Literary Essays

Here is Hemingway: the adventurer, the reporter, the man! More intimately than all his fiction, Hemingway the reporter reveals Hemingway the man, driving an ambulance through a bullet-barrage or leading guerrilla forces into Paris, always in the thick of the action. Here are his most sensational dispatches, the behind-the-scenes stories that became For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, and The Sun Also Rises.

The End of the End of the Earth is a collection of Jonathan Franzen's essays and speeches from the past five years, in which he grapples with the most important and heated ethical subjects of the day: environmentalism, capitalism, wealth inequality, race, technology, and the role of art. He challenges us to ask difficult questions: What is our civic responsibility in the face of climate change, the greatest ever threat to our planet and species? Does technology give us a sense of control or community or is it stripping these from us?

Celebrated as one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, André Aciman has written a luminous series of linked essays about time, place, identity, and art that show him at his very finest. From beautiful and moving pieces about the memory evoked by the scent of lavender; to meditations on cities like Barcelona, Rome, Paris, and New York; to his sheer ability to unearth life secrets from an ordinary street corner, Alibis reminds the listener that Aciman is a master of the personal essay.

Deborah Levy invites us into the interiors of her world, sharing her most intimate thoughts and experiences, as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her. From Marguerite Duras to Colette and Ballard, and from Lee Miller to Francesca Woodman and Paula Rego, we can relish here the richness of their work and, in turn, the richness of the author’s own. Each moment draws upon Levy’s life in exalting ways, encapsulating the wonderful precision and astonishing depth of her writing,.

Over the last decade, William Giraldi has established himself as a charismatic and uncompromising literary essayist. American Audacity gathers Giraldi's fierce and witty considerations of American writers and themes, including a never-before-published appreciation of James Baldwin and an introductory call to arms for 21st-century American literature.

“Books can connect people across time zones and zip codes, across cultures, national boundaries, and historical eras”, Kakutani writes in her introduction to Ex Libris. Here listeners will discover novels and memoirs by some of the most gifted writers working today; favorite classics worth listening or relistening; and nonfiction works, both old and new, that illuminate our social and political landscape and some of today’s most pressing issues, from climate change to medicine to the consequences of digital innovation.

Jack Kerouac’s archive is vast. Throughout his life he was constantly writing, and he meticulously saved and catalogued his material. The result is that beyond the work published in his lifetime there has been a rich stream of posthumous writing that is far from tapped. This collection of previously unpublished writing culled from the Kerouac archive, and as a companion to Paul Maher Jr.'s Becoming Kerouac, spans Kerouac’s adult life, from a journal written at age seventeen to autobiographical reflections a few years before his death.

Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

Despite their phenomenal decades-long success, the Harry Potter novels have attracted relatively little attention from literary critics and scholars. This book challenges that oversight, assembling and foregrounding some of the best literary critical work by scholars trying to move the needle on these novels to reflect their importance to twenty-first-century literary culture. In Open at the Close, contributors consciously address Harry Potter primarily as a literary phenomenon rather than a cultural one.

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.

Nick Lansing and Susy Branch are young, attractive but impoverished New Yorkers. They are in love and decide to marry, but realise their chances of happiness are slim without the wealth and society that their more privileged friends take for granted. Nick and Susy agree to separate when either encounters a more eligible proposition.

Fun, bright, and playful, power pop is a sometimes adored, sometimes maligned, often misunderstood genre of music. From its heyday in the '70s and '80s to its resurgence in the '90s and '00s, power pop has meant many things to many people. In Go All the Way, today's best and brightest writers go deep on what certain power pop bands and songs mean and have meant to them. Whether they love or hate it, Go All the Way is a dive into the Beatles-inspired pop rock of the last five decades.

"In almost any culture, at any time, you can find food writing,” writes guest editor Mark Bittman in his introduction. “Food means growing and hardship, and health and medicine, and work and holiday. In its abundance it is a gift and a joy, and in its absence a curse and a tragedy. If a culture has writing, that culture has food writing.” The stories in this year’s Best American Food Writing are brilliant, eye-opening windows into the heart of our country’s culture.

Before Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Jonathan Lethem became revered authors, they were readers. In this ebullient book, America’s favorite librarian Nancy Pearl and noted-playwright Jeff Schwager interview a diverse range of America's most notable and influential writers about the books that shaped them and inspired them to leave their own literary mark. The Writer’s Library is a revelatory exploration of the studies, libraries, and bookstores of today’s favorite authors.

When “The Fourth State of Matter”, her now famous piece about a workplace massacre at the University of Iowa, was published in The New Yorker, Jo Ann Beard immediately became one of the most influential writers in America, forging a path for a new generation of young authors willing to combine the dexterity of fiction with the rigors of memory and reportage, and in the process extending the range of possibility for the essay form. Now, with Festival Days, Beard brings us the culmination of her groundbreaking work.

15 Essays des gefeierten Autors von Die Korrekturen, Freiheit und Crossroads. Virtuos und pointiert setzt sich Jonathan Franzen mit dem Geist seiner Zeit auseinander und offenbart ganz persönliche Erfahrungen: In fünfzehn Essays ergründet er »die Schwierigkeit, in einer lärmenden und zerstreuenden Massenkultur Individualität und Vielschichtigkeit zu bewahren: die Frage, wie Alleinsein geht«. Gegen eine medial beschleunigte Welt und von Ideologien gefärbte Wahrnehmung setzt er die kreative Abgeschiedenheit, den genauen Blick, das Lesen.

Will Self is one of the most important British novelists of his generation, and he is as acclaimed in the UK for his outstanding, daring journalism as he is for his fiction. Now finally available in America, Junk Mail is an original selection of pieces from Self's nonfiction and journalism that will introduce American listeners to Self as a literary journalist par excellence.

Presented here are 3 short works by Virginia Woolf, each a unique consideration of the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The essays included are: The Father: Woolf's ruminations of family and, particularly, the father within the works of Dostoyevsky. More Dostoyevsky: Further thoughts on Dostoyevsky's work, an author of whom she once wrote “It is directly obvious that he is the greatest writer ever born." In Cranford: A comedic exploration of Dostoyevsky's work where Woolf transplants the great master into English provincial life to explore the unique nature of his work and the English nature.

Morris waxes on the ironies of modern life in all their resonant glories and inevitable stupidities - from her daily exercise (a "statutory thousand paces of brisk walk") to the troubles of Brexit; her enduring yet complicated love for America; and honest reflections on the vagaries and ailments of aging. Both intimate and luminously wise, Thinking Again is a testament to the virtues of embracing life, creativity, and above all, kindness.

In this fascinating set of essays, based on the talks he delivered at Harvard University as part of the distinguished Norton Lecture series, Pamuk presents a comprehensive and provocative theory of the novel and the experience of reading. Drawing on Friedrich Schiller’s famous distinction between “naïve” writers—those who write spontaneously—and “sentimental” writers—those who are reflective and aware—Pamuk reveals two unique ways of processing and composing the written word.