Showing titles in Essays

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.

In the book that he was born to write, provocateur and best-selling author Christopher Hitchens inspires future generations of radicals, gadflies, mavericks, rebels, angry young (wo)men, and dissidents. Who better to speak to that person who finds him or herself in a contrarian position than Hitchens, who has made a career of disagreeing in profound and entertaining ways.

Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a genre-defying collection of essays that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives. His is a meditation on delight that takes a clear-eyed view of the complexities, even the terrors, in his life, including living in America as a Black man; the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture; the loss of those he loves.

For a quarter century, Peggy Noonan has been thinking aloud about America in her much-loved Wall Street Journal column. In this new collection of her essential recent work, Noonan demonstrates the erudition, wisdom and humor that have made her one of America’s most admired writers. She calls balls and strikes on the political shenanigans of recent leaders and she honors the integrity of great Americans, ranging from Billy Graham to the heroes of 9/11.

These masterpieces (along with several previously uncollected stories) are available in one volume, which presents an indelible collective portrait of an unsuspected New York and its odder citizens - as depicted by one of the great writers of this or any other time.

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.

The Memory Palace is a collection of tiny, crystalline historical tales that come across like luminous short fiction, and, like Nate DiMeo’s acclaimed podcast of the same name, conjure lost moments and forgotten figures who are calling out across time to be remembered. For fifteen years, Nate DiMeo has turned to the past to make sense of the way we live today, finding beauty and meaning in history’s dustier corners, holding things up to the light and weaving facts, keen insight, wit, and poignant observation into unforgettable tales.

In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill s Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, famously referred to by Peter Levi, professor of poetry at Oxford University, as 'the greatest poem written in either Ireland or Britain during the eighteenth century'. In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with its parallels with her own life, and sets out to track down the rest of the story.

When it comes to how societies commemorate their own distant dreams and catastrophes, we often think of books, archives, or memorials carved from stone. But in Time's Echo, Jeremy Eichler makes a revelatory case for the power of music as culture's memory, an art form uniquely capable of carrying forward meaning from the past. Eichler shows how four towering composers - Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich - lived through the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust and later transformed their experiences into deeply moving works of music.

Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life. Disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. Sitting Pretty challenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practical and imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write a different story.

The revolutionary writings of Audre Lorde gave voice to those 'outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women'. Uncompromising, angry and yet full of hope, this collection of her essential prose - essays, speeches, letters, interviews - explores race, sexuality, poetry, friendship, the erotic and the need for female solidarity and includes her landmark piece 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House'.

A collection of gorgeously written and timely pieces in which prize-winning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life's inevitable hardships. In an era when divisive voices take up so much air space, Inciting Joy offers a vital alternative: what might be possible if we turn our attention to what brings us together? Full of energy, curiosity, and compassion, it is essential listening from one of our most brilliant writers.

Published to coincide the with 50th anniversary of the Israel occupation of the West Bank, an anthology that explores the human cost of the conflict there as witnessed by such notable writers as Colum McCann, Colm Toibin, Dave Eggers, Madeleine Thien, Eimear McBride and Taiye Selasi and editors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman.

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.

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.

From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times best-selling author of Lincoln in the Bardo, a literary masterclass on how to become both a better writer and reader, on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about how to live. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders guides the listener through seven classic Russian short stories he's been teaching for 20 years as a professor in the prestigious Syracuse University graduate MFA creative writing program.

Bittersweetness recognises that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired. As Bittersweet shows, our obsession with happiness is not making us happy, healthy or whole. It's only by embracing our darker emotions—as well as the light—that we discover our deepest meaning and connection, love and joy. It can change the way we work, the way we create and the way we love—for it is the hidden source of our love stories, moonshots and masterpieces.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) has influenced philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Oswald Spengler, George Grant, Emil Cioran, Albert Camus, Ayn Rand, Jacques Derrida, Leo Strauss, Max Scheler, Michel Foucault and Bernard Williams. His writings on aesthetics, language, truth, morality, cultural theory, history, nihilism, power, and the meaning of existence have exerted a vast influence on Western philosophy and intellectual history.

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.

Do you know it, do you remember it, the drives, the attitudes, the terrors and, yes, the joys? Thus Steinbeck introduces his collection of poignant and hard-hitting dispatches for the New York Herald Tribune when the Second World War was at its height. He begins in England, recounting the courage of the bomber crews, the tragic air-raids and the strangeness of the British, before being sent to Africa and joining a special operations unit off the coast of Italy.