Short Essays

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s deeply personal essay explores racial conflict through the prism of his childhood and the influence of his father, a police officer who walked the beat between two worlds.

Of all the essentials for survival: oxygen, water, sleep, and food, only food is a vast treasure trove of memory and of sensory experience. Food is a portal to culture, to times past, to disgust, to comfort, to love: no matter one's feelings about a particular dish, they are hardly ever neutral.

David Bain offers ten essays on writing, with an eye toward helping new writers gain their footing and keeping the more seasoned scribe motivated. It also includes his essay "Basic E-Book Self-Publishing Advice for Newbies" which has already helped hundreds of beginning indie authors. A longtime college English prof and former newspaper bureau chief, Bain infuses these essays on the writing life with years of teaching, editing, and indie publishing experience, using an easygoing yet incisive style.

Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American writers of the last hundred years. Since her death in 1965, her place in the landscape of twentieth-century fiction has grown only more exalted. As we approach the centenary of her birth comes this astonishing compilation of fifty-six pieces—more than forty of which have never been published before. Two of Jackson’s children co-edited this volume, culling through the vast archives of their mother’s papers at the Library of Congress, selecting only the very best for inclusion.

One of the most talented and creative authors working today, Neal Stephenson is renowned for his exceptional novels - works colossal in vision and mind-boggling in complexity. Exploring and blending a diversity of topics, including technology, economics, history, science, pop culture, and philosophy, his books are the products of a keen and adventurous intellect. Stephenson ponders a wealth of subjects, from movies and politics to David Foster Wallace and the Midwestern American College Town; and more.

This combination of serious artistic engagement with warmth and clarity of prose revels in the experiences and pleasures of art and the body, identity, and community.

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.

Lars Horn's Voice of the Fish, the latest Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, is an interwoven essay collection that explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a back injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak. In Horn's adept hands, the collection takes shape as a unified book: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries, and antiquities serve as interludes between longer essays, knitting together a sinuous, wave-like form that flows across the book.

"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.

In Entrapment and Other Writings - containing his unfinished novel and previously unpublished or uncollected stories, poems, and essays - Algren speaks to our time as few of his fellow great American writers of the 1940s and ’50s do, in part because he hasn’t yet been accepted and assimilated into the American literary canon, despite that he is held up as a talismanic figure.

The Right Side of History tells the 100-year history of queer activism in a series of revealing close-ups, first-person accounts, and intimate snapshots of LGBT pioneers and radicals. This diverse cast stretches from the Edwardian period to today, including first-person accounts of the key protest that is at the heart of the 2015 movie Stonewall. The book shows how LGBT folk have always been in the forefront of progressive social evolution in the United States.

Short Stuff is a compilation of both narrative and poetic forms. I have always loved writing, but it took some jolts from my life journey to lead to more introspection and more freedom to hone these writings into some publishable form.

"From nothing to nothing is no time at all." (John Steinbeck) Two men discuss their New Year's resolutions shortly after midnight on December 31, 2014. The discussion is inspired by a piece of minimalist piano music by Steve Reich and turns to the meaning and nature of time, drawing on John Steinbeck's famous quote.

Malthus predicted a grim future with geometrical population growth, versus food production that increases only arithmetically. He claimed that this would result in famine and starvation unless births were controlled. It is called the Malthusian catastrophe, in which humans would disregard the limits of natural resources and the world would be plagued by famine and disease.

Miss Val has shaped her UCLA gymnastics program as a life-skills class, and now she's sharing those lessons with you, whether you're an athlete, business leader, or simply someone who wants to own his or her destiny. Miss Val's philosophies are timeless. Her coaching style is unorthodox. Life Is Short, Don't Wait to Dance is a thought-provoking, fun journey through the personal stories and anecdotes of the 35-year career of a dancer/choreographer turned athletic coach.

Andrew Sullivan, “one of the most influential journalists of the last three decades” (The New York Times) and founding editor of The Daily Dish presents a collection of 60 his most iconic and powerful essays of social and political commentary from The New Republic, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, and more.

In the Adirondacks, short carries are portages between waterways, and this book is a collection of short essays about wilderness, outdoor adventures, natural history and small town life - all of which connect with each other through the author's voice and deep sense of place.

In When the Facts Change, Tony Judt's widow and fellow historian Jennifer Homans has assembled an essential collection of the most important and influential pieces written in the last 15 years of Judt's life, the years in which he found his voice in the public sphere. Included are seminal essays on the full range of Judt's concerns, including Europe as an idea and in reality, before 1989 and thereafter; Israel, the Holocaust and the Jews; American hyperpower and the world after 9/11.

Charles Dickens was a writer and social critic who created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. THE SHORT-TIMERS: Within so many yards of this Covent-garden lodging of mine, as within so many yards of Westminster Abbey, Saint Paul's Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament, the Prisons, the Courts of Justice, all the Institutions that govern the land, I can find must find...

Christopher Buckley at his best: an extraordinary, wide-ranging selection of essays both hilarious and poignant, irreverent and delightful. In his first book of essays since his 1997 best seller, Wry Martinis, Buckley delivers a rare combination of big ideas and truly fun writing. Listening to these essays is the equivalent of being in the company of a tremendously witty and enlightening companion.