Showing titles in Essays

“Refreshingly candid...Niazi is telling her story in medias res, inviting readers to figure the whole mess out with her—and in this era of gentle-parenting TikToks and general advice oversaturation, that feels like a gift.” —Emma Specter, Vogue Channeling the subversive and sharp-eyed...

Join Ursula K. Le Guin as she explores a broad array of subjects, ranging from Tolstoy, Twain, and Tolkien to women's shoes, beauty, and family life. With her customary wit, intelligence, and literary craftsmanship, she offers a diverse and highly engaging set of stories. The Wave in the Mind includes some of Le Guin's finest literary criticism, rare autobiographical writings, performance-art pieces, and most centrally, her reflections on the arts of writing and reading. 

Julian Barnes began writing about art with a chapter on Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa in his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. Since then he has written a series of remarkable essays, chiefly about French artists, for a variety of journals and magazines. Gathering them for this book, he realised that he had unwittingly been retracing the story of how art made its way from Romanticism to Realism and into Modernism.

Intended to be a defense of the Christian religion, Pensées is a penetrating collection of thoughts on faith, reason, and theology. Unfinished at the time of Pascal's death, the book consists of philosophical fragments on the "wretchedness" of man and the controversial schisms of the church at the time. It includes the philosopher's infamous wager encouraging belief over agnosticism, as well as his thoughts on numerous other topics. Endlessly quotable, Pensées overflows with pearls of wisdom, each elusive sentence pregnant with a universe of thought.

Filled with his usual obsessions - sex, booze, gambling - More features Bukowski's offbeat insights into politics and literature, his tortured, violent relationships with women, and his lurid escapades on the poetry reading circuit. Highlighting his versatility, the book ranges from thinly-veiled autobiography to purely fictional tales of dysfunctional suburbanites, disgraced politicians, and down-and-out sports promoters - climaxing with a long, hilarious adventure among French filmmakers.

One of the most famous of all literary dogs, Flush was the golden cocker spaniel belonging to Elizabeth Barrett. In this charming and heartfelt biography, Viginia Woolf tells his story: his early days as Miss Mitford's puppy running across the fields in wild abandon and fathering another, then the years spent in his invalid mistress' bedroom in Wimpole Street.

Brought to you by Penguin. Warm, wise and full of practical tips, this book is the ideal companion to every writing life Write every day Show, don’t tell Write what you know Kill Your Darlings These are some of the most popular nuggets of advice given to writers, universally agreed to be true...

THE PLANETS is Dava Sobel's sweeping look at our heavenly galaxy. In the spirit of Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, Sobel once again brings science and history deftly to life as she explores the origins of the planets and reveals the exotic environments that exist in each of these fascinating...

Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and a life-long committed Darwinist, abridges and reads this special audio version of Charles Darwin's famous book. A literally world-changing book, Darwin put forward the anti-religious and scientific idea that humans in fact evolved over millions of generations from animals, starting with fish, all the way up through the ranks to apes, then to our current form.

Staring down the barrel of her 40th year, Samantha Irby is confronting the ways her life has changed since the days she could work a full 11 hour shift on 4 hours of sleep, change her shoes and put mascara on in the back of a moving cab and go from drinks to dinner to the club without a second thought. Recently, things are more 'Girls Gone Mild.'

When Paul Auster was asked to join NPR's Weekend All Things Considered program to tell stories, he turned the proposition on its head: he would let the stories come to him. He invited listeners to submit brief, true-life anecdotes about events that touched their lives. And so the National Story...

Brought to you by Penguin. *Narrated by Academy, Tony and Primetime Emmy Award winner Ellen Burstyn* From the beloved bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a posthumous collection of newly discovered writing, offering a fresh perspective on the remarkable literary mind behind To Kill a...

In diesem Hörbuch erwarten dich 101 schonungslos ehrliche und tief verletzliche Texte über (Selbst-)Liebe und Schönheitsideale, über Politik und Herzbruch, über Einsamkeit und Hoffnung. Clara Lösel, Literaturpreisträgerin und Instagramphänomen, spricht das aus, was so viele bewegt und sich trotzdem niemand zu sagen traut, und lässt dich dadurch fühlen und wachsen.

From the singular mind of Zosia Mamet, a collection of charmingly witty and achingly vulnerable essays about the challenge and magic of growing up in show business You may know Zosia Mamet from her role as Shoshanna on Girls, or for being one of Hollywood’s original nepo babies (or as she says...

Following the best-selling Summer of a Dormouse, Sir John Mortimer - playwright, novelist, octogenarian, and erstwhile QC - offers up more lessons in living and growing old disgracefully. What would we like to leave to our descendants? Not a third-rate painting or our PEPS, according to Sir John, but a love of Shakespeare, a taste for alcohol, the ability to defeat boredom, the importance of never locking the lavatory door, and so on.

For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.

Brought to you by Penguin. ‘We were so happy and didn’t know it…’ A thirty-three-year-old writer lives in a quiet European suburb with his wife and his dog. His parents have bought an apartment nearby. On weekends they go out for brunch, cook and see friends. Life is good; it is normal...

From the celebrated poet, novelist and memoirist, The Vast Extent is an ingenious constellation of "exploded essays" about light and image, seeing and the unseen. Each is a record of how thought builds and ideas emerge, aligning art, myth, strange voyages, scientific scrutiny and a poet's response so that they cast light upon each other. Ranging across caves, seasickness, early photography, boredom, wonder, mountains, mice, the body and its shadow, Lavinia Greenlaw invites us to travel such questions as how we might describe what we have never seen before.

Frauen im Internet stehen unter ständiger Beobachtung. Sophie Passmann ist selbst Teil der widersprüchlichen Welt weiblicher Selbstdarstellung in den sozialen Medien. Radikal selbstkritisch seziert sie die Phänomene, die eine ganze Generation prägen: von der asketischen Disziplin einer Hailey Bieber über die kalkulierte Görenhaftigkeit von Charli XCX bis zur neurotischen Perfektion von Taylor Swift. Warum sind wir alle so fasziniert von Frauen, die uns etwas vormachen – und gleichzeitig hassen wir sie genau dafür?

Moved to honour a form of relation often subordinated to romantic and familial ties, and to explore a part of her own history, Hélène Giannecchini pieces together an alternative genealogy of queer ancestors. In searching and sensitive prose, she sifts the past to bring existences deemed 'marginal' into communion with each other, traces of which may remain only in memory and archival fragments.