Showing titles in Essays

In January 2017, Donald Trump signed an executive order stopping entry to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries and dramatically cutting the number of refugees allowed to resettle in the United States each year. The American people spoke up, with protests, marches, donations, and lawsuits that quickly overturned the order. But the refugee caps remained. In The Displaced, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, himself a refugee, brings together a host of prominent refugee writers to explore and illuminate the refugee experience.

From Pulitzer Prize - winning book critic Michael Dirda comes a collection of his most personal and engaging essays on the literary life - the perfect companion for any lover of books. Dirda's latest volume collects fifty of his witty and wide-ranging reflections on literary journalism, book collecting, and the writers he loves. Reaching from the classics to the postmoderns, his allusions dance from Samuel Johnson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and M. F. K. Fisher to Marilynne Robinson, Hunter S. Thompson, and David Foster Wallace.

Sebastian Haffners "Geschichte eines Deutschen" handelt von einem Jungen aus bürgerlicher Familie, der den Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges als Zerstörung seines Ferienidylls empfindet. Der die galoppierende Inflation 1923 beobachtet, mit ihren jugendlichen Aktienspekulanten und hilflosen Vätern, ihrem Januskopf von Hunger und Verschwendung...

Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag's second collection of essays, extends the investigations she undertook in Against Interpretation with essays on film, literature, politics, and a groundbreaking study of pornography.

Brought to you by Penguin. 'This book will take your breath away, break your heart, and leave you in awe' President Bill Clinton _______ Soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines speak in their own words about real life in today's armed forces. These are the brutally honest stories usually only...

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.

According to the Washington Post, no one who cares about contemporary African-American cultures can ignore Bell Hooks's electrifying feminist explorations. Targeting cultural icons as diverse as Madonna and Spike Lee, Outlaw Culture presents a collection of essays that pulls no punches. As Hooks herself notes, interrogations of popular culture can be a "powerful site for intervention, challenge and change." And intervene, challenge, and change is what hooks does best.

Witty, tender and daring essays from the British David Sedaris 'A lovely writer: supple, stylish and almost effortlessly witty.' Daily Mail 'Made me laugh out loud and then properly cry.’ Jennie Godfrey When it comes to the challenge of being a man, Adam Farrer always seems to find a way to...

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...

Sound interesting? Listen to Secret Societies and Subversive Movements and learn about the author's views on politics, history, and the occult.

A remarkable insight into the birth of a writer and the moving discovery of family secrets. When Hanif Kureishi discovers an abandoned manuscript of his father's, his understanding of the family history is transformed. So begins a journey which takes Kureishi through his father's privileged childhood by the sea in Bombay, to the trauma of partition and to his adult life hidden away in the suburbs of Bromley - his days spent as a minor functionary in the Pakistan embassy in London, his nights writing prose, hopeful of one day receiving literary recognition.

Born and raised in idyllic Sullivan's Island, Susan Hayes navigated through her turbulent childhood with humor, spunk, and characteristic Southern sass. But years later, she is a conflicted woman with an unfaithful husband, a sometimes resentful teenage daughter, and a heart that aches with painful, poignant memories. And as Susan faces her uncertain future, she realizes that she must go back to her past. To the beachfront house where her sister welcomes her with open arms.

In this posthumous collection of thought-provoking essays—many never published before—Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and bestselling author David McCullough affirms the value of history, how we can be guided by its lessons, and the enduring legacy of American ideals. History Matters...

Anthony Bourdain chases the fumigation truck in Bergen County, New Jersey. Dave Eggers tells it straight: Illinois is Number 1. Louise Erdrich loses her bikini top in North Dakota. Jonathan Franzen gets waylaid by New York's publicist...and personal attorney...and historian...and geologist. John Hodgman explains why there is no such thing as a "Massachusettsean." 

New York Times–bestselling author and cultural critic Chuck Klosterman presents a unique Audio Companion for Chuck Klosterman X, in which he contextualizes and reads from the collection of his best articles and essays, providing both a fascinating tour of the past decade and an ideal...

Drawing from two political and several literary homelands, this collection presents a remarkable series of trenchant essays, demonstrating the full range and force of Salman Rushdie's remarkable imaginative and observational powers. With candour, eloquence and indignation he carefully examines an expanse of topics; including the politics of India and Pakistan, censorship, the Labour Party, Palestinian identity, contemporary film and late-20th century race, religion and politics.

The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. The writer is Joan Didion, who delivers an anatomy of that country's particular brand of terror - its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy. As ash travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb "to disappear," Didion gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.

This exclusive compilation was first published to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the 'Quote, Unquote'. It takes a fond look a the show in which celebrity guests are quizzed about quotations, famous and obscure, and invited to contribute their own quotes and anecdotes. From identifying...

In five short essays, the award-winning writer dissects the nervous condition of being not only Black, and not only a woman, but also quote-unquote "postcolonial". Weaving together the experiences, events, intersections and negotiations of her multifaceted identity, Dangarembga offers a powerful vision of Black liberation.

How many times have we heard that reading builds empathy? That we can travel through books? How often have we were heard about the importance of diversifying our bookshelves? Or claimed that books saved our lives? These familiar words—beautiful, aspirational—are sometimes even true. But award-winning novelist Elaine Castillo has more ambitious hopes for our reading culture, and in this collection of linked essays, she moves to wrest reading away from the aspirations of uniting people in empathetic harmony and reposition it as thornier, ultimately more rewarding work.