Essays Life

Jessica McCann has woven together a collection of personal essays and writing tips that offer a unique glimpse into her writing journey and process. She is an award-winning historical novelist and has worked as a professional freelance writer and editor for magazines, universities, corporations, and nonprofits for more than 30 years. In Words, McCann shares her passion for books as well as research that shows how reading improves our lives. With a philosophy that is equally pragmatic and optimistic, Words will appeal to readers and writers alike.

A Full Heart is a collection of essays and a few speeches that are personal reflections on a wide variety of topics, from baseball to love, from health issues to surviving child sex abuse, from the arts to reflections on war and peace, from life to death. The book also has a companion volume, Bleeding Heart, a collection of political writings. Most of the pieces in both books were originally published as Facebook notes or blog posts, and many of them were also published in print or online in publications from Madison Wisconsin's weekly arts paper, Isthmus, to Belt Magazine, Verse Wisconsin,...

Each essay illuminates the life of a single species and its relationship to humans, and how these species can help us understand birds in general. A dedicated birdwatcher and teacher, Gedney finds wonder not only in the speed and glistening beauty of the Anna's hummingbird, but also in her nest building. He acclaims the turkey vulture's and red-tailed hawk's roles in our ecosystem, and he venerates the inimitable California scrub jay's work planting acorns.

You know those people who always seem calm, organized, and emotionally stable? Yeah. This book is not about them. Welcome to the unfiltered confessions of someone who has spent a lifetime pretending to be normal—and failing spectacularly. From turning therapy into stand-up comedy, to surviving public meltdowns in Costco, to attempting yoga while emotionally unwell and allergic to spandex, this is your backstage pass to one person’s absurd journey through modern life. Equal parts chaos and charm, this book doesn’t teach you how to fix your life. It just lets you laugh so hard you ...

In Don't Call Me Princess, Orenstein's most resonant and important essays are available for the first time in collected form, updated with both an original introduction and personal reflections on each piece. Her takes on reproductive justice, the infertility industry, tensions between working and stay-at-home moms, pink ribbon fear-mongering and the complications of girl culture are not merely timeless - they have, like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, become more urgent in our contemporary political climate.

Connie Ragen Green has experienced more in life than most have been exposed to during one lifetime. In Essays at the Intersection of Hope and Synchronicity, she bares her soul and shares the stories, people, and situations that have been and continue to be the fabric of her life Keep an open heart, mind, and soul as you immerse yourself in these pages...

In America and in England, faltering economies at home and failed wars abroad have generated a political and intellectual hysteria. It is a derangement manifested in a number of ways: nostalgia for imperialism, xenophobic paranoia, and denunciations of an allegedly intolerant left. These symptoms can be found even among the most informed of Anglo-America.

Quintus Curtius is an attorney, writer, translator, and former marine officer. Expertly blending history, biography, philosophy, and the author's personal experience, this penetrating collection of essays achieves what one reviewer called "a perfect fluency in [a] dialogue with truth." The unifying theme is the nature of masculine identity and how that identity has been manifested. Drawing on examples from history and using sources in their original languages, Quintus Curtius' soaring vision combines lucid explanation with a passionate intensity like few other writers.

In 2018, boundary-breaking visual and sonic artist Cosey Fanni Tutti received a commission to write the soundtrack to a film about Delia Derbyshire, the pioneering electronic composer who influenced the likes of Aphex Twin and The Chemical Brothers. While researching Derbyshire's life, Tutti became immersed in her story and uncovered fascinating parallels with her own life. At the same time, Tutti began reading about Margery Kempe, the fifteenth-century mystic visionary who wrote the first English-language autobiography. The connections between the three women soon shifted into focus.

For over 60 years, since his award-winning debut, The Room on the Roof, was published, Ruskin Bond has charmed and entertained us with characters ranging from the animal world to humans to ghostly spirits, and his magic touch has often presented to us a world unhurried, tucked away in hills and valleys. What does it mean to be an octogenarian loved by the young and old alike? To be synonymous with the smell of pinewood and rambling mountain paths? In short, what is it that makes him Bond?

Funny, candid, and searchingly self-aware, this essay collection tells the story of Chelsea Martin’s coming of age as an artist. We are with Chelsea as an 11-year-old atheist, trying to will an alien visitation to her neighborhood; fighting with her stepfather and grappling with a Tourette’s diagnosis as she becomes a teenager; falling under the sway of frenemies and crushes in high school; going into debt to afford what might be a meaningless education at an expensive art college.

Incisive, wide-ranging and witty, it explores the questions, anxieties and agendas that consume our lives. Pandora Sykes interrogates the stories we’ve been sold and the ones we tell ourselves - from happiness to wellness, womanhood to consumerism - in ways that are both surprising and reassuring.

If you are captivated by creative storytelling—brimming with vivid imagery and emotional honesty—you will love Mark Johnson’s fourth book, I Think I’ll Prune the Lemon Tree. Set against the warm and rugged landscape of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, it features thirty-nine serendipitous, provocative, and humorous essays. Mark’s true stories and desert fantasies chronicle his triumphs as a gay man and journey with husband Tom to build a healthy, open, and literary life in Arizona, while revisiting indelible memories from his Illinois, Missouri, and North Carolina past. Throughout his ...

A mouthwatering testament to the healing power of food, My Place at the Table is a moving coming-of-age story of how a gay man emerges from a wounding childhood, discovers himself, and finds love. Published here for the first time is Lobrano’s “little black book,” an insider’s guide to his thirty all-time-favorite Paris restaurants.

What if the clarity you’ve been chasing isn’t something you find—but something you uncover? In Clearer, Jordan Ellis delivers 74 potent, soul-stirring essays that cut through emotional fog, dismantle inherited mental frameworks, and challenge the beliefs quietly running your life. With the same radical honesty and conversational insight as books like 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think, this is not a manual for perfection—it’s a mirror held up to your inner world. Each essay is a single, cutting truth followed by a short but impactful reflection. Designed to be read in ...

If you haven't already heard of Samantha Irby...where have you been? Samantha Irby is your sharp-tongued best friend who can't help but tell it like it is. In We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, Irby laughs her way through her ridiculous life of failed relationships, taco feasts, bouts with Crohn's disease and more. Written with scathing wit and poignant bluntness, these essays have earned Irby a dedicated fan base, have sold over 100,000 copies in the US and are the perfect introduction to this fresh, bold voice.

I’m not a musician. Not that I haven’t tried. My brain just doesn’t seem to be wired for it. I’m not a student of music either, at least not in the academic sense. I don’t work in music, but I do listen to music while I work. And I’m definitely not a music nerd. By that I mean I don’t memorize who’s in what band or who produced whatever album. The point I’m trying to make is, there’s no good reason why I should be writing a book about my personal music history, other than the fact that music is everything to me. Music has a hold on so many of us. It comforts us. It pumps...

A group of notable writers - including UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, Margaret MacMillan, and Jenny Uglow - celebrate our fascination with the houses of famous literary figures, artists, composers, and politicians of the past.

A much-loved classic of nature writing from environmentalist and the author of Waterlog, Roger Deakin, Wildwood is an exploration of the element wood in nature, our culture and our lives. From the walnut tree at his Suffolk home, he embarks upon a quest that takes him through Britain, across Europe, to Central Asia and Australia, in search of what lies behind man's profound and enduring connection with wood and trees.

Nanjala Nyabola is constantly exploring the world, working with migrants and confronting complex realities challenging common assumptions - both hers and others’. From Nepal to Botswana, Sicily to Haiti, New York to Nairobi, her sharp, humane essays ask tough questions and offer surprising, deeply shocking, and sometimes funny answers. It is time we saw the world through her eyes.