Heart Essays

The handsome Texas sailor who offers dinner to a runaway in Central Park. The Midwestern college girl who stops a cop in Times Square for restaurant advice. The Brooklyn man on a midnight subway who helps a weary tourist find her way to Chinatown. The Columbia University graduate student who encounters an unexpected object of beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art....

A remarkable insight into the birth of a writer and the moving discovery of family secrets. When Hanif Kureishi discovers an abandoned manuscript of his father's, his understanding of the family history is transformed. So begins a journey which takes Kureishi through his father's privileged childhood by the sea in Bombay, to the trauma of partition and to his adult life hidden away in the suburbs of Bromley - his days spent as a minor functionary in the Pakistan embassy in London, his nights writing prose, hopeful of one day receiving literary recognition.

In this remarkable audiobook of days, John Hildebrand charts the overlapping rings - home, town, countryside - of life in the Midwest. Like E. B. White, Hildebrand locates the humor and drama in ordinary life. In these wry, sharply observed essays, the Midwest isn’t "The Land Time Forgot", but a more complicated (and vastly more interesting) place where the good life awaits once we figure exactly out what it means.

Provocative, thoughtful, beautiful, these essays have a directness and humanity that connects with our era.

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.