Short Essays

Through a collection of intimate reflections (on art, punctuation, eyeglasses, color, dreams, celebrity, corpses, porn, and translation) and assignments that encourage pleasure, attentiveness, and acts of playful making, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts 26 ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play.

Mohsin Hamid's brilliant, moving, and extraordinarily clever novels have not only made him an international best seller, they have earned him a reputation as a "master critic of the modern global condition" ( Foreign Policy). His stories are at once timeless and of-the-moment, and his themes are universal: love, language, ambition, power, corruption, religion, family, identity. Here, he explores this terrain from a different angle in essays that deftly counterpoise the personal and the political.

Being a boy with a girl's name was just the beginning... Stacey Roberts detailed the family’s five-year adventure in their unpredictable Winnebago in his previous novel. Now, his free-spirited mother, entitled older brother, criminal stepfather, and not-so-trusty old Winnebago are back for the next chapter in his story. Machetes at the breakfast table, shooting grapefruit for sport, and a dogged police detective get the story rolling, along with trailer park bullies and his mother’s daily menu from hell. Through his work, Roberts explores the relationships between parent and child and ...

Stories include How to Remember Names Better, Too Smart for Your Own Good?, How to Write Every Day, FOREVER, How to Get Rid of a Nasal Voice, Why Do Authors Use Tension in a Story?, Why Study History As An Adult?, and more. Listen today!

In Screen Tests, an astoundingly original and stylish collection, Zambreno has once again created new categories of writing, of vivid and surprising language and thought.

My Year as a Rookie: How I almost became a cop, is the entertaining, insightful, true, real-life story of how writer James J. Caterino, well, almost became a cop. James J. Caterino is the author of True Stories, My Encounter with The Partridge Family, Cool Stuff, Laura and Laurie, and much more.

This short story chronicles one particular night in Samantha's life where she attended an ugly Christmas sweater party and crossed paths with a boy she went to high school with. Throughout her senior year, he seemed to linger on the peripherary of her life, though he never seemed interested enough to take action. Now that they find themselves alone in a mutual friend's kitchen at the party, adrift in a sea of strangers, defenses crumble and a true human connection sparks. This short story is told from the perspective of an older Smantha reflecting on her past and wondering what could have ...

A striking collection of stories, poems, letters, travel essays, journal entries, excerpts from three novels, and more—including the complete text of The Sheltering Sky—from one of the most revered authors of the twentieth century.

Love, memories, family, enduring friendships, cooking, movies, dogs, travels, hairstyles, and saying Yes to many No’s in a witty, yet often sentimental, journey of self-discovery… You Will Have a Black Labrador is a collection of semiautobiographical essays forming a narrative about a modern Georgian woman. Her stories range from the search for a perfect romantic partner to exploring food as an integral part of the Georgian culture. Many of the vignettes center on childhood memories or weird family traditions, such as the way family members stay connected no matter if they’re deceased...

In this collection, editors Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older champion realistic, progressive social change using the speculative stories of writers across the world. Exploring topics ranging from disability justice and environmental activism to community care and collective worldbuilding, these imaginative pieces from writers such as NK Jemisin, Charlie Jane Anders, Alejandro Heredia, Sam J. Miller, Nisi Shawl, and Sabrina Vourvoulias center solidarity, empathy, hope, joy, and creativity.

Shenequa Golding doesn’t aim to speak for all Black women. We’re too vast, too vibrant, and too complicated. As an adult, Golding begins to own her boldness, but growing up, she found herself “kind of in the middle,” fluctuating between not being the fly kid or the overachiever. Her debut collection of essays, A Black Girl in the Middle taps into life’s wins and losses, representing the middle ground for Black girls and women.

The Ukraine is a collection of twenty-six pieces that deliberately blur the line between nonfiction and fiction, conjuring the essence of a beloved country through its tastes, smells, and sounds, its small towns and big cities, its people and their compassion and indifference, simplicities and complications. The Ukraine conveys to listeners a place that Chapeye and his countrymen are currently fighting for with their lives. The book features a preface by the author, which he composed on his phone from the front lines.

This collection opens with an essay about how writing has helped Andrea Levy to explore and understand her heritage. She explains the context of each piece within the chronology of her career and finishes with a new story, written to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. As with her novels, these stories are at once moving and honest, deft and humane, filled with insight, anger at injustice, and her trademark lightness of touch.

From bestselling and Booker-nominated author Colm Tóibín comes a beautiful collection of essays ranging from personal memoir to brilliantly acute writing on religion, literature and politics.

What is it like to be known as Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi's daughter? Or to have a mother as famous as Sharmila Tagore? Or to be recognized as Saif Ali Khan's sister? Or as Kareena Kapoor's sister-in-law? And where do I stand among them? Actor Soha Ali Khan's debut audiobook is at heart a brilliant collection of personal essays where she recounts with self-deprecating humor what it was like growing up in one of the most illustrious families of the country.

In this stunning debut, Laura Lee weaves unforgettable and eye-opening essays on a variety of taboo topics. In “History of Scars” and “Aluminum’s Erosions”, Laura dives head-first into heavier themes revolving around intimacy, sexuality, trauma, mental illness, and the passage of time. In “Poetry of the World”, Laura shifts and addresses the grief she feels by being geographically distant from her mother whom, after being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, is relocated to a nursing home in Korea.

Europe and Elsewhere is a collection of Mark Twain's short stories and essays published in 1923. It is a must-listen for any Samuel Langhorn Clemens aficionado.

Strange Thoughts is a collection of prose poems, short stories, epigrams, aphorisms, vignettes, and mini-essays. It is unique in that it consists predominantly of prose rather than poetry. The collection combines various aspects of existence, perception, and the relationship between oneself and the world. Every piece is a philosophical and artistic contemplation, comprising abstract thoughts and stunning imagery into a reflective cascade effortlessly flowing through various forms of expression. Existential meditation stands out the most in this collection as it fosters deep thinking of ...

Showcasing the work of literary giants like Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and authors whom listeners may be surprised to learn were "in the life", Black Like Us is the most comprehensive collection of fiction by African American lesbian, gay, and bisexual writers ever published.

"You had better shove this in the stove," Mark Twain said at the top of an 1865 letter to his brother, "for I don't want any absurd 'literary remains' and 'unpublished letters of Mark Twain' published after I am planted." He was joking, of course. But when Mark Twain died in 1910, he left behind the largest collection of personal papers created by any nineteenth-century American author.