Showing titles in Essays

In letters addressed to their friends, to members of their family - both biological and chosen - and to fellow storytellers, Akwaeke describes the shape of a life lived in overlapping realities. Through heartbreak, chronic pain, intimacy with death, becoming a beast, this is embodiment as a nonhuman: outside the boundaries imposed by expectations and legibility. This book is an account of the gruelling work of realignment and remaking necessary to carve out a future for oneself. The result is a black spirit memoir: a powerful, raw unfolding of identity.

UG Krishnamurti has been called the ‘anti-guru’, the ‘raging sage’ and the ‘thinker who shuns thought’. UG does not give lectures, has no organizations, does not write books, holds no gatherings and peddles no mantras. Yet he is the most talked-about thinker in India. This biography...

As defender of both the righteous and the questionable, Alan Dershowitz has become perhaps the most famous and outspoken attorney in the land. Whether or not they agree with his legal tactics, most people would agree that he possesses a powerful and profound sense of justice. In this meditation...

Brought to you by Penguin. Everything started with a photo. To see her free, hurtling fulsomely towards the future, made me think back to the life she shared with my father. Seeing the photo reminded me that those twenty years of devastation were not anything natural but were the result of...

For the last three decades Gary Younge has had a ringside seat during the biggest events and with the most significant personalities to impact the black diaspora: accompanying Nelson Mandela on his first election campaign, joining revellers on the southside of Chicago during Obama's victory, entering New Orleans days after hurricane Katrina or interviewing Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Maya Angelou and Stormzy. He has witnessed how much change is possible and the power of systems to thwart those aspirations.

“Masterful. The Anthropocene Reviewed is a beautiful, timely book about the human condition—and a timeless reminder to pay attention to your attention.” —Adam Grant, #1 bestselling author of Think Again and host of the podcast Re:Thinking The instant #1 bestseller from John Green, author...

'This book is heaven. Elspeth Barker writes like no one else' OLIVIA LAING 'Deserves to be permanently on the bedside table - to cheer, reassure and inspire' OBSERVER 'Gothic, poetic and exuberantly funny. What a pleasure it was to read' ESTHER FREUD 'Joyous, startling, funny, lush, dark and...

In 2024, exactly one hundred years after his death at the age of 40, readers and listeners all over the world will reach for the works of Franz Kafka. Many of them will want to learn more about the enigmatic man behind the classic books filled with mysterious courts and monstrous insects. Who, exactly, was Franz Kafka? Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist ever elected as a Fellow of Oxford's All Souls College, will tell Kafka's story beyond the boundaries of language, time and space, travelling from the Prague of Kafka's birth through the work of contemporary writers in East Asia.

"[These essays] reflect a lively, unselfconscious, rigorous, erudite, and earnestly open mind that's busy refining its view of life, literature, and a great deal in between." —Los Angeles Times Split into five sections--Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering--Changing My Mind finds...

In 1958, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was published in the United States to immediate controversy and bestsellerdom. More than sixty years later, this phenomenal novel generates as much buzz as it did when originally published. Central to countless issues at the forefront of our national...

A memoir-in-essays from disability advocate and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty Rebekah Taussig, processing a lifetime of memories to paint a beautiful, nuanced portrait of a body that looks and moves differently than most. Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early...

Sir Mark Tully was the BBC’s Foreign Correspondent in India from 1972 to 1994. He has become familiar to listeners around the world for his incisive and thought-provoking reports. On this special recording, he looks back at a career that coincided with a remarkable period in Indian history...

Biographer Michael Shelden called Orwell’s Politics and the English Language “his most important essay on style”. First published in 1946, the essay exploded the language trends of the time and served as an inflection point in the debate about communication in the 20th century. This collection of essays published 1946-48 provides a comprehensive critique of the status of politics and speech in the mid-century.

'Gay has an ability to blend the personal and political in a way that feels simultaneously gentle and brutal . . . you look at a cultural moment through Gay's eyes and, by the end, you see the world differently' Arwa Mahdawi, Guardian Since the publication of the groundbreaking Bad Feminist and...

We live in a world where strongman politics are rising, neo-liberalism has hollowed out political parties and corporations have undermined democracy. Ordinary voters feel helpless to effect change, resulting in outbreaks of populist anger, and traditional platforms for debate are losing their viability as readers source information online. In this short and vital polemic, progressive thinker and activist Billy Bragg argues that accountability is the antidote to authoritarianism and that without it, we can never truly be free.

Brought to you by Penguin. In this joyous and illuminating book, the million-copy bestselling author brings together an unlikely pairing to explore the story of their creative genius What could possibly connect Prince, the great twentieth century singer songwriter, and Charles Dickens, the great...

For thirty years Anne Enright—one of our greatest living novelists (Times)—has been paying attention: casting her distinctive gaze across the world, literature, and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights. These essays, collated from across Enright’s career, take us from Galway to Honduras, from keen-eyed memoir to urgent political writing. Enright writes about the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society: She interprets Sophocles’ Antigone through the lens of the Mother and Baby Homes in Galway, writes on Ireland’s successful 2018 referendum on abortion rights…

Bloomsbury presents Dirtbag, Massachusetts written and read by Isaac Fitzgerald. * THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * * WINNER OF THE 2022 NEW ENGLAND BOOK AWARD FOR NON-FICTION * 'A heart on the sleeve, demons in check, eyes unblinking, unbearably sad, laugh-out-loud funny revelation'...

An irreverent and charming collection of deeply personal essays about the joys of low pop culture and bad taste, exploring coming of age in the 2000s in the age of Hot Topic, Creed, and frosted lip gloss—from the James Beard Award-nominated writer of the Catapult column "Store-Bought Is...

Meditations on the terror of love; tips for getting your disgusting meat carcass ready for some new, hot sex; a frank self-evaluation upon the occasion of one's 30th birthday; and, finally, the answer to the question on everyone's minds: would dying alone really be so terrible? Blogger and comedian Samantha Irby covers it all with wit and honesty - and serves it with a side of Instagram frittata.