Essays Social

Love your country? Want to make it truly great? Tired of loud debates and complex arguments which lead to no solutions? Welcome to Making India Awesome. Following the phenomenal success of his first nonfiction book, What Young India Wants, Chetan Bhagat, the country's biggest-selling writer, returns with another audiobook of essays in which he analyses and provides inspired solutions to the country's most intractable problems - poverty, unemployment, corruption, violence against women, communal violence, religious fundamentalism, illiteracy and more.

Briallen Hopper's Hard to Love honours the categories of loves and relationships beyond marriage, the ones that are often treated as invisible or seen as secondary - friendships, kinship with adult siblings, care teams that form in times of illness, or various alternative family formations. She also values difficult and amorphous loves like loving a challenging job or inanimate objects that can't love you back.

This essay comes from the NPR series This I Believe, which features brief personal reflections from both famous and unknown Americans. The pieces that make up the series compel listeners to rethink not only what and how they have arrived at their beliefs, but also the extent to which they share them with others.

An urgent collection of essays by first- and second-generation immigrants, exploring what it's like to be othered in an increasingly divided America.

Milan Kundera's brilliant new collection of essays is a passionate defense of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and ideas that characterizes his bestselling novels, the internationally acclaimed author revisits the artists whose works help us better understand what it means to be human. Elegant, startlingly original, and provocative, Encounter combines many of the author's signature themes with personal reflections and stories.

Isaac Fitzgerald has lived many lives. He's been an altar boy, a bartender, a fat kid, a smuggler, a biker, a prince of New England. But before all that, he was a bomb that exploded his parents' lives—or so he was told. In Dirtbag, Massachusetts, Fitzgerald, with warmth and humor, recounts his ongoing search for forgiveness, a more far-reaching vision of masculinity, and a more expansive definition of family and self.

Another in a series (including From the Top, Roughneck Grace, Million Billion, and Peaceful Persistence) of collected brief essays by New York Times best-selling author and humorist Michael Perry.

Black Music is a book about the brilliant young jazz musicians of the early 1960s: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, and others. It is composed of essays, reviews, interviews, liner notes, musical analyses, and personal impressions from 1959-1967. Also includes Amiri Baraka's reflections in a 2009 interview with Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly.

In this lively, accessible, and provocative collection, Aph and Syl Ko provide new theoretical frameworks on race, advocacy for nonhuman animals, and feminism. Using popular culture as a point of reference for their critiques, the Ko sisters engage in groundbreaking analysis of the compartmentalized nature of contemporary social movements, present new ways of understanding interconnected oppressions, and offer conceptual ways of moving forward, expressive of Afrofuturism and Black veganism.

Whether writing about the genesis of his plays, such as Aunt Dan and Lemon; discussing how the privileged world of arts and letters takes for granted the work of the “unobtrusives”, the people who serve our food and deliver our mail; or describing his upbringing in the sheltered world of Manhattan’s cultural elite, Shawn reveals a unique ability to step back from the appearance of things to explore their deeper social meanings.

Author Quintus Curtius continues his explorations in history, biography, and philosophy to extract inspiring, timeless lessons for modern listeners. The pervasive themes include courage in adversity, character and fate, moral problems, and the transcendent search for life's lessons. Special attention is given to Stoicism, Platonism, and the quest for meaning in a turbulent world.

In 12 Bytes, the New York Times best-selling author of Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? Jeanette Winterson draws on her years of thinking and reading about artificial intelligence in all its bewildering manifestations. In her brilliant, laser focused, uniquely pointed, and witty style of storytelling, Winterson looks to history, religion, myth, literature, the politics of race and gender, and computer science, to help us understand the radical changes to the way we live and love that are happening now.

Leo Tolstoy wrote prolifically in a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice and religion. These culminated in What Is Art?, published in 1898. Although Tolstoy perceived the question of art to be a religious one, he considered and rejected the idea that art reveals and reinvents through beauty. The works of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Baudelaire, and even his own novels are condemned in the course of Tolstoy's impassioned and iconoclastic redefinition of art as a force for good; for the improvement of humankind.

Three years before David Bowie died, he shared a list of 100 books that changed his life. His choices span fiction and nonfiction, literary and irreverent, and include timeless classics alongside eyebrow-raising obscurities. In 100 short essays, music journalist John O'Connell studies each book on Bowie's list and contextualizes it in the artist's life and work. Heartfelt, analytical, and totally original, Bowie's Bookshelf is one part epic reading guide and one part biography of a music legend.

A group of notable writers - including UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, Margaret MacMillan, and Jenny Uglow - celebrate our fascination with the houses of famous literary figures, artists, composers, and politicians of the past.

The Foxfire Magazine, a literary journal first published in 1967 in Rabun Gap, Georgia, was founded on the belief that stories and meaning could be found in Appalachian spaces, not only in classics such as Shakespeare. Filled with poetry and prose from local students and authors, the magazine also featured interviews with relatives and neighbors. These oral histories conducted by students from the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School quickly became the star of the magazine. Now, pulled from the vast Foxfire archive, come twenty-one oral histories from southern Appalachian women.

Whether laughing to tears reading Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great or clamoring for more unmistakable "me too!" moments in Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, girls all over the world have been touched by Judy Blume's poignant coming-of-age stories. Now, in this anthology of essays, 24 notable female authors write straight from the heart about the unforgettable novels that left an indelible mark on their childhoods and still influence them today. After growing up from Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing into Smart Women, these writers pay tribute to one of the most beloved authors of all time.

Before he became a best-selling novelist (The Bonfire of the Vanities), Tom Wolfe was an essayist and keen observer of 1960s and 1970s culture for Esquire and Rolling Stone. (This is the man who coined the phrase "Me Decade", after all.) This ear-candy collection of 20 essays and articles narrated by Edoardo Ballerini was handpicked by Wolfe and includes some of his best-known nonfiction work.

When 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump and 94 percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton, how can women unite in Trump's America? Nasty Women includes inspiring essays from a diverse group of talented women writers who seek to provide a broad look at how we got here and what we need to do to move forward. Nasty Women features essays by Rebecca Solnit, Cheryl Strayed, Sarah Hepola, Nicole Chung, Katha Pollitt, Jill Filipovic, Samantha Irby, Randa Jarrar, Sarah Hollenbeck, Meredith Talusan, and Sarah Jaffe, among others.

In this gripping essay, Hugh White explores Australia’s fateful choice to back America to the hilt and oppose China. What led both sides of politics to align with America so absolutely? Is this a case of sleepwalking to war? What tests might a new government face? White assesses America’s credibility and commitment, by examining AUKUS, the Quad, Trump and Biden. He discusses what the Ukraine conflict tells us about the future. And he argues that the US can neither contain China nor win a war over Taiwan. So where does this leave our future security and prosperity in Asia?