Showing titles in Essays

After fleeing Chicago to quarantine at home in Michigan, Irby finds herself bleaching groceries and wondering if her upper lip hairs are visible on Zoom. Her career reaches new heights: she gets to work with the iconic ladies of Sex and the City - her dream! - but behind the new-found glam, Irby is just trying to keep her life together. Our friend in print is back, on point, and ready to take us with her, from adopting Abe (her scrawny, watery-eyed firstborn dog) to her favourite, extremely specific porn searches (including two old nuns).

Incisive, wide-ranging and witty, it explores the questions, anxieties and agendas that consume our lives. Pandora Sykes interrogates the stories we’ve been sold and the ones we tell ourselves - from happiness to wellness, womanhood to consumerism - in ways that are both surprising and reassuring.

Edited and with an introduction by Roxane Gay, the New York Times best-selling and deeply beloved author of Bad Feminist and Hunger, this anthology of first-person essays read by all 30 contributors, including Gabrielle Union, Ally Sheedy and Lyz Lenz, tackles rape, assault and harassment head-on.

The inspirational wisdom of Oprah Winfrey, collected for the first time in a beautiful book. After film critic Gene Siskel asked her, 'What do you know for sure?' Oprah Winfrey began writing the 'What I Know For Sure' column in O, The Oprah Magazine. Saying that the question offered her a way to take 'stock of her life', Oprah has penned one column a month over the last 14 years.

There is no more dramatic scene in literary history than the stormy night by Lake Geneva when Byron, Claire Clairmont, Polidori and the Shelleys met to talk of horror and the unexplained. From that emerged Frankenstein, a monster who has haunted imaginations for 200 years. Miranda Seymour illustrates the rich and unexplored life of Mary Shelley. Everything from her childhood to her tempestuous relationship with Percy Shelley; Seymour brings to life the brilliant mind that created Frankenstein through unexplored and intriguing sources.

From modern literature to menopause, from utopian thought to rodeos - in this classic collection of essays, Ursula K. Le Guin roves with her customary audacity over the intersecting arenas of literature, feminism, and social responsibility, exploding any received notions she comes across and revealing visionary possibilities in their stead.

Mit den Erinnerungen eines Europäers hat Stefan Zweig seine persönliche, zugleich eine der besten Analysen der Jahrzehnte zwischen dem ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert und dem 2. Weltkrieg verfasst.

When Oliver Sacks, a physician by profession, injured his leg while climbing a mountain, he found himself in an unusual position - that of patient. The injury itself was severe but straightforward to fix; the psychological effects, however, were far less easy to predict, explain, or resolve: Sacks experienced paralysis and an inability to perceive his leg as his own, instead seeing it as some kind of alien and inanimate object over which he had no control. A Leg to Stand On is both an account of Sacks’ ordeal and subsequent recovery and an exploration of the ways in which mind and body are inextricably linked.

Known as the ‘four horsemen’ of New Atheism, these four big thinkers of the 21st century met only once. Their electrifying examination of ideas on this remarkable occasion was intense and wide-ranging. Everything that was said as they agreed and disagreed with one another, interrogated ideas and exchanged insights - about religion and atheism, science and sense - speaks with urgency to our present age.

From organising the school summer fete - 'Because of our inability to recognise our climatic shortcomings from the outset, arrangements for outdoor jollities get completely out of hand' - to the sometimes rather odd passions of childhood - 'I collect stones with holes in them' - Miss Read captures the essence of rural life, and in particular of village schools, as only she can.

In Feeding the Monster, Anna Bogutskaya dispels this notion once and for all by examining how horror responds to and fuels our feelings of fear, anxiety, pain, hunger and power.

One of our most beloved scientists, a fearless free spirit, Carlo Rovelli is also a masterful storyteller. In this collection of writings, the logbook of an intelligence always on the move, he follows his curiosity and invites us on a voyage through science, literature, philosophy and politics. Written with his usual clarity and wit, these pieces, most of which were first published in Italian newspapers, range widely across time and space....

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.

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he described it as a “comic weekly.” And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder’s description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists of the modern era. This anthology gathers together, for the first time, the funniest work of more than seventy New Yorker contributors.

A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public, commonly referred to as A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian satirical essay written and published anonymously by Jonathan Swift in 1729. Swift suggests in his essay that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling children as food. By doing this he mocks the authority of the British officials.

Acquired Tastes is a celebration of life's extravagances. It explores an aspect of human nature that, although dormant in hard economic times, is capable of erupting with the hint of good fortune and the drop of a credit card. It samples the luxuries of Havana cigars, Parisian hotels, bespoke London tailoring, and handmade shoes; discusses the proper color for a stretch limousine; and weighs the cost versus the pleasure of keeping a mistress.

When it comes to shame, Desiree Akhavan knows what she’s talking about—whether it’s winning the title of The Ugliest Girl at her high school, acquiescing to the nose job she was lovingly forced into by her Iranian parents, or losing her virginity to a cokehead she met in a support group for cutters. In You're Embarrassing Yourself, Desiree goes to the rawest places—the lifelong struggle to be at peace in one’s body, the search for home as the child of immigrants, the anxious underbelly of artistic ambition—in pursuit of wisdom, catharsis, and lolz.

Embodiment is not an easy business. From violence to illness, sexuality to racism, the fact of a body can be impossibly hard to inhabit. Olivia Laing draws on her own background in protest and alternative medicine to investigate the reasons why. Laing’s exploration of the complexities of bodily life takes in some of the most significant and beguiling figures of the past century, among them the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, the painters Francis Bacon and Agnes Martin and the singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone.

Spring is a deeply moving novel about family, our everyday lives, our joys and our struggles. Spring follows a father and his newborn daughter through one day in April, from sunrise to sunset. A day filled with everyday routine, the beginnings of life and its light, but also its deep struggles and its darkness.

Listening to Shaking a Leg is like spending time with the funniest, wisest friend you've ever had - a person whose breadth of interest ranges from food to feminism to science fiction and everything in between. Bursting with ideas, culturally astute and sparklingly witty, this comprehensive volume of Angela Carter's journalism is the most down-to-earth and entertaining companion to latter 20th-century thought you'll ever need.