and poor yawns hideously wide, while we compensate with misguided attempts to effect equality in love and art, where it does not belong.

The author of Bel Canto, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Orange Prize, and long-running New York Times best seller, turns to nonfiction in a moving chronicle of her decades-long friendship with the critically acclaimed and recently deceased author, Lucy Grealy.

Walter Benjamin was an icon of criticism, renowned for his insight on art, literature, and philosophy. This volume includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and Brecht’s epic theater. Illuminations also includes his penetrating study “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, an enlightening discussion of translation as a literary mode, and his theses on the philosophy of history.

We live in a culture of casual certitude. This has always been the case, no matter how often that certainty has failed. Though no generation believes there's nothing left to learn, every generation unconsciously assumes that what has already been defined and accepted is (probably) pretty close to how reality will be viewed in perpetuity. And then, of course, time passes. Ideas shift. Opinions invert. What once seemed reasonable eventually becomes absurd, replaced by modern perspectives that feel even more irrefutable and secure - until, of course, they don't.

For years, New York Times bestselling author Dolly Alderton has been sharing her wisdom, warmth, and wit with the diverse universe of fans who have turned to her “Dear Dolly” column seeking guidance on a host of life problems. Dolly has thoughtfully answered questions ranging from the painfully—and sometimes hilariously—relatable to the occasionally bizarre. They include breakups and body issues, families, relationships platonic and romantic, dating, divorce, the pleasures and pitfalls of social media, sex, loneliness, longing, love and everything in between.

Gore Vidal’s reputation as America’s finest essayist is an enduring one. This collection, chosen by the author from 40 years of work, contains about two-thirds of what he published in various magazines and journals. He has divided the essays into three categories, or states. State of the art covers literature, including novelists and critics, bestsellers, pieces on Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Suetonius, Nabakov, and Montaigne (a previosly uncollected essay from 1992).

Cet ouvrage présente 52 chroniques humoristiques pour trouver sa motivation et la garder tout au long du parcours vers une meilleure santé. Finis les complexes et les excuses! C’est maintenant qu’on s’prend en main!

With His gentle hand He wounded my neck And caused all my senses to be suspended. Part poetic masterpiece, part mystic treatise, The Dark Night of the Soul by 16th century Carmelite monk, St. John of the Cross, addresses the feeling of being forgotten by the Presence of the Almighty that every Christian, desirous of walking more closely with God must pass through in order to learn to walk by faith and not by sight.

Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag's second collection of essays, extends the investigations she undertook in Against Interpretation with essays on film, literature, politics, and a groundbreaking study of pornography.

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.