Short Essays

Celebrated for her award-winning political columns, criticism, and poetry, Katha Pollitt offers something new in this poignant, hilarious, and sometimes outrageous collection of stories drawn from her own life.

Central Park is perhaps the most well-trod and familiar green space in the country. It is both a refuge from the city and Manhattan's very heart; a respite from the urban grind and a hive of activity all its own. Eight hundred forty-three carefully planned acres allow some 37 million visitors each year to come and get lost in a sense of nature. Unsurprisingly, the park also inspires a wealth of great writing, and here Andrew Blauner collects some of the finest fiction and nonfiction - 20 pieces in all.

Reminiscent of Joan Didion's White Album or Kurt Vonnegut's Palm Sunday, Visions and Revisions is a collage-style portrait of a tumultuous era that puts the listener on the streets of NYC during the early '90s AIDS crisis, also touching on such diverse subjects as the serial murders of gay men, Peck's first loves upon coming out, and the transformation of LGBT people from marginal, idealistic fighters to their present place in a world of widespread, if fraught, mainstream acceptance.

A selection from the John Updike audio collection

About this collection: This is the a collection of seven of the author's best short stories, including "The Killing of Train-Man Brown","Send Me a Friend","Then Her Wig Fell Off","Let the Dog Drive","Selma at 4 A.M.","Young Turk", and "Slow Foreplay on a Fast Bus".

A selection from the John Updike audio collection. These extraordinarily evocative stories depict the generation born in a small-town America during the Depression and growing up in a world where the old sexual morality was turned around and material comforts were easily had. Yet, as these stories reflect so accurately, life was still unsettling, and Updike chronicles telling moments both joyful and painful.

With her trademark insight and her special ability to convey the impact public events have on ordinary lives, Anna Quindlen here combines commentary on American society and the world at large with reflections on being a woman, a writer, and a mother. Grounding the public in the private, connecting people to each other and to the greater world, Quindlen encourages us to develop authentic lives, even as she serves as a catalyst for political and social change.

Winner of the 2013 Eric Hoffer E-book Fiction Award, The War Is Language is a destruction of narrative, an experimental collection of flash fiction. These often humorous pieces exist at story's amorphous limit of spoken word and deconstruction. This disordered collection makes a mosaic with cathartic, inflammatory language.

This is the story of an unforgivable con man. Vulnerable families were his prey. His promise was an impossible dream and a lie. Peter Candlewood understood the system. That’s how he could commute prison sentences and reunite hopeless families with incarcerated loved ones. For a price. Except there was no Candlewood. No hope. Just a lowly Texas con artist who bet on the desperate - and won. And he wasn’t working alone. The multimillion-dollar deception cost the betrayed more than their savings.

What is it like to be known as Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi's daughter? Or to have a mother as famous as Sharmila Tagore? Or to be recognized as Saif Ali Khan's sister? Or as Kareena Kapoor's sister-in-law? And where do I stand among them? Actor Soha Ali Khan's debut audiobook is at heart a brilliant collection of personal essays where she recounts with self-deprecating humor what it was like growing up in one of the most illustrious families of the country.

Examining the borders between one nation and another, between one person and another, Urrea reveals his mastery of the short form. This collection includes the Edgar-award winning "Amapola" and his now-classic "Bid Farewell to Her Many Horses," which had the honor of being chosen for NPR's "Selected Shorts" not once but twice.

When Trisha Low moves West, her journey is motivated by the need to arrive “somewhere better” - someplace utopian, like revolution; or safe, like home; or even clarifying, like identity. Instead, she faces the end of her relationships, a family whose values she has difficulty sharing, and America’s casual racism, sexism, and homophobia. In this book-length essay, the problem of how to account for one’s life comes to the fore - sliding unpredictably between memory, speculation, self-criticism, and art criticism, Low seeks answers that she knows she won’t find.

This collection of five stories and four essays showcases the work of Mike Heppner, the writer whom Entertainment Weekly calls, "A fearsome cultural critic disguised in a novelist's clothing," and whose funny and biting fiction has been praised in Esquire, The Washington Post, and The Millions. Most of these pieces have not been published before. Featured performers include: A deluded Lothario, a man obsessed with corn, Charlie Watts, the dude from Def Leppard, and a sweet old lady who meets her untimely end at a Boston Market.

All of the contributors to this book were friends and family of author Ellen Gray Massey, and all of them considered her a model of a strong woman. There was a consensus among contributors that their proceeds from the sale of this book be donated to charities that helped women. The charities chosen are: New Life Project, Lebanon, Missouri, and Tostan, Dignity for All.

The waters of time never lie. Wisdom drifts down through the ages for all who dare to listen. History teaches us through honesty. Are you bold enough to hear the truth? Reflections: Poems and Essays wraps you in the untold stories of the past. Sit next to the waters of time and listen to the wisdom of the past. What if John Wilkes Booth hadn't been killed at Garret's barn? Who are the Shawnee? Why did the Cherokee accuse Sequoyah of witchcraft? These stories and more await you within this inspiring book.

Chloe Aridjis's stories and essays are known to transport listeners into liminal, often dreamlike, realms. In this collection of works, we meet a woman guided only by a plastic bag drifting through the streets of Berlin who discovers a nonsense-named bar that is home to papier-mâche monsters and one glass-encased somnambulist.

Film festivals. Disruptive elections. Train wrecks. Suburban cults. Empty mansions. Digital dating. In Halftone, new author James Wolf uses a lavish and broad stroke of fiction and non-fiction to discuss feelings of worth, fears for the future, and visions of a new Americana in six stories / essays. In a buckshot-style prose scattering across a wide breadth of genre, Wolf's writings are both touching and hard-nosed, blunt yet pastoral - they are deliciously entertaining and wholly necessary.

A striking collection of stories, poems, letters, travel essays, journal entries, excerpts from three novels, and more—including the complete text of The Sheltering Sky—from one of the most revered authors of the twentieth century.

Rolf Boysen liest Heinrich von Kleist. In seinem Essay "Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden" gibt Kleist den Rat, Probleme durch das "Darüber reden" mit anderen Menschen zu lösen. Allein schon das Formulieren bringt uns einer Lösung näher, denn "die Idee kommt beim Sprechen". In der Novelle "Das Erdbeben in Chili" droht den Liebenden Jeronimo und Josephe die Hinrichtung, als ein Erdbeben ihnen unverhofft zur Freiheit verhilft.

Does This Beach Make Me Look Fat? is a collection of funny stories and true confessions that every woman can relate to by Lisa Scottoline and Francesca Serritella - the unstoppable, irreverent mother-daughter team.