Art Essays

Life on the Mississippi expresses the full range of Twain's literary personality. It remains the most vivid, boisterous, and provocative account of the cultural and societal history of the Mississippi Valley, from 'the golden age' of steamboating to the violence wrought by the Civil War.

“I don’t want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude or for the Nobel Prize, but rather for my journalism,” Gabriel García Márquez said in the final years of his life. And while some of his journalistic writings have been made available over the years, this is the first volume to gather a representative selection from across the first four decades of his career - years during which he worked as a full-time, often muckraking, and controversial journalist, even as he penned the fiction that would bring him the Nobel Prize in 1982.

Michel de Montaigne embodies the humanist ideal—curious, measured, contemplative yet not unworldly, witty, free of prejudice, and urbane. But what does this French Renaissance philosopher have to tell us about how to think and live today? In forty short, erudite, and lively chapters written over a single summer, Antoine Compagnon seeks answers to that question. In A Summer with Montaigne, Compagnon invites his listeners to join him as he strolls through Montaigne’s key contributions to our understanding of what is good and worthwhile in life.

An essay from Things I've Learned From the Women Who've Dumped Me.

10歳で建築家を志し、国内外で多数のプロジェクトをてがける今もっとも注目の建築家が建築知識満載で綴る10代へのメッセージ。建築家とは、そしてこれからの建築とは――。

Reading Backwards opens with the autobiographical "My Life in the Theater," a memoir of the younger Crowley's earliest ambitions, and closes with the moving and memorable "Practicing the Arts of Peace." In between, the author offers us more than 30 carefully crafted essays, each one notable for its insight, intelligence, and typically graceful prose.

In Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury’s love for his craft shines. With signature wisdom, wit, and verve, Bradbury delves into his prolific writing career, exploring the creation of countless stories, novels, plays, movies, and more that have stood the test of time. Written over a thirty-year period, these inspirational essays insist that there is a “deep well of explosive self-revelation” in all of us waiting to be released through the process of writing.

From columnist and critic Alana Massey, a collection of essays examining the intersection of the personal with pop culture through the lives of pivotal female figures - from Sylvia Plath to Britney Spears - in the spirit of Chuck Klosterman, with the heart of a true fan.

The world is never done catching up with Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the author of Walden, “Civil Disobedience,” and other classics. A prophet of environmentalism and vegetarianism, an abolitionist, and a critic of materialism and technology, Thoreau even seems to have anticipated a world of social distancing in his famous experiment at Walden Pond. In Now Comes Good Sailing, 27 of today’s leading writers offer wide-ranging original pieces exploring how Thoreau has influenced and inspired them.

Ya desde el comienzo del siglo XX, Walter Benjamin reflexionaba sobre lo que supondría la masificación del arte que las nuevas técnicas de reproducción hicieron posible, y proponía que en un futuro -sin duda, el que vivimos hoy- las nuevas técnicas tenderían a la politización y ganarían un poder creciente sobre el destino de los pueblos.

Best-selling and Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie offers incisive, often humorous takes on literature, culture, and world events in this New York Times Notable Book. In these stimulating pieces, Rushdie addresses a variety of subjects, including the death of the novel, India, soccer, and the Rolling Stones.

Pop Song is a book about love and about falling in love - with a place, or a painting, or a person - and the joy and terror inherent in the experience of that love. Plumbing the well of culture for clues and patterns about love and loss - from Agnes Martin's abstract paintings to James Turrell's transcendent light works, and Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet to Frank Ocean's Blonde - Larissa Pham writes of her youthful attempts to find meaning in travel, sex, drugs, and art, before sensing that she might need to turn her gaze upon herself.

From the late editor, writer, and critic, one of the great chroniclers of the art, fashion, and celebrity scenes: an expansive collection of 35 essays that offer an intimate look into the worlds of some of the most important and well-known artists, designers, and actors of our time.

Die kulturtheoretische Schrift "Das Unbehagen in der Kultur" gehört zum Alterswerk Sigmund Freuds. Dem allgemeinen naiven Fortschrittsglauben widersprechend und von einem tiefen Kulturpessimismus durchdrungen, formuliert Freud in diesem einflussreichen Text die These, dass der Einzelne im Umfeld der Kultur, in die er integriert ist, dazu gezwungen wird, seine Triebe, insbesondere seinen Sexualtrieb und seinen Aggressionstrieb, zu unterdrückt.

It happens to us all: We think we’ve settled into an identity, a self, and then out of nowhere and with great force, the traces of our parents appear to us, in us - in mirrors, in gestures, in reaction and reactivity, at weddings and funerals, and in troubled thoughts that crouch in dark corners of our minds. In this masterful collection of new essays, the apple looks at the tree.

An essay from Things I've Learned From the Women Who've Dumped Me.

When it comes to how societies commemorate their own distant dreams and catastrophes, we often think of books, archives, or memorials carved from stone. But in Time's Echo, Jeremy Eichler makes a revelatory case for the power of music as culture's memory, an art form uniquely capable of carrying forward meaning from the past. Eichler shows how four towering composers - Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich - lived through the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust and later transformed their experiences into deeply moving works of music.

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 Further, editors Paul Myers and S. W. Lauden have a whole new crop of writers going deep on what certain Power Pop bands and songs mean and have meant to them. Whether they love or hate it, Go Further is a dive into the Beatles-inspired pop rock of the last five decades.

An essay from Things I've Learned From the Women Who've Dumped Me.

India has unmatched talent and ambition with an inherent tendency to work hard; then what is it that keeps India from overtaking the world? Why does India as a nation settle for the ordinary when the extraordinary is well within reach? Dr. Kalam shares his dream of a nation that is unrivaled, he discusses how he has, from his experience, met such skilled people whose visions can transform the nation.