Showing titles in Essays

Though uncompromising, polemical and argumentative, Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) made a lasting impact on 19th-century culture as a multi-talented man of letters. And though his lengthy history of the French Revolution proved his major scholarly legacy, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History remains perhaps his most popular and accessible work. It presented his deep-seated belief that ‘Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here’.  

This was Alan Clark’s first volume of diaries and the only one that he recorded. As such it is a unique and historical record and reminder of the man and his work. To hear Alan Clark reading the book in his marvelously rich voice adds immeasurably to the pleasure of these informative and entertaining diaries. The recording covers two Parliaments and constitutes the most outspoken and revealing account of British politics ever written.

‘Most smart people tend to feel queasy when the conversation turns to things like “certain death” and “total failure” and the idea of “a doomed generation”. But not me. I am comfortable with these themes.’ Hunter S. Thompson, celebrated author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy. A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century 'Life falls apart. We try to get a grip. We try to hold it together. And then we realize that we don't want to hold it together...' Picking up where Things I Don't Want to Know...

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi is an impassioned response to the Holocaust: Consisting of 21 short stories, each possessing the name of a chemical element, the collection tells of the author's experiences as a Jewish-Italian chemist before, during, and after Auschwitz in luminous, clear, and unfailingly beautiful prose. It has been named the best science book ever by the Royal Institution of Great Britain and is considered to be Levi's crowning achievement.

Every memoir is a battle between reality and invention - but in her follow up to Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys., Viv Albertine has reinvented the genre with her unflinching honesty. To Throw Away Unopened is a fearless dissection of one woman's obsession with the truth - the truth about family, power and her identity as a rebel and outsider. It is a gaping wound of a book, both an exercise in bloodletting and psychological archaeology, excavating what lies beneath: the fear, the loneliness, the anger.

This selection of essays by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) demonstrate the varied power of his genius. Compiled from his lecture tours, newspaper articles, essays and epigrams, these writings show that beneath his trademark wit and love of paradox, Oscar Wilde was an original and remarkably modern writer.

Leopold's essays on conservation will open the mind of any listener who gives them a chance. The first part uses essays for each of the 12 months to share the rhythm of life on his restored Wisconsin farmland, and uses the stories to branch into eye opening lessons on the history of man's use and abuse of it. The second part continues using stories from Leopold's experiences in wild places across North America to expand the lessons to a much wider view. The final part of the work seeks to lay out a better path for humanity, using solid logic and deep philosophical questioning.

In On the Genealogy of Morals, subtitled "A Polemic", Nietzsche furthers his pursuit of a clarity that is less tainted by imposed prejudices. He looks at the way attitudes towards 'morality' evolved and the way congenital ideas of morality were heavily colored by the Judaic and Christian traditions.

Get yourself comfortable and let Marian Keyes take you places you've never been before. Places like the Irish air-guitar championships, a shopping trip to Bloomingdales with a difference and Cannes with a chronic case of Villa-itis. Along the way you'll encounter knicker-politics, fake tans...

Brought to you by Penguin. George Orwell's searing account of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s, The Road to Wigan Pier is a brilliant and bitter polemic that has lost none of its political impact over time Orwell's graphically...

A stunning collection of essays and memoir from twice Booker Prize winner and international bestseller Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the Light In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, ‘I have no critical...

An instant New York Times bestseller, I'll Show Myself Out is the eagerly anticipated second essay collection from Jessi Klein, author of the acclaimed debut You’ll Grow Out of It. Longlisted for the PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay “Sometimes I think about how much...

Bloomsbury presents A View from the Stars by Cixin Liu, read by Brian Nishii. We’re mysterious aliens in the crowd. We jump like fleas from future to past and back again, and float like clouds of gas between nebulae; in a flash, we can reach the edge of the universe, or tunnel into a quark, or...

In We Learn Nothing, satirical cartoonist Tim Kreider turns his funny, brutally honest eye to the dark truths of the human condition, asking big questions about human-sized problems: What if you survive a brush with death and it doesn't change you? Why do we fall in love with people we don't even like? How do you react when someone you've known for years unexpectedly changes genders?

Two classic collections of Nora Ephron’s uproarious essays—tackling everything from feminism to the media, from politics to beauty products, with her inimitable charm and distinctive wit—now available in one audiobook. This edition brings together some of Ephron’s most famous writing on...

Wildflower is a portrait of Drew's life in stories as she looks back on the adventures, challenges and incredible experiences of her earlier years. It includes tales of living on her own at 14 (and how laundry may have saved her life), getting stuck in a gas station overhang on a cross country road trip, saying good-bye to her father in a way only he could have understood and many more adventures and lessons that have led her to the successful, happy,and healthy place she is today.

Horror movies hold a complicated space in the queer community: historically misogynist, and often homo- and transphobic, the genre has also been inadvertently feminist and open to subversive readings. It Came from the Closet features twenty-five original essays by writers speaking to this relationship, through connections both empowering and oppressive. From Carmen Maria Machado on Jennifer’s Body, Jude Ellison S. Doyle on In My Skin, Addie Tsai on Dead Ringers, and many more, these conversations convey the rich reciprocity between queerness and horror.

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.

Bloomsbury presents Spring is the Only Season, written and read by Simon Barnes. 'A book that filled me from first to last with a rapture as transcendent and thrilling as that which spring yearly provides... I absolutely adored it!' STEPHEN FRY 'As dynamic and ebullient as the season it...