Showing titles in Essays

In the spirit of Mindy Kaling’s bestseller Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? or Judd Apatow’s Sick in the Head, a collection of humorous, autobiographical essays from Kunal Nayyar, best known as Raj on CBS’s #1 hit comedy The Big Bang Theory. Of all the charming misfits on television...

'I tend to think of myself as a man of few words, but looking at this collection it seems to have been gab gab gab for the last thirty years'. Admittedly not all the words are his own - but even the work of other writers can be transformed by Alan Bennett. This unique anthology of Bennett's...

These masterpieces (along with several previously uncollected stories) are available in one volume, which presents an indelible collective portrait of an unsuspected New York and its odder citizens - as depicted by one of the great writers of this or any other time.

Read by the author, this is Louis Theroux's hilarious and thought-provoking journey through weird America. For 10 years, Louis Theroux has been making programmes about off-beat characters on the fringes of US society. Now he revisits America and the people who have most fascinated him to try to...

Internationally bestselling novelist and American icon Tom Robbins' legendary memoir--wild tales of his life and times, both at home and around the globe. Tom Robbins’ warm, wise, and wonderfully weird novels—including Still Life With Woodpecker, Jitterbug Perfume, and Fierce Invalids Home...

The controversial father of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud charted the human unconscious, brought us the talking cure, and wrote books that now rank among the classics of world literature. In On the Couch, the great analyst is analyzed by some of today's great writers and thinkers, who help us understand the man who has helped us understand ourselves as much, if not more, than anyone else, ever. The result is a fresh, multifaceted reassessment of Freud's continuing relevance and influence on ideas, literature, culture, science, and more.

‘The most dazzling biography of a female writer to have come my way for a decade…' – Financial Times ‘To be savoured for its vivid and sympathetic recreation of the tragic life and brilliant times of the gifted Mary Shelley’ – Times Literary Supplement ‘Brilliant and enthralling'...

Spring is the time of renewal and rebirth, a celebration of the resilience of life. As the year turns, animals and plants that have struggled to survive the winter find new hope and create the next generation. The season has inspired some of humanity’s greatest art and many of its most significant religious festivals. Now, in Spring is the Only Season, Simon Barnes provides a fresh and compelling look at this period of the year.

A graphic and biting polemic that still holds a fierce political relevance and impact despite being written over half a century ago. First published in 1937 it charts George Orwell's observations of working-class life during the 1930s in the industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire. His depictions of social injustice and rising unemployment, the dangerous working conditions in the mines amid general squalor and hunger also bring together many of the ideas explored in his later works and novels.

Embodiment is not an easy business. From violence to illness, sexuality to racism, the fact of a body can be impossibly hard to inhabit. Olivia Laing draws on her own background in protest and alternative medicine to investigate the reasons why. Laing’s exploration of the complexities of bodily life takes in some of the most significant and beguiling figures of the past century, among them the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, the painters Francis Bacon and Agnes Martin and the singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone.

Stockinette, ribbing, cables, even the humble yarn over can instantly evoke places, times, people, conversations, all those poignant moments that we’ve tucked away in our memory banks. Over time, those stitches form a map of our lives. —From the preface In The Yarn Whisperer: Reflections on...

The final and most personal work from Pulitzer Prize - winning author and historian Will Durant - discovered 32 years after his death - is a message of insight for everyone who has sought meaning in life or the council of a wise friend in navigating life's journey. From 1968 to 1978, Will Durant made four public allusions to the existence of Fallen Leaves. One, in 1975, hinted at its contents: "a not very serious book that answers the questions of what I think about government, life, death, and God."

El 10 de Pelé, Maradona o Messi; el 7 de Cristiano Ronaldo o Álex Aguinaga; el 14 de Johan Cruyff… Los héroes de las canchas llevan números en la espalda. Juan Villoro hace un repaso por esas figuras de rango mítico. Cuando los representantes de la tribu saltan al césped «lo que está en juego ya no es un deporte. A partir de ese momento comienza a suceder algo distinto, único, inclasificable: el misterio que llena los estadios».

A trans essayist with a checkered past takes on the big questions of human existence Move over Michel de Montaigne, there's a new girl in town An ABA Indie Next Pick A San Francisco Chronicle Women's History Month Book Pick An Allstora Queer History 101 Book Club Pick Set against a...

A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR From one of the definitive journalists of this era—acclaimed historian, Pulitzer Prize finalist, staff writer at The New Yorker, and Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism—comes a kaleidoscopic, real-time portrait of the turbulent past...

A master class in the art of writing by one of its most distinguished and innovative practitioners Delve into the labyrinth of Jorge Luis Borges’s thoughts on the theory and practice of literature, and learn from one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century not only what a...

From the bestselling author of Stitches, and Help, Thanks, Wow comes her long-awaited collection of new and selected essays on hope, joy, and grace. Anne Lamott writes about faith, family, and community in essays that are both wise and irreverent. It’s an approach that has become her...

A collection of essays, lectures, and observations on the art of writing fiction from Alice McDermott, winner of the National Book Award and unmatched "virtuoso of language and image" (Rebecca Steinitz, The Boston Globe) What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction gathers the...

Abridged for audio. Read by the author, Clive James. With fascinating essays on towering figures from Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Wittgenstein, Cultural Amnesia is one of the crowning achievements in Clive James's illustrious career as a critic...

In the early spring of 1845, Henry David Thoreau built and lived in a cabin near the shore of Walden Pond in rural Massachusetts. For the next two years, he enacted his own Transcendentalist experiment, living a simple life based on self-reliance, individualism, and harmony with nature. The journal he kept at that time evolved into his masterwork, Walden, an eloquent expression of a uniquely American philosophy.