Showing titles in Essays

In her 20s Rachel Kushner went to Mexico in pursuit of her first love - motorbikes - to compete in the notorious and deadly race, Cabo 1000. As fellow racers died on the roadside, bikes were stolen and friends abandoned one another in the heat of the chase, she crashed at 130mph and miraculously survived; soon after, she decided to leave her controlling boyfriend and manoeuvred her way into a freer new life.

Step aboard Boater, a mesmerising voyage along the tranquil waterways of England, written by former UK Canal Laureate, Jo Bell. ' It's not a lifestyle. It's a life ' For over twenty years, Jo Bell, archaeologist and poet, has travelled the waterways of England (and sometimes Wales) meeting...

Ursula K. Le Guin witnessed and contributed to many of the twentieth century’s rebellions and upheavals, including women’s liberation, the Civil Rights movement and US anti-war and environmental activism. Spanning fifty years of her life and work, Space Crone brings together Le Guin’s writings on feminism and gender for the first time, offering new insights into her imaginative, multispecies feminist consciousness: from its roots in deep ecology and philosophies of non-violence to her self-education about racism and her writing on motherhood and ageing.

Gore Vidal’s reputation as America’s finest essayist is an enduring one. This collection, chosen by the author from 40 years of work, contains about two-thirds of what he published in various magazines and journals. He has divided the essays into three categories, or states. State of the art covers literature, including novelists and critics, bestsellers, pieces on Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Suetonius, Nabakov, and Montaigne (a previosly uncollected essay from 1992).

In her latest forays into the American scene, Joan Didion covers ground from Washington to Los Angeles, from a TV producer's gargantuan "manor" to the racial battlefields of New York's criminal courts. At each stop she uncovers the mythic narratives that elude other observers: Didion tells us about the fantasies the media construct around crime victims and presidential candidates; she gives us new interpretations of the stories of Nancy Reagan and Patty Hearst; she charts America's rollercoaster ride through evanescent booms and hard times that won't go away.

‘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'...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of My Seditious Heart by Arundhati Roy, read by Tania Rodrigues. My Seditious Heart collects the work of a two-decade period when Arundhati Roy devoted herself to the political essay as a way of opening up space for justice, rights and freedoms in an...

Have you ever seen something that wasn't really there? Heard someone call your name in an empty house? Sensed someone following you and turned around to find nothing? Hallucinations don't belong wholly to the insane. Much more commonly, they are linked to sensory deprivation, intoxication...

In the 1960s and early '70s, the most prominent, vocal cultural movement was the New Left: a movement that condemned America and everything it stood for: individualism, material wealth, science, technology, capitalism.

'Any story that starts will also end.' As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth as she explores family, friendship, marriage, failure, success and what it all means. Ranging from the personal to the sublime, each essay transforms the particular into the universal, letting us all see our own worlds anew.

How do we keep going in a burning world? Do we have what it takes to meet the moment? And how do we hold on to what is pure and precious? A memoir in essays, Songs from the Firefront is a book about the sacred fragility of existence. Deeply personal, brimming with anger and humour and love - for...

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.

A selection of the world’s most incredible things according to award-winning writer, comedian, artist and podcaster Rob Auton I Strongly Believe In Incredible Things is a book of poetic prose, musings, short stories and biro drawings detailing a selection of the Earth’s incredible things by...

Candid, moving, exhilarating, uplifting, frequently humorous, and passionately read by Ophrah Winfrey, What I Know For Sure shimmers with the sort of truth that listeners will revisit again and again. As a creative force, student of the human heart and soul, and champion of living the life you...

Listening to Shaking a Leg is like spending time with the funniest, wisest friend you've ever had - a person whose breadth of interest ranges from food to feminism to science fiction and everything in between. Bursting with ideas, culturally astute and sparklingly witty, this comprehensive volume of Angela Carter's journalism is the most down-to-earth and entertaining companion to latter 20th-century thought you'll ever need.

"Clever. . . magical. . . beautifully crafted. Kingsolver spins you around the philosophic world a dozen times." — Milwaukee Sentinel "Kingsolver's essays should be savored like quiet afternoons with a friend." —New York Times Book Review In this brilliant essay collection, Pulitzer...

‘Our greatest living satirist’ Sunday Times ‘The most screamingly funny living writer’ Mail on Sunday From the bestselling and award-winning author of Ma'am Darling and One Two Three Four, a selection of Craig Brown's finest writing collected together for the first time. Haywire presents...

Brought to you by Penguin. 'Do you know it, do you remember it, the drives, the attitudes, the terrors and, yes, the joys?' Thus Steinbeck introduces his collection of poignant and hard-hitting dispatches for the New York Herald Tribune when the Second World War was at its height. He begins in...

'A brave writer whose books open up fundamental questions about life and art' – Telegraph In this inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a vivid and politically-engaged case for the importance of art – especially in the turbulent weather of the...

‘I’ve lived through ten iOS upgrades on my Mac – and that’s just something I use to muck about on Twitter. Surely capitalism is due an upgrade or two?’ When Caitlin Moran sat down to choose her favourite pieces for her new book she realised that they all seemed to join up. Turns out...