Showing results for "What" in Essays

Tolstoy claims that all good art is related to the authentic life of the broader community and that the aesthetic value of a work of art is not independent of its moral content.

“You will devour these beautifully written—and very important—tales of honesty, pain, and resilience” (Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat Pray Love and City of Girls) from fifteen brilliant writers who explore how what we don’t talk about with our mothers...

Leo Tolstoy wrote prolifically in a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice and religion. These culminated in What Is Art?, published in 1898. Although Tolstoy perceived the question of art to be a religious one, he considered and rejected the idea that art reveals and reinvents through beauty. The works of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Baudelaire, and even his own novels are condemned in the course of Tolstoy's impassioned and iconoclastic redefinition of art as a force for good; for the improvement of humankind.

In this love letter to reading, curated by Pandora Sykes in aid of the National Literacy Trust, bestselling and beloved writers share their favourite books: the ones they hold most dearly, that they return to time and again and that helped make them the writers they are.

Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books - selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude - have been described as ‘virtuoso performances’ and ‘small masterpieces'. Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? is a collective interrogation of the universal experience from a very particular psyche.

In this bestselling tour de force of a culinary manifesto, Great British Bake Off alum and former Guardian columnist Ruby Tandoh will help you fall back in love with food—from a great selection of recipes to straight-talking, sympathetic advice on mental health and body image “I read it...

In this brilliant collection, the follow-up to her New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, the distinguished novelist, literary critic, and essayist celebrates the pleasures of reading and pays homage to the works and writers she admires above all others, from Jane Austen and Charles...

An intimate and evocative celebration of the life and legacy of music and political icon Sinéad O’Connor, featuring writers including Neko Case, Sinéad Gleeson, Rayne Fisher-Quann, Porochista Khakpour, and more. More than thirty years ago, Sinéad O’Connor shocked the world by tearing up a...

New York Times bestselling author Chuck Klosterman asks questions that are profound in their simplicity: How certain are we about our understanding of gravity? How certain are we about our understanding of time? What will be the defining memory of rock music, five hundred years from today? How...

A follow-up to the wildly successful What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About, this “moving and deeply relatable” (Qian Julie Wang, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Country) collection of essays from sixteen notable writers breaks the silence on the complex—and sometimes...

In his award-winning debut essay collection, What Cannot Be Undone, Walter M. Robinson shares surprising stories of illness and medicine that do not sacrifice hard truth for easy dramatics. These true stories are filled with details of difficult days and nights in the world of high-tech medical care, and they show the ongoing struggle in making critical decisions with no good answer. This collection presents the raw moments where his expertise in medical ethics and pediatrics are put to the test.

We're Doomed, Now What? addresses the crisis that is our time through a series of brilliant, moving, and original essays on climate change, war, literature, and loss from one of the most provocative and iconoclastic minds of his generation.

A Finalist for the NAACP Image Award Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay An NPR Best Book of the Year A Washington Independent Review of Books Favorite of the Year From the cofounder of VerySmartBrothas.com, and one of the most read writers on race and...

It's been over ten years since Robert Fulghum has published a book of his essays, but he is back and in fine form with What on Earth Have I Done?, encouraging listeners to slow down and pay attention to the miracles, sometimes hilarious and sometimes serious, that can be found around us...

In What Water Holds, a series of lyrical essays first shared at Oregon’s FisherPoets Gathering, Tele examines questions of equity, identity, community, the changing climate, and sustainability with loving, detailed attention, revealing the complexities within their many shades of gray.

El budismo, rama de la filosofía, ocupa un lugar central en el conjunto de la obra de Borges. La percepción del cosmos como un laberinto o una paradoja, la negación del Yo, el cuestionamiento a la concepción occidental del tiempo y la singular noción de que el mundo es una ficción y la realidad un sueño, entre otras ideas, cruzan los ensayos, cuentos y poemas del autor desde sus textos más tempranos y son la particular reformulación con fines literarios de algunos de los nodos centrales de esta doctrina.

Prophecy may vary between being an intellectual amusement and a serious occupation; serious not only in its intentions, but in its consequences. For it is the lot of prophets who frighten or disappoint to be stoned. But for some of us moderns, who have been touched with the spirit of science, prophesying is almost a habit of mind.

In What Wars Leave Behind, J. Malcolm Garcia reveals the people and pain behind the statistics. He writes about impoverished families scraping by in Cairo’s city of the dead, ordinary Syrians pretending all is well as shells explode around them, and others caught in conflicts that rage long after the cameramen have packed up and gone away.

Locked in his desk for 25 years, What Is Man? was Twain's most serious, philosophical, and private work. The narrative appears in the form of a Socratic dialogue between a romantic young idealist and an elderly cynic. The pair debate issues of mankind, such as whether man is free to act or is more of a machine, whether personal merit is meaningless given how the environment shapes us, and if man truly has impulses other than to pursue pleasure and avoid pain.

"What Is Man?", the 1906 essay by Mark Twain, is a dialogue between a young man and an older man involving ideas of destiny, free will, and egoism. The old man asserts that the human being is merely a machine, but the young man objects and asks him to go into particulars and provide the reasons for his attitude.