Essays Social

From one of Mexico's most exciting young writers, a cosmopolitan and candid essay collection exploring life in cities across the world and reflecting on the transformative importance of literature in understanding ourselves.

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat and civil servant, made a nine-month journey through the eastern United States. The result was Democracy in America, a monumental study of the strengths and weaknesses of the nation’s evolving politics. His insightful work has become one of the most influential political texts ever written on America.

Anarchism claims that there's no need for a state and that it would be better to have a society without central government. Anarchists dislike the authority of the state, but the dream of the stateless society is not a simple matter.

Journalist and former Allure editor Sable Yong debuts with a sharp-toothed and hilarious essay collection about beauty and vanity, examining their stigmatization in the cultural zeitgeist, and how to shift the focus to use both for powerful tools for self-exploration, interpersonal connection, and cultural change.

Shocked and distressed by a male writer's vilification of women, Christine de Pizan has a powerful dreamlike vision in which she is visited by three personified Virtues: Reason, Rectitude and Justice. They tell her she has been chosen to write a book which will be like a city, housing virtuous women and protecting them from feminist attack. Partly myth, partly fact, The Book of the City of Ladies is an extraordinary, pioneering and impassioned defense of women that set out to shatter misogynist cliches and serve to instill self-worth in its female listeners of the time.

A collection of non-fiction essays about the counter-culture of the 1960s that dives deep into the issues that marked the era: female empowerment, increasing freedom around sexuality, vibrant subcultures, and the rise of psychedelic drugs. In this sprawling work, Wolfe profiles Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and compares him to Jay Gatsby, interviews one of the first women to get breast implants, and hangs out with freewheeling surfers (aka The Pump House Gang).

In a gauntlet-throwing essay at the start of this brilliant assemblage, Cynthia Ozick stakes the claim that, just as surely as critics require a steady supply of new fiction, novelists need great critics to build a vibrant community on the foundation of literary history. For decades Ozick herself has been one of our great critics, as these essays so clearly display. She offers models of critical analysis of writers from the mid-20th century to today, from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Kafka to William Gass and Martin Amis, all assembled in provocatively named groups.

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.

On the Shoulders of Giants is a collection of essays based on lectures Eco famously delivered at the Milanesiana Festival in Milan over the last 15 years of his life. Previously unpublished, the essays explore themes he returned to again and again in his writing: the roots of Western culture and the origin of language, the nature of beauty and ugliness, the potency of conspiracies, the lure of mysteries, and the imperfections of art.

Peter Singer is often described as the world's most influential philosopher. Now, in Ethics in the Real World, Singer shows that he is also a master at dissecting important current events in a few hundred words. In this book of brief essays, he applies his controversial ways of thinking to issues like climate change, extreme poverty, animals, abortion, euthanasia, human genetic selection, sports doping, the sale of kidneys, the ethics of high-priced art, and ways of increasing happiness.

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.

Credited as the Father of Liberalism and revered for his ground-breaking theories, John Locke left behind a legacy which has radically shaped political and philosophical thought for over 300 years. His writings continue to inspire and educate people to this day, from founding our central ideas of consciousness and knowledge to creating a framework for society which greatly influenced America’s founding fathers.

In I Wear the Black Hat, Klosterman questions the very nature of how modern people understand the concept of villainy. What was so Machiavellian about Machiavelli? Why don't we see Batman the same way we see Bernhard Goetz? Who's more worthy of our vitriol - Bill Clinton or Don Henley? What was O.J. Simpson's second-worst decision? Masterfully blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and limitless imagination, I Wear the Black Hat delivers perceptive observations on the complexity of the anti-hero.

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.

According to the Washington Post, no one who cares about contemporary African-American cultures can ignore Bell Hooks's electrifying feminist explorations. Targeting cultural icons as diverse as Madonna and Spike Lee, Outlaw Culture presents a collection of essays that pulls no punches. As Hooks herself notes, interrogations of popular culture can be a "powerful site for intervention, challenge and change." And intervene, challenge, and change is what hooks does best.

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. Although there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system.

It's a report tempered by hard times. In "Matricide", Daum unflinchingly describes a parent's death and the uncomfortable emotions it provokes; and in "Diary of a Coma" she relates her own journey to the twilight of the mind. But Daum also operates in a comic register. With perfect precision, she reveals the absurdities of the marriage-industrial complex, of the New Age dating market, and of the peculiar habits of the young and digital.

Indiana champions shining examples of literary and artistic merit regardless of whether the individual artist or writer is famous; asserts a standard of care and tradition that has nothing to do with the ivory tower establishment; is unafraid to deliver the coup de grâce when someone needs to say the emperor has no clothes; speaks in the same breath—in the same discerning, insolent, eloquent way—about high art and pop culture. Few writers could get away with saying the things Gary Indiana does. And when the writing is this good, it's also political, plus it's a riot of fun.

Smart, humorous, and strikingly original essays by one of “America’s most bracing thinkers on race, gender, and capitalism of our time.” (Rebecca Traister) In these eight piercing explorations on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom - award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed - embraces her venerated role as a purveyor of wit, wisdom, and Black Twitter snark about all that is right and much that is wrong with this thing we call society.

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.