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.

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.

Sacred Cinema: why movie theaters matter, is an essay by James J. Caterino, the author of The Art of Listening to Music, My Encounter with the Partridge Family, Why I Don't Drink, The Green Girl, Chrome Dome, Megan Ward: the best actress you never heard of, Girl Pop, What If, Make Me Cry, Please, True Stories, Cool Stuff, Escape to Nowhere, and much more.

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

Like Love is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson's brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson's passion for dialogue and dissent. Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts.

Jonathan Franzen’s best seller Freedom was the most-discussed novel of 2010, an ambitious and searching engagement with life in America in the 21st century. The New York Times Book Review proclaimed it “a masterpiece of American fiction.” Now a new collection of Franzen’s non-fiction brings fresh evidence of that moral intelligence, confirming his status not only as a great American novelist but also as a keen observer, social critic and self-investigator.

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

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?

El mundo que habitó Ramón López Velarde, quebrado por la Revolución mexicana y por la separación sibilina entre la provincia y la metrópoli fingida oposición entre costumbre y decadencia-, es uno de los periodos más complejos de la historia de México. Contubernio de voces, reflejo plural de una época convulsa, elaboración de la provincia "diamantina".

Put Off My Sackcloth is a mosaic of essays about one writer’s journey through a life fraught with crippling interior darkness in an uncertain world to the salve she finds in her “shored-up ruins” and new maternal life beneath the lambent glow of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range in South-Central Colorado. The daughter of a Jewish refuge from Nazi Germany and an American mother prone to suicidal depression, Annie Dawid, in these essays, traces the history of her life.

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

Was ist Mode? Was erzählen wir über uns, wenn wir uns anziehen? Und woher kommt die Lust an Inszenierung und Selbstausdruck? In ihren persönlichen, hellsichtigen Essays schreibt Katja Eichinger über Handtaschen, Hermès und Habermas. Sie denkt über Fast Fashion und Nachhaltigkeit nach, über die Träume und Hoffnungen, die wir mit unserem Äußeren verbinden, über die Sehnsucht nach Selbstwert und Einzigartigkeit im digitalen Zeitalter und über Mode als politische Geste. Ein radikal vergnügliches Buch, geschrieben mit wachem Blick und großem Gespür für die Sprache der Mode heute.

Since Andrew Hudgins was a child, he was a compulsive joke teller, so when he sat down to write about jokes, he found that he was writing about himself — what jokes taught him and mistaught him, how they often delighted him but occasionally made him nervous with their delight in chaos and sometimes anger. Because Hudgins’s father, a West Point graduate, served in the US Air Force, his family moved frequently; he learned to relate to other kids by telling jokes and watching how his classmates responded. And jokes opened him up to the serious, taboo subjects that his family didn’t talk about openly — religion, race, sex, and death. Hudgins tells and analyzes the jokes that explore the contradictions in the Baptist religion he was brought up in, the jokes that told him what his parents would not tell him about sex, and the racist jokes that his uncle loved, his father hated, and his mother, caught in the middle, was ambivalent about. This audiobook is both a memoir and a meditation on jokes and how they educated, delighted, and occasionally horrified him as he grew.

Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, examining its role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keefe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body.

中学時代の同級生が自殺した。お別れ会のために帰郷した私は、7年ぶりに初恋の相手ナルヤに再会する。昔と変わらぬ笑顔を向けてくれる彼だったが、私は不倫の恋を経験し、夢に破れ仕事も辞めてしまっていた

Un viaggio, per quanto terribile possa essere, nel ricordo si trasforma in qualcosa di meraviglioso. La vita è un viaggio, e come tutti i viaggi si compone di ricordi. In questo audiolibro, Banana Yoshimoto raccoglie preziosi frammenti di memoria e ci porta con sé, lontano nel tempo e nel mondo. Dalle emozioni del primo amore alla scoperta della maternità, dalle piramidi egiziane alla Tokyo degli anni settanta.

Wendy Cope has long been one of the nation's best-loved poets, with her sharp eye for human foibles and wry sense of humour. For the first time, Life, Love, and the Archers brings together the best of her prose - recollections, reviews, and essays from the light-hearted to the serious, taken from a lifetime of published and unpublished work, and all with Cope's lightness of touch.

A collection of magazine writer Jon Bradshaw’s essential writings, The Ocean Is Closed rediscovers a memorable talent, and offers us a shadow reality to the established literary canon of the mid-century. With droll wit and keen intelligence, Bradshaw’s cinematic prose brings the ’70s to vibrant life.

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

The greatest popular songs, whether it’s Aretha Franklin singing ‘Respect’ or Bob Dylan performing ‘Blind Willie McTell’, have a way of embedding themselves in our memories. You remember a time and a place and a feeling when you hear that song again. In Holding the Note, David Remnick writes about the lives and work of some of the greatest musicians, songwriters, and performers of the past fifty years.