Essays

Drawing on more than 30 years of therapeutic encounters with people facing hurdles in their love lives, former chair of the British Psychoanalytic Council Susanna Abse takes us deep inside one of the most fascinating realms there is: other people's relationships....

David Sedaris once again captures what is most unexpected, hilarious, and poignant about these recent upheavals, personal and public, and expresses in precise language both the misanthropy and desire for connection that drive us all....

King George V predicted that his son, Edward VIII, would destroy himself within a year of succeeding to the throne....

In this inspiring masterpiece, best-selling author Susan Cain shows the power of 'bittersweetness'—a tendency towards sorrow and longing, an acute awareness of passing time and a piercing joy when beholding beauty....

What could be a more tempting Christmas gift than a compendium of David Sedaris' best stories, selected by the author himself? From a spectacular career spanning almost three decades, these stories have become modern classics and are now for the first time collected in one volume....

The collection of 10 absorbing tales by master psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom uncovers the mysteries, frustrations, pathos, and humor at the heart of the therapeutic encounter....

The revolutionary writings of Audre Lorde gave voice to those 'outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women'....

David Sedaris' remarkable ability to uncover the hilarious absurdity teeming just below the surface of everyday life is elevated to wilder and more entertaining heights....

Honest, tender and written with piercing clarity, On Connection is a call to arms that speaks to a universal yet intimate truth.... 

Explore the questions, anxieties and agendas that consume our lives....

Following the international critical acclaim of The Cost of Living, this final volume of Deborah Levy's Living Autobiography is an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the spectres that haunt it.... 

The inspirational wisdom of Oprah Winfrey, collected for the first time in a beautiful book....

In this vivid and powerful collection of essays, Emilie Pine boldly confronts the past to better understand herself, her relationships and her role in society. She speaks to the business of living as a woman in the 21st century - its extraordinary pain and its extraordinary joy....

Many think that Marian leads a glitzy life of limos, television, and showbiz parties - but she would argue that she spends the majority of her life writing alone, wearing her PJs....

What does it mean to feel truly alive? Aged 24, Matt Haig's world caved in. He could see no way to go on living....

From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times best-selling author of Lincoln in the Bardo, a literary masterclass on how to become both a better writer and reader, on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about how to live....

From cultural icon Margaret Atwood comes a brilliant collection of essays - funny, erudite, endlessly curious, uncannily prescient - which seek answers to burning questions....

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....

This is the second edition of a uniquely empowering, international word-of-mouth best seller about wild landscapes, female mythology, and the challenges facing modern women....

A graphic and biting polemic that still holds a fierce political relevance and impact despite being written over half a century ago....

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....

Universally acclaimed from the time it was first published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has been admired for decades as a stylistic masterpiece....

Things I Don't Want to Know is the first in Deborah Levy's essential three-part 'Living Autobiography' on writing and womanhood....

One of our most beloved scientists, a fearless free spirit, Carlo Rovelli is also a masterful storyteller....

This collection brings together more than 60 pieces of Neil Gaiman's outstanding nonfiction....

Drawing on more than 30 years of therapeutic encounters with people facing hurdles in their love lives, former chair of the British Psychoanalytic Council Susanna Abse takes us deep inside one of the most fascinating realms there is: other people's relationships. From dealing with infidelity to navigating our changing role within a single relationship over the course of a lifetime, Tell Me the Truth About Love sheds vivid light on the human heart and its struggle to both embrace life's greatest gift and protect itself from pain. 

This engaging collection of essays was originally published in The Daily Post Athenian newspaper during the tumultuous two-year period of 2020-2021. The author, Kathryn L. Hunter, who holds a masters degree in Forestry from Yale University, deftly weaves natural science with social commentary into each article, creating a result that is both entertaining and wise.

In New York Times best-selling author and Emmy Award-winning writer and producer Jessi Klein’s second collection, she hilariously explodes the cultural myths and impossible expectations around motherhood and explore the humiliations, poignancies, and possibilities of midlife. 

Bittersweetness recognises that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired. As Bittersweet shows, our obsession with happiness is not making us happy, healthy or whole. It's only by embracing our darker emotions—as well as the light—that we discover our deepest meaning and connection, love and joy. It can change the way we work, the way we create and the way we love—for it is the hidden source of our love stories, moonshots and masterpieces.

Stillpoint is the moment between thoughts, when all mental chatter ceases and the clarity of absolute mind emerges from within. Stillpoint is also an audiobook of short stories and original music from Grammy-winning producer, writer, and Zenist Barrett Martin. Building on his previous two audiobooks that also came with musical soundtracks (The Singing Earth [2017] and The Way Of The Zen Cowboy [2019]), Stillpoint is his third audiobook with 18 stories and 15 original compositions that provide the soundtrack to the book.

Big Snake Little Snake is a cascade of true stories by DBC Pierre, recorded while on his way to make a short film with a parrot in Trinidad, which not only examines the nature of gambling, the love affair between gambler and game and the mindset of obsessive practitioners, but aims to shed light on the invisible odds and outrageous chances of everyday life on Earth. Snakes symbolise a road in a Trinidadian numbers game based on dreams and superstition. The inquiry was prompted by a little snake on Pierre's doorstep.

After Andrea Dworkin, the famous feminist philosopher and activist, passed away, her chief critic, Susie Bright, who many perceived as Dworkin's opposite, published a stirring obituary and series of essays in which she described the ways that Dworkin was a catalyst for the sex-positive movement in contemporary feminism.

Sebastian Barry's writing career has been as long and varied as it has extraordinary. Intimate, revealing and generous of heart, these three lectures—written and delivered as part of his three-year tenure as the laureate for Irish fiction—reflect on his life and career so far, and some of the formative moments and people he's met along the way.

Do we need bookstores in the twenty-first century? If so, what makes a good one? In this beautifully written book, Jeff Deutsch—the director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores, one of the finest bookstores in the world—pays loving tribute to one of our most important and endangered civic institutions. He considers how qualities like space, time, abundance, and community find expression in a good bookstore. Along the way, he also predicts—perhaps audaciously—a future in which the bookstore not only endures, but realizes its highest aspirations.

Poartry: A Collision of Poetry and Art by Douglas Kiburz, MD, is a collection of poetry, essays, eulogies, philosophy, and interpretation of historical events. From Maple Leaf Meadows ranch in the Midwest, Kiburz brings his experience as an orthopedic surgeon, father, son, husband, sculptor, rancher, and poet to bear in the sometimes comical, often dignified, and always thought-provoking collection.

When Colleen Kinder put out a call to writers to answer the question "what stranger haunts you?", she knew she had opened the floodgates. The responses, short and addictive, all in the form of letters, all written in the second person, began pouring in and her website column “Letter to a Stranger” was born. Now Kinder has selected the most extraordinary of these responses, solicited plenty more from formidable cast of writers as diverse themselves as the strangers - and places - they invoke.

Do you remember that moment you looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the face? Do you feel like time is flying by and you’re caught in its wings? This honest, straight from the soul book will resonate with every woman who’s struggled with growing older. A witty and sharp observer of life, Jane H. Goldman reveals her fears and thoughts about growing older and freeing herself from the expectations of others. In these beautiful and cleverly written essays and poetry, you’ll find insights and inspiration for your own journey and living a life without regrets.

Skin Deep explores beauty, ageing, imperfection, health and illness, all of which are closely related to skin, and interrogates whiteness, both historically, structurally and through current notions of white fragility and victimhood. Phillipa McGuinness has interviewed plastic surgeons, dermatologists, burn survivors, beauticians, melanoma sufferers, people who suffer from body dysmorphias, victims and perpetrators of racism and all kinds of people who are and are not comfortable in their own skin to write a book where science meets art and culture, history and politics.

Surveying the many images of the country, De points out that for every truism about India, the opposite is also true: India as the land of the meek; India as inheritor of the earth; India gherao-ed by distinctly unfriendly neighbours; Indians fleeing to jobs in the West and then racing right back to a better life; Indians who ape their erstwhile colonizers and yet cling irrationally to tradition. 

 Sometime in her 20s, Jennifer De Leon asked herself, "What would you do if you just gave yourself permission?" While her parents had fled Guatemala more than three decades earlier when the country was in the grips of genocide and civil war, she hadn't been back since she was a child. She gave herself permission to return - to relearn the Spanish that she had forgotten, unpack her family's history, and begin to make her own way.