Essay Essays

The inimitably witty David Rakoff, New York Times best-selling author of Don’t Get Too Comfortable, defends the commonsensical notion that you should always assume the worst, because you’ll never be disappointed. In this deeply funny (and, no kidding, wise and poignant) audiobook, Rakoff examines the realities of our sunny, gosh­ everyone-can-be-a-star contemporary culture and finds that, pretty much as a universal rule, the best is not yet to come, adversity will triumph, justice will not be served, and your dreams won’t come true.

After a violent coup in the United States overthrows the Constitution and ushers in a new government regime, the Republic of Gilead imposes subservient roles on all women. Offred, now a Handmaid tasked with the singular role of procreation in the childless household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife, can remember a time when she lived with her husband and daughter and had a job, before she lost everything, even her own name.

Baldwin's personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also a probing appraisal of American racial politics. Offering an incisive look at racism in American movies and a vision of America's self-delusions and deceptions, Baldwin challenges the underlying assumptions in such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and The Exorcist.

Coventry encompasses memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about literature, with pieces on family life, gender, and politics, and on D. H. Lawrence, Françoise Sagan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Named for an essay Cusk published in Granta (“Every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. There’s a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: it’s called being sent to Coventry”), this collection is pure Cusk and essential listening for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, and dazzling to behold.

In this engaging audio edition, find out why Wilderness Essays is the top-selling book by John Muir. Wilderness Essays is an essential collection of the finest essays ever written by the “Father of the National Parks.” An ardent outdoorsman, a gifted writer, a dedicated preservationist, and a spiritual beacon, John Muir conveys here the boundless love and wonder of the natural world that drove his critically important work.

What will it take to stop gendered violence? What went wrong? Australian governments promised to end violence against women and children in a single generation. Instead, it is escalating: men have been murdering women at an increased rate, coercive control and sexual violence are becoming more complex and severe, and we see a marked rise in youth-on-youth sexual assault. Why? In Losing It, Jess Hill investigates Australia's National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children to find out what's working and what's not – and what we can do to turn things around.

Here, in this unusual collection, are some of the greatest essays in Western literature. Witty, informative and imaginative, the topics vary from starvation in Ireland, fine China, the extension of railways in the Lake District, and the tombs in Westminster Abbey. A little like after-dinner monologues, they are passing thoughts expressed as journalism. Neville Jason reads with urbane clarity.

The first new collection of essays by Christopher Hitchens since 2004, Arguably offers an indispensable key to understanding the passionate and skeptical spirit of one of our most dazzling writers, widely admired for the clarity of his style, a result of his disciplined and candid thinking. Topics range from ruminations on why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men to the enduring legacies of Thomas Jefferson and George Orwell.

One of the greatest minds in American writing, Kurt Vonnegut shares his often hilarious and always insightful reflections on America, art, politics and life in general. No matter the subject, Vonnegut will have you considering perspectives you may never have regarded. On the creative process: "If you want to really hurt your parents...the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding."

A companion volume to Illuminations, the first collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin.

A collection of new and previously published essays offering an interpretation of Plato at once new and in harmony with the best philosophical traditions of antiquity.

By one of the most profoundly influential thinkers of our century, The Rebel is a classic essay on revolution. For Albert Camus, the urge to revolt is one of the "essential dimensions" of human nature, manifested in man's timeless Promethean struggle against the conditions of his existence, as well as the popular uprisings against established orders throughout history. And yet, with an eye toward the French Revolution and its regicides and deicides, he reveals how inevitably the course of revolution leads to tyranny.

“This is not a book to promote tranquility, and readers in quest of peace of mind should look elsewhere,” writes Paul Fussell in the foreword to this original, sharp, tart, and thoroughly engaging work. The celebrated author focuses his lethal wit on habitual euphemizers, artistically pretentious third-rate novelists, sexual puritans, and the “Disneyfiers of life”. He moves from the inflammatory title piece on the morality of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima to a disquisition on the “naturist movement”, and more.

Tracing a loose arc from Edwidge Danticat’s childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti, the essays gathered in We’re Alone include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez, and James Baldwin that explore several abiding themes: environmental catastrophe, the traumas of colonialism, motherhood, and the complexities of resilience.

Viewed as too libelous to print in England until 1968, the title essay in this collection reveals the abuse Orwell experienced as a child at an expensive and snobbish boarding school and offers insights into his lifelong concern for the oppressed. "Why I Write" describes Orwell's sense of political purpose, and the classic essay "Politics and the English Language" insists on clarity and precision in communication in order to avoid the Newspeak later described in 1984.

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-...

Success at poker does not come easy. However, poker can be extremely rewarding since it will allow you a degree of freedom that virtually no other profession can offer. Yet, very few people ever achieve this level of competence even though many try. The reason for this is that very few players are able to master all the skills that a top professional needs. Some are unwilling to make the effort -- "these players usually come to gamble" -- and others who try are not quite able to grasp the debt of sophistication that is required. This text contains those essays that this author wrote from ...

Lane Moore is a rare performer who is as impressive onstage - whether hosting her iconic show Tinder Live or being the enigmatic front woman of It Was Romance - as she is on the page, as both a former writer for The Onion and an award-winning sex and relationships editor for Cosmopolitan. But her story has had its obstacles, including being her own parent, living in her car as a teenager, and moving to New York City to pursue her dreams. Through it all, she looked to movies, TV, and music as the family and support systems she never had.

In Nature, Emerson put forth the foundation of transcendentalism, a belief system that espouses a non-traditional appreciation of nature. Transcendentalism suggests that the divine, or God, suffuses nature, and suggests that reality can be understood by studying nature. Self Reliance contains the most thorough statement of one of Emerson's recurrent themes: the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow their own instincts and ideas.

American writer Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain has given us some literary gems with Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and his travel adventures in 19th-century Europe and to Australia and New Zealand. In How to Tell a Story and Other Essays, Twain discusses the telling of stories, rather than providing more stories.