Art Essays

Meryl Streep, Marlon Brando, Anthony Hopkins, Carey Mulligan. When we watch these remarkable actors in a performance, we see only Sophie, Stanley Kowalski, Hannibal Lecter, or Cassie from Promising Young Woman. How are they able to transform our world in this way? How and why do they do what they do? In Acting Naturally, David Thomson sheds light on the actors who have shaped the film industry. He shrewdly analyzes these stars, revealing how a sly smile, an extra-long pause, even a small gesture of the hand can draw in an audience.

In Robyn’s 2010 track Dancing on My Own, the Swedish pop-singer chronicles a night on the dance floor in the shadow of a former lover. She is bitter, angry, and at times desperate, and yet by the time the chorus arrives her frustration has melted away. She decides to dance on her own, and in this way, she transforms her solitude into a more complex joy. Taking inspiration from Robyn’s seminal track, emerging art critic and curator Simon Wu dances through the institutions of art, capitalism, and identity in these expertly researched, beautifully rendered essays.

Inspired by Saeed Jones and Maggie Smith’s conversations in the wake of the 2024 election, this is a collection of poems, essays, and visual art on what we—individually and collectively—can hold onto, and what we can work towards. In times of difficulty, with a government working against its own people, we must turn to our friends and loved ones to provide context, language, energy, and hope. The People’s Project offers a range of perspectives, drawing wisdom from their communities and histories.

Julian Barnes began writing about art with a chapter on Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa in his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. Since then he has written a series of remarkable essays, chiefly about French artists, for a variety of journals and magazines. Gathering them for this book, he realised that he had unwittingly been retracing the story of how art made its way from Romanticism to Realism and into Modernism.

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.

From Scandihoovian Spanglish to snickering chickens, New York Times best-selling author and humorist Michael Perry navigates a wide range of topics in this collection of brief essays drawn from his weekly appearances on the nationally syndicated Tent Show Radio program. Fatherhood, dumpster therapy, dangerous wedding rings, Christmas trees, used cars, why you should have bacon in your stock portfolio, loggers in clogs - whatever the subject, Perry has a rare ability to touch both the funny bone and the heart.

We live in a world filled with noise—literal, emotional, digital, and internal. But what if the most powerful moments in life are found not in what’s spoken, but in what’s left unsaid? Sounds of Silence is an extraordinary exploration of the quiet spaces that shape our relationships, our spirituality, our memories, and even our sense of self. Across thirty deeply thoughtful chapters, Dr. Laski guides readers through the hidden terrain of silence—not as an absence, but as a presence all its own. You'll walk through the hush of a first kiss, the aching silence after a loss, the quiet ...

Popular humor writer Anna Lind Thomas had an epiphany after her essay about a humiliating fart went mega-viral: Everything’s funny...eventually. You’ll cry-laugh your way through the many grave offenses she’s endured....

What If is an essay about the power of daydreaming, and why you should never, ever, ever, become a writer. James J. Caterino is the author of Jordan Rose and the Tomb of Resurrection, The Anti-Matter Girl, Dreams, True Stories, To Meghan, I Want to Believe, Ghost Stories, Pop Star, Time Travel Stories, The Girl from the Stars, and much more.

Everyone’s a critic, especially in the digital age—but no one takes on the movies like multiple award-winning author Harlan Ellison. Renowned both for fiction (A Boy and His Dog) and pop-culture commentary (The Glass Teat), Ellison offers in this collection twenty-five years’ worth of essays and film criticism.

Critical Mass is a treasure trove of sparkling, spiky prose and a fascinating portrait of our lives and cultural times over the past decades. In an age where a great deal of back scratching and softball pitching pass for criticism, James Wolcott’s fearless essays and reviews offer a bracing taste of the real critical thing.

From graffiti gangs and Grand Theft Auto to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing. Starting with Hodson’s own work experience, which ranges from the mundane to the bizarre - including modeling and working on a NASA Mars mission - Hodson expands outward, looking at the ways in which the human will submits, whether in the marketplace or in a relationship.

Rising literary star and Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award finalist Sarah Gerard uses her experiences growing up along Florida's Gulf Coast to illuminate the struggles of modern human survival - physical, emotional, environmental - through a collection of essays exploring intimacy, addiction, obsession, religion, homelessness, and incarceration.

When Mindy and her best friend, B.J. Novak, are approached on a dark street by a Charles Manson-esque character, naturally they’re unnerved. Turns out he’s a huge fan of The Office! Now Mindy’s feeling a little judgy. But the night is young, unseasonably hot, and getting weirder. Mindy and B.J.’s brief encounter with the drifter is about to take an unexpected turn in Sunset Junction.

What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction gathers the best-selling novelist Alice McDermott’s pithiest wisdom about her chosen art, acquired over a lifetime as an acclaimed writer and teacher of writing.

As a young woman, Kate Betts nursed a dream of striking out on her own in a faraway place and becoming a glamorous foreign correspondent. After college—and not without trepidation—she took off for Paris, renting a room in the apartment of a young BCBG (bon chic, bon genre) family and throwing herself into the local culture. She was determined to master French slang, style, and savoir faire, and to find a job that would give her a reason to stay.

When artists and athletes age, what happens to their work? Does it ripen or rot? Achieve a new serenity or succumb to an escalating torment? As our bodies decay, how do we keep on? In this beguiling meditation, Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last works of writers, painters, footballers, musicians, and tennis stars who’ve mattered to him throughout his life. Throughout, he stresses the accomplishments of uncouth geniuses who defied convention, and went on doing so even when their beautiful youths were over.

With this collection of more than 50 pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today’s most powerful and original voices. Moment after moment, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram.

For everyone who's had their fill of politicians, TV trials and the daily events seen on the evening news, Simon & Schuster Audio offers some relief with this collection of the funniest opening monologues from Comedy Central's hit show, Politically Incorrect starring Bill Maher.

Navigating racial identity, gender roles, workplace dynamics, and beauty standards, Mia Mercado's hilarious essay collection explores the contradictions of being a millennial woman, which usually means being kind of a weirdo.