Beautiful Essays

Join Leslie Means, founder of the popular website Her View From Home, as she weaves together a powerful, emotional collection of essays from women of all ages and stages. These real-life, straight-to-the-heart stories will make you laugh, cry, and nod along. No two mothers are alike. No two experiences in motherhood mirror each other. But something powerful happens when our stories come together: they speak love, worth, value, and beauty. They take the undefinable experience of motherhood and give it shape and substance and strength. They speak to us all.

Paris Review contributor Katy Kelleher explores our obsession with gorgeous things, unveiling the fraught histories of makeup, flowers, perfume, silk, and other beautiful objects. In these dazzling and deeply researched essays, Katy Kelleher blends science, history, and memoir to uncover the dark underbellies of our favorite goods.

Let It All Be Beautiful is a collection of 45 essays and energy practices designed to awaken the natural, authentic, and magnetic energy within all of us. Blending memoir, poetry, and lists with intentional practices, this book invites you to see yourself in your full glory. Whether you’re longing to feel more radiant, searching for healing, or motivated to become more mindful, this book will meet you where you are, celebrate everything you exude, and walk alongside you as you find your way home.

Life doesn’t come with a map—just scars, memories, and the occasional bad idea. In this raw and reflective collection of essays, a man looks back on the people who shaped him, the places that changed him, and the moments that wouldn’t let him go. From Bronx alleyways to Thai backstreets, through heartbreak, absurdity, and unexpected grace—these stories linger like smoke and stay like scars.

This essay comes from the NPR series This I Believe, which features brief personal reflections from both famous and unknown Americans. The pieces that make up the series compel listeners to rethink not only what and how they have arrived at their beliefs, but also the extent to which they share them with others.

In Search of a Beautiful Freedom brings together the best work from Farah Jasmine Griffin's rich forays on music, Black feminism, literature, the crises of Hurricane Katrina and COVID-19, and the Black artists she esteems. She moves from evoking the haunting strength of Odetta and the rise of soprano popular singers in the 1970s to the forging of a Black women's literary renaissance and the politics of Malcolm X through the lens of Black feminism.

This selection of essays by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) demonstrate the varied power of his genius. Compiled from his lecture tours, newspaper articles, essays and epigrams, these writings show that beneath his trademark wit and love of paradox, Oscar Wilde was an original and remarkably modern writer.

Love poetry , which can be sent to the person of your dreams, on Valentine's Day, or any other day of the year. When you want to express yourself, there's no time like the present. Some of these are pure and simple direct love poems, some are declarations, where the writer is trying to convince someone to change his/her life, and better the dream. They can be combined or used on their own. You might find a little bit of yourself in some of these poems. Who amongst us has not wished for someone to turn their way and recognize all they had to offer. With a cup of tea, these poems go down to ...

Migraine is an age-old – the first recorded instances date back over two thousand years – and often debilitating condition, affecting a 'substantial minority' of the population across the globe. In Migraine, Oliver Sacks offers at once a medical account of its occurrence and management; an exploration of its physical, physiological, and psychological underpinnings and consequences; and a meditation on the nature and experience of health and illness.

Walking Chickens in the Rain: Embracing the Chaos of Life is a wildly relatable, laugh-out-loud, heartwarming collection of essays for anyone who’s ever tried to hold it all together while everything—chickens included—ran wildly off-script. With wit, warmth, and muddy boots, Annie Rowen invites you into a life less filtered, full of flying feathers, sideways plans, and accidental wisdom. Whether she’s chasing a hen across the driveway in slippers or finding meaning in the cluck of an unimpressed bird, Annie reminds us that life doesn’t have to be tidy to be beautiful. This is not ...