American Essays

Over the course of less than 24 hours in the spring of 1921, Tulsa’s infamous “Black Wall Street” was wiped off the map - and erased from the history books. Official records were disappeared, researchers were threatened, and the worst single incident of racial violence in American history was kept hidden for more than 50 years. But there were some secrets that would not die. A riveting and essential new book, The Ground Breaking not only tells the long-suppressed story of the notorious Tulsa race massacre.

This classic collection of essays, edited by Booker T. Washington and with contributions from many of post-Civil War America's other prominent African-American thinkers, sought to redefine the role of Black persons in the new Jim Crow era and beat back white supremacy through racial uplift. Seven essays include Charles Chesnutt's "The Disfranchisement of the Negro", W. E. B. DuBois "The Talented Tenth", and Wilford Horace Smith's "The Negro and the Law" .

Daughters of Latin America collects the intergenerational voices of Latine women across time and space, capturing the power, strength, and creativity of these visionary writers, leaders, scholars, and activists—including 24 Indigenous voices. Several authors featured are translated into English for the first time. Grammy, National Book Award, Cervantes, and Pulitzer Prize winners as well as a Nobel Laureate and the next generation of literary voices are among the stars of this essential collection, women whose work inspires and transforms us.

The past decade has marked a shift in America's trajectory, pivoting around the monumental presidential election of 2016. Acclaimed author and leading historian Jill Lepore has been documenting the twists and turns as they unfold, beginning with the run-up to Trump's election through to the chaos and confusion left in its wake. In this incisive collection of essays published in the New Yorker, Lepore writes with wit and warmth as she reflects on the issues of our time.

The Best American series, launched in 1915, is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction, and it is the most respected—and most popular—of its kind. New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean selects twenty pieces that represent the best science and nature writing published the previous year and explores our ever-changing world.

One of the most distinguished voices in American letters, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet N. Scott Momaday has devoted much of his life to celebrating and preserving Native American culture, especially its oral tradition. In this wise and wonderous work, Momaday shares stories and memories throughout his life, stories that have been passed down through generations, stories that reveal a profound spiritual connection to the American landscape and reverence for the natural world.

The first ever collection of short stories by Jaime Cortez, Gordo is set in a migrant workers camp near Watsonville, California, in the 1970s.

General Gustave Perna U.S. Army Retired, Operation Warp Speed Commander "Lt. Col. John McBrearty, a natural leader, combat Veteran, and family man, shares his unique perspective on history through his essays, reflections, and reviews. His personalized style provides the reader with a kaleidoscope of American history, in which he cleverly weaves his own military story within. This is a must-read for all Veterans and American history buffs alike." Having risen from the rank of Private to Lieutenant Colonel, combat veteran John J. McBrearty shares his unique insight of American History through...

Straight out of Joshua Tree, California, Desert Oracle is “The Voice of the Desert”: a field guide to the strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros, out there in the sand. Desert Oracle is your companion at a roadside diner, around a campfire, in your tent or cabin (or high-rise apartment or suburban living room) as the wind and the coyotes howl outside at night.

It is on the knife’s edge between fury and farce that the essays in this exquisite collection balance. Whether confronting the medical profession’s racial biases, considering the complicated legacy of Michael Jackson, paying homage to his writing mentor James Alan McPherson, or attempting to break free of personal and societal stereotypes, Walker elegantly blends personal revelation and cultural critique. The result is a bracing and often humorous examination by one of America’s most acclaimed essayists of what it is to grow, parent, write, and exist as a Black American male.

From the author of The New York Times best sellers Treason and Slander comes an updated Ann Coulter compendium, complete with reader responses and television and talk radio transcripts (Couric, Donahue, Franken). With titles like "Would Mohamed Atta Object to Armed Pilots?", "9 out of 10 Caribou Support Drilling", and "Liberal Pimps for Clintonism", How to Talk to a Liberal covers Coulter's waterfront on her favorite issues and targets, from national security to Hollywood.

This is a collection of poems and short essays that find among their lines the questioning of the self as it is reflected in the words and concepts they seek. It is a journey into the depths of the soul and the feelings that we express as humans in our language.

In a series of penetrating and alarming essays, whose centerpiece is a commentary on the events of September 11, 2001 (deemed then too controversial to publish), Gore Vidal challenges the comforting consensus following September 11th and goes back and draws connections to Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. He asks were these simply the acts of “evil-doers?”

Romantic love has been one of the most essential elements of storytelling for centuries. But for Black people in the United States and across the diaspora, it hasn't often been easy to find Black romance joyfully showcased in entertainment media. In this collection, revered authors and sparkling newcomers, librarians and academicians, and avid fans and reviewers consider the mirrors and windows into Black love as it is depicted in the novels, television shows, and films that have shaped their own stories.

With a blend of reportage, historical data, and pop culture, Black Genius touches on timely issues of race, class, and creativity. Tre’s life and career put him in a unique position to become a cultural observer, diving into predominantly-Black cities, communities, and schools with an ever-watchful eye of what was happening around Black opportunity, mobility, politics, and institutions. In this collection Tre pinpoints four key aspects of Black American genius—innovation, family, celebration, and community as the recipe to coming out on top.

A move at age ten from a Detroit suburb to Chattanooga in 1984 thrusts Anjali Enjeti into what feels like a new world replete with Confederate flags, Bible verses, and whiteness. It is here that she learns how to get her bearings as a mixed-race brown girl in the Deep South and begins to understand how identity can inspire, inform, and shape a commitment to activism. Her own evolution is a bumpy one, and along the way Enjeti, racially targeted as a child, must wrestle with her own complicity in white supremacy and bigotry as an adult.

From Paris to Prague, from the past to the present, authors and artists say farewell in this unique collection. In this audiobook you'll find personal letters, reminiscences, poetry, art and brand new fiction from some of the most talented and important voices at work today, including Jessie Burton, Alain de Botton, Matt Haig, Richard Herring, Owen Jones, Mark Kermode, Robert Macfarlane, Kate Mosse, Chris Riddell, Lionel Shriver and many others.

"An often well-reasoned, if sometimes speculative, challenge to American political orthodoxy." Kirkus Review June 2021 This book is an effort to bring some measure of conciliation, and common ground to the bitterly opposed camps of political opinion that currently divides the nation. These essays address the most contentious issues that face Americans with the aim of finding common ground to diminish the acrimony and personal vitriol that presently animates our national politics. The economy, energy policy, education, abortion, gun control, health care, and international relations are ...

A powerful, poetic memoir about what it means to exist as an Indigenous woman in America, told in snapshots of the author’s encounters with gun violence.

Before Langston Hughes and his literary prowess became synonymous with American poetry, he was a seventeen-year-old on a train to Mexico City, seeking funds to pursue his passion. His early poems, beloved verses like “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” were written without formal training, often on the back of napkins and envelopes, and were inspired by the sights and sounds of Black working-class people he encountered in his early life. Blues in Stereo is a posthumous collection of these early works, in which we see Langston Hughes like we’ve never seen him before.