English Essay

Samantha Irby’s career has taken her to new heights. She dodges calls from Hollywood and flop sweats on the red carpet at premieres (well, one premiere). But nothing is ever as it seems online, where she can crop out all the ugly parts. Irby got a lot of weird emails about Carrie Bradshaw, and not only is there diarrhea to avoid, but now—anaphylactic shock. She is turned away from restaurants for being inappropriately dressed and looks for the best ways to cope, i.e., reveling in the offerings of QVC and adopting a deranged pandemic dog.

From cameraman to chef, musician to food scientist, Alton Brown has had a diverse and remarkable career. His work on the Food Network, including creating Good Eats and hosting Iron Chef America and Cutthroat Kitchen, has resonated with countless viewers and home cooks. Now, he shares exactly what’s on his mind, mixing compelling anecdotes from his personal and professional life with in-depth observations on the culinary world, film, personal style, defining meals of his lifetime, and much more.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's Spiritual Laws is more than an essay—it's an invitation to align with the rhythm of the universe. With clarity and poetic force, Emerson strips away illusions of control, urging us to trust the quiet power within. For him, law isn't rigid or imposed; it's a natural flow, always present, waiting to be recognized. True self-reliance isn't defiance but harmony with this deeper order. The world moves for those who walk with conviction. The awakened soul follows a path beyond logic, yet never loses its way. Emerson doesn't instruct; he sparks something.

In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had “a rough few years.” She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne. For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods.

David Sedaris' collection of essays - including live recordings! - tells a most unconventional life story. With every clever turn of a phrase, Sedaris brings a view and a voice like no other to every unforgettable encounter. You can also listen to Sedaris in an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air.

A modern classic, The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America is the book Buffett autographs most and likes best. Its popularity and longevity over three decades attest to the widespread appetite for this definitive statement of Mr. Buffett’s thoughts that’s uniquely comprehensive, non-repetitive, and digestible. New and experienced listeners alike will gain an invaluable informal education by perusing this classic arrangement of Mr. Buffett's best writings.

Soil is the unlikely story of our most maligned resource as swashbuckling hero. A saga of bombs, ice ages and civilisations falling. Of ancient hunger, modern sicknesses and gastronomic delight. It features poison gas, climate collapse and a mind-blowing explanation of how rain is formed. For too long, we've not only neglected the land beneath us, we've squandered and debased it, by over-clearing, over-grazing and over-ploughing.

Luis J. Rodriguez writes about race, culture, identity, and belonging and what these all mean and should mean (but often fail to) in the volatile climate of our nation. His passion and wisdom inspire us with the message that we must come together if we are to move forward.

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,” but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities. In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind.

Smart, humorous, and strikingly original essays by one of “America’s most bracing thinkers on race, gender, and capitalism of our time.” (Rebecca Traister) In these eight piercing explorations on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom - award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed - embraces her venerated role as a purveyor of wit, wisdom, and Black Twitter snark about all that is right and much that is wrong with this thing we call society.

Good Dog offers memorable, beautifully written stories of dog ownership, companionship, friendship, and kinship. From the troublemakers who can't be fenced in to the lifelong companions who won't leave our sides, this poignant anthology showcases man's best friend through all of his most endearing--and sometimes maddening--attributes.

One of the most acclaimed essayists of his generation, Wesley Yang writes about race and sex without the jargon, formulas, and polite lies that bore us all. His powerful debut, The Souls of Yellow Folk, does more than collect a decade's worth of cult-reputation essays - it corrals new American herds of pickup artists, school shooters, mandarin zombies, and immigrant strivers, and exposes them to scrutiny, empathy, and polemical force.

William Gaddis published only four novels during his lifetime, but with those works, he earned himself a reputation as one of America's greatest novelists, the heir to Joyce and Nabokov. Less well-known is Gaddis' body of perceptive critical writings. Presented here is a wide range of Gaddis' original essays.

❓ What if pain was never the problem—but the path? 🌀 What if addictions weren’t only about weakness—but also about forgetting who you are? 🌪 What if chaos held the key to clarity and freedom? 🔥 And what if hell isn’t something to escape—but something you must pass through to evolve? In a world that medicates discomfort, sells noise, and rewards distraction—The Zen Meditations of an Addict Monk is a quiet rebellion. A book not meant to inspire you—but to awaken you. This is not a self-help book. Not a guide. Not a strategy. It is a mirror. A fire. A return. A ...

Jim Harrison, Pam Houston, Ted Leeson, Nick Lyons, Thomas McGuane, and more, share stories of fly fishing and life on the river. This marvelous collection features stories from some of America’s finest and most respected writers about one of the world’s most solitary and satisfying sports: fly fishing. For the first time, the stories of thirty-one acclaimed writers including Kim Barnes, Walter Bennett, Russell Chatham, Guy de la Valdne, Robert DeMott, Chris Dombrowski, Ron Ellis, Jim Fergus, Kate Fox, Charles Gaines, Bruce Guernsey, Jim Harrison, Pam Houston, Michael Keaton, Greg Keeler, Sydney Lea, Ted Leeson, Nick Lyons, Craig Mathews, Thomas McGuane, Joseph Monninger, Howard Frank Mosher, Jake Mosher, Craig Nova, Margot Page, Datus Proper, Le Anne Schreiber, Paul Schullery, W. D. Wetherell, and Robert Wrigley come together in one collection. Fly fishers and non-fly fishers alike will recognize in these poignant tales the universal aspects of the appreciation of nature, the necessity of conservation, and the joy and knowledge that come from time spent on fresh and salt water. This is a delightful, handsome volume that captures the allure and spirit of fly fishing and those that love it.

At once a powerful evocation of his early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice to both the individual and the body politic, James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil rights movement with this eloquent manifesto. The Fire Next Time stands as one of the essential works of our literature.

I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric and the essay in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America.

These 50 slice-of-life college application essays were written by real students who all got into outstanding schools--from Harvard, UCLA, Cornell, NYU and Berkeley to Boston College, Williams, Smith and Brown. By reading these core essays, students can discover their own topic ideas, and also learn the narrative writing style, format and voice for their own essays. Each essay also includes an insightful analysis by the author--renowned essay expert Janine Robinson from the wildly popular blog, Essay Hell--who explains what worked and why. She shows students how they can use specific story-...

For more than 25 years, David Sedaris has been carving out a unique literary space, virtually creating his own genre. A Sedaris story may seem confessional, but is also highly attuned to the world outside. It opens our eyes to what is at absurd and moving about our daily existence. And it is almost impossible to listen without laughing.

In his "Industrial Society and Its Future" (also called the "Unabomber Manifesto"), he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom necessitated by modern technologies requiring large-scale organization.