Nonfiction Essays

Helen Garner visits the morgue, and goes cruising on a Russian ship. She sees women giving birth, and gets the sack for teaching her students about sex. She attends a school dance and a gun show. She writes about dreaming, about turning 50 and the storm caused by The First Stone. Her story on the murder of the two-year-old Daniel Valerio wins her a Walkley Award.

Writers are witnesses and scribes to society’s conscience but writing about social issues in the twenty-first century requires a new, sharper toolkit. Craft and Conscience helps writers weave together their narrative craft, analytical and research skills, and their conscience to create prose which makes us feel the individual and collective impact of crucial issues of our time. Kavita Das guides writers to take on nuanced perspectives and embrace intentionality through a social justice lens.

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.

Best-selling and Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie offers incisive, often humorous takes on literature, culture, and world events in this New York Times Notable Book. In these stimulating pieces, Rushdie addresses a variety of subjects, including the death of the novel, India, soccer, and the Rolling Stones.

Jiordan's family was never quite like everyone else's, with her father's mood swings, her mother's attempts at normalcy, and her two older sisters with a different last name. But on the surface, they fit in. Until the day the FBI came knocking on the door. After that, her father's mood plunged to a dangerous new low. After that, there was an investigation into his business and a sentencing in court. Soon Jiordan's father would have to leave home, and her family would change forever.

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.

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.

Get to the Point is a beginner’s guide on how to write essays, use critical thinking, and break down complex topics with the use of logical analysis. Essays are a profound way to build your body of work and solidify your philosophy. Learn the art and science of essay writing in this book, including how to create a compelling subject for your essays, how to break down complex topics, effective research strategies, a quick way to build a rough draft, a simple framework for editing, the art of proofreading, how to overcome imposter syndrome and publish your work, and more.

We will teach you how to write creative nonfiction in seven easy steps. This guide is designed to provide you with all the tools you need in a concise, easy-to-understand format that will answer all your burning questions and get you on your way to successful nonfiction writing.

Dogs have masters; cats have staff. That old saying reflects the conventional wisdom about our favorite pets. Cats are described as independent and aloof. But that stereotype clashes with the reality of untold cat companions, who know that their felines can be just as affectionate, devoted, and trainable as any dog. Like Henry who rescued lost cats. Or Basil, a licensed therapist who comforts hospital patients and staff, hospice-care residents, and trauma victims. Or Belle, who repaid being rescued from a sewer in Costa Rica by becoming a devoted nurse during his caretaker's lengthy illness...

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.

Composer Leonard Bernstein on the importance of individuals and the potential for good in people.

Kendra Allen’s first collection of essays—at its core—is a bunch of mad stories about things she never learned to let go of. Unifying personal narrative and cultural commentary, this collection grapples with the lessons that have been stored between parent and daughter. These parental relationships expose the conditioning that subconsciously informed her ideas on social issues such as colorism, feminism, war-induced PTSD, homophobia, marriage, and “the n-word,” among other things.

Robert Stone was a singular American writer, a visionary whose award-winning novels - including Dog Soldiers, Outerbridge Reach, and Damascus Gate - earned him comparisons to literary lions ranging from Samuel Beckett to Ernest Hemingway to Graham Greene. Stone had an almost prophetic grasp of the spirit of his age, which he captured with crystalline clarity in each of his novels. Of course, he was also a sharp and brilliant observer of American life, and his nonfiction writing is revelatory.

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.

As in her fiction, the essays in Out of the Sun demonstrate Esi Edugyan's commitment to seeking out the stories of Black lives that history has failed to record. Written with the death of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the background, in five wide-ranging essays Edugyan reflects on her own identity and experiences as the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants.

Mark R. Hunter's weekly humor column "Slightly off the Mark" appeared in three newspapers for over twenty years, which is coincidentally the age of his first grey hair, before being unceremoniously cut short in 2014. This volume collects his previously unpublished and “leftover”columns. Mark is an author, 911 dispatcher, volunteer firefighter, humorist, dad, and self-proclaimed home maintenance failure who lives in northeast Indiana with his wife Emily. Together they're responsible for loosing eleven books on an unsuspecting world.

This is some of the most popular stuff I wrote and published in 2021. These are some of the short stories, essays, and poetry that bubbled up into my brain and made it onto the page and out into the world. Enjoy.

Who would have thought the turn of the last Century would one day be ancient history? In "More Slightly Off the Mark, Why I Hate Cats, and Other Lies", former newspaper columnist Mark R. Hunter went back to collect his humor pieces from 2000 and 2001—the earliest ones to be put on a computer. In DOS format, on a floppy disk. The amount of change in just twenty years resulted in Hunter completely rewriting the columns, and inserting his present self (and his dog, Beowulf, through pictures) into the work—mostly to make fun of his older self. Along the way Mark riffs on everything from ...

What does it feel like to be passionate about your daily work? How do people find their way into fascinating, unusually fulfilling careers, even against the odds? Space lawyers and bibliotherapists; euthanasia activists and women's rugby champions; shark experts and solar power visionaries; a master perfumer and a moon dust maven, among many others. What all of these people have in common is the courage to pursue their dreams and obsessions, no matter how niche or particular, and transform them into their life's work.