Category
Essays
From the mailbox of the Prime Minister's Office to your bookshelf, a list of more than 100 books that every Canadian should read. This largely one-sided correspondence from the "loneliest book club in the world" is a compendium for bibliophiles and those who follow the Canadian political scene....
The Anatomy of Love 2026
Dryness, paleness, waking, sighing, despair, frenzy, death: love's repercussions can be dire indeed. Perhaps that is why Robert Burton devoted the largest part of his monumental 17th-century psychological work, The Anatomy of Melancholy, to this supreme passion.
Edited to offer the modern reader...
Baptism of Desire 1990
Baptisim by blood, water, or desire is necessary for salvation in Roman Catholic tradition, and baptism of desire in the term used for the leap of trust by which a sincere believer can experience spiritual regeneration.Louise Erdrich's poems are acts of redemption. Everywhere evident is Erdrich's...
Bento's Sketchbook 2025
The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza (a.k.a. Bento) spent the most intense years of his short life writing. He also carried with him a sketchbook. After his sudden death, his friends rescued letters, manuscripts, notes—but no drawings.
For years, without knowing what its pages might...
A meditation on the ever-constant allure of risk, fortune and fate from Booker Prize-winner DBC Pierre.
Big Snake Little Snake is a cascade of true stories by DBC Pierre, recorded while on his way to make a short film with a parrot in Trinidad, which not only examines the nature of gambling, the...
Bite by Bite 2024
In Bite by Bite, poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores the way food and drink evoke our associations and remembrances—a subtext or layering, a flavor tinged with joy, shame, exuberance, grief, desire, or nostalgia.
Nezhukumatathil restores our astonishment and wonder about food through...
Abominations 2024
Novelist, cultural observer, and social satirist Lionel Shriver is among the sharpest talents of our age. A writer who embraces “under-expressed, unpopular or downright dangerous” points of view, she filets cherished shibboleths and the conformity of thought and attitude that has overtaken...
Bookends 2019
In Bookends, Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon offers a compilation of pieces about literature—age-old classics as well as his own—that presents a unique look into his literary origins and influences, the books that shaped his taste and formed his ideas about writing and reading.
George Saunders's first foray into nonfiction is comprised of essays on literature, travel, and politics. At the core of this unique collection are Saunders's travel essays based on his trips to seek out the mysteries of the "Buddha Boy" of Nepal; to attempt to indulge in the extravagant pleasures...
Changing My Mind 2010
Split into five sections--Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering--Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural.
This engaging collection of essays, some published here for the first time, reveals Smith as a passionate and precise...
Changing My Mind 2025
“We always believe that changing our mind is an improvement, bringing a greater truthfulness to our dealings with the world and other people. It puts an end to vacillation, uncertainty, weak-mindedness. It seems to make us stronger and more mature. Well, we would think that, wouldn't we?”
In these...
A masterful evocation of the city that never sleeps, The Colossus of New York captures the city’s inner and outer landscapes in a series of vignettes, meditations, and personal memories. Colson Whitehead conveys with almost uncanny immediacy the feelings and thoughts of longtime residents and of...
Coventry 2020
Coventry encompasses memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about literature, with pieces on family life, gender, and politics, and on D. H. Lawrence, Françoise Sagan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Named for an essay Cusk published in Granta (“Every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother...
The Cows 2011
The Cows is a meditative and closely observed work centered on three cows living in a field across from the narrator’s home. Through a series of detailed observations recorded over time, Lydia Davis studies the animals’ movements, moods, habits, and interactions with remarkable patience and...
Dancing on My Own 2024
In Robyn’s 2010 track *Dancing on My Own*, the Swedish pop singer chronicles a night on the dance floor in the shadow of a former lover. She is bitter, angry, and at times desperate, and yet by the time the chorus arrives her frustration has melted away. She decides to dance on her own, and in this...
Nonfiction is the new black comedy in this hilarious collection of award-winning literary essays written by the infamous Pagan Kennedy.
In the title piece, Alex Comfort, author of The Joy of Sex, reinvents himself as a sex guru in California and hatches a plan to destroy monogamy forever.
In the...
Dead and Alive 2025
In this eagerly awaited new collection, Zadie Smith brings her unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years.
She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kara Walker and Celia Paul. She invites us along to the...
The Destiny Thief 2019
“I’ve written a lot about destiny in my fiction,” admits Richard Russo, “not because I understand it, but because I’d like to.” In the first of these eleven remarkable essays, Russo shares the story of his onetime fiction workshop classmate who, of the two of them, was considered the class star,...
A brilliant and unsparing examination of America in the early twenty-first century, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely invents a new genre to confront the particular loneliness and rapacious assault on selfhood that our media have inflicted upon our lives. Fusing the lyric, the essay, and the...
Due Considerations 2008
Here Updike considers many books, some in introductions—to such classics as Walden, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Mabinogion—and many more in reviews, usually for The New Yorker. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the five Biblical books of Moses come in for appraisal, along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The...
Chinua Achebe's characteristically measured and nuanced voice is everywhere present in these seventeen beautifully written pieces.
In a preface, he discusses his historic visit to his Nigerian homeland on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of *Things Fall Apart*, the story...
Essays One 2019
Lydia Davis is a writer whose originality, influence, and wit are beyond compare. Jonathan Franzen has called her “a magician of self-consciousness,” while Rick Moody hails her as "the best prose stylist in America." And for Claire Messud, “Davis's signal gift is to make us feel alive.”
Best known...
Essays Two 2021
Lydia Davis, who has been called “a magician of self-consciousness” by Jonathan Franzen and “the best prose stylist in America” by Rick Moody, gathered a selection of her essays for the first time in 2019 with *Essays One*. Now she continues her nonfiction project with *Essays Two*.
This edition...
Feel Free 2018
Sharp, witty, and intellectually restless, Feel Free brings together a wide-ranging collection of essays by Zadie Smith that explore the cultural and personal landscapes of contemporary life. Moving effortlessly between subjects—from literature and film to politics, technology, and everyday...
In The Givenness of Things, the incomparable Marilynne Robinson delivers an impassioned critique of our contemporary society - our addiction to technology, our materialism - while arguing that reverence must be given to who we are and what we are: creatures of singular interest and value, despite...
Havanas in Camelot 2009
After the great success in 1990 of Darkness Visible, his memoir of depression and recovery, William Styron wrote more frequently in an introspective, autobiographical mode. Havanas in Camelot brings together fourteen of his personal essays, including a reminiscence of his brief friendship with John...
Walker’s complete poems, including new and previously unpublished verse, collected for the first time-with author’s notes that provide historical perspective on spiritual and political issues of the last three decades.
High Tide in Tucson 1996
With the eyes of a scientist and the vision of a poet, Kingsolver writes about notions as diverse as modern motherhood, the history of private property, and the suspended citizenship of humans in the animal kingdom. Kingsolver's canny pursuit of meaning from an inscrutable world compels us to find...
Home and Exile 2001
Powerful and deeply personal, these three essays by the great Nigerian author articulate his mission to rescue African culture from the narratives written by Europeans.
Looking through the prism of his experiences as a student in English schools in Nigeria, he recalls his first encounters with...
One of the most provocative and original voices in contemporary literature, Chinua Achebe here considers the place of literature and art in our society in a collection of essays spanning his best writing and lectures from the last twenty-three years.
For Achebe, overcoming goes hand in hand with...
Hugging the Shore 2013
“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea,” writes John Updike in his Foreword to this collection of literary considerations. But the sailor doth protest too much: This collection begins somewhere near deep water, with a flotilla of short...
In a Narrow Grave 2018
Originally published in 1968, In a Narrow Grave is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s homage to the past and present of the Lone Star State, where he grew up a precociously observant hand on his father’s ranch. From literature to rodeos, small-town folk to big city intellectuals, McMurtry explores...
Intimations 2020
Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality--or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what...
Just Us 2021
In Just Us, Claudia Rankine invites us into a necessary conversation about Whiteness in America. What would it take for us to breach the silence, guilt, and violence that arise from addressing Whiteness for what it is? What are the consequences if we keep avoiding this conversation? What might it...
Languages of Home 2025
John Edgar Wideman, acclaimed since the early 1970s for his award-winning fiction and memoirs, has long been engaged in a project to redefine, from the perspective of an American of color, the wondrous and appalling power of his country’s literary culture and history. Now, curated by him, this...
Languages of Truth 2022
Gathering pieces written between 2003 and 2020, Languages of Truth chronicles Rushdie’s intellectual engagement with a period of momentous cultural shifts. Immersing the reader in a wide variety of subjects, he delves into the nature of storytelling as a human need, and what emerges is, in myriad...
Letters From London 1995
With brilliant wit, idiosyncratic intelligence, and a bold grasp of intricate political realities, the celebrated author of Flaubert's Parrot turns his satiric glance homeward to England, in a sparkling collection of essays that illustrates the infinite variety of contemporary London life.
Life and Art 2026
Life and Art—these are the twin subjects considered in Richard Russo’s twelve masterful new essays—how they inform each other and how the stories we tell ourselves about both shape our understanding of the world around us.
In “The Lives of Others,” he reflects on the implacable fact that writers...
In Like the Flowing River, Paulo Coelho invites readers into a journey through his life, sharing reflections, personal stories, and moments of insight gathered over decades of travel, writing, and encounters with people from all walks of life. Each chapter is a small story, a lesson, or a...
Siri Hustvedt's novels are known for being as thought-provoking as they are emotionally involving. In these essays, Hustvedt shows what lies behind her fiction - an abiding curiosity about who we are and how we got that way, which has led her into the realms of psychology and neuroscience, as well...
In *Magically Black and Other Essays*, Jerald Walker elegantly blends personal revelation and cultural critique to create a bracing and often humorous examination of Black American life.
He thoughtfully addresses the inherent complexities of topics as eclectic as incarceration, home renovations,...
Mantel Pieces 2021
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 training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.’ This collection of twenty reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three...
Maps and Legends 2009
In this lively collection of sixteen critical and personal essays, the author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay champions the cause of westerns, horror, and all the stories, comics, and pulp fiction that get pushed aside when literary discussion turns serious. Whether he's taking up...
My Generation 2015
My Generation is the definitive gathering of William Styron’s nonfiction, exposing the core of this greatly gifted, highly convivial, and profoundly serious artist from his literary emergence in the 1950s to his death in 2006.
Here are fifty years of Styron’s essays, memoirs, reviews, op-eds,...
Nobody Knows My Name 1992
Told with Baldwin's characteristically unflinching honesty, this collection of illuminating, deeply felt essays examines topics ranging from race relations in the United States to the role of the writer in society, and offers personal accounts of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer and other writers.
Not a Novel 2020
In this deeply personal collection of essays, reflections, and memoir pieces, Jenny Erpenbeck looks back on the experiences that shaped her life and literary imagination. From her childhood in East Berlin and the final years of the German Democratic Republic to her emergence as one of Germany's most...
Odd Jobs 2012
To complement his work as a fiction writer, John Updike accepted any number of odd jobs—book reviews and introductions, speeches and tributes, a “few paragraphs” on baseball or beauty or Borges—and saw each as “an opportunity to learn something, or to extract from within some unsuspected wisdom.” In...
Opinions 2024
Since the publication of the groundbreaking *Bad Feminist* and *Hunger*, Roxane Gay has continued to tackle big issues embroiling society—state-sponsored violence and mass shootings, women’s rights post-Dobbs, online disinformation, and the limits of empathy—alongside more individually personalized...
Passions of the Mind 1993
Whether she is writing about George Eliot or Sylvia Plath; Victorian spiritual malaise or Toni Morrison; mythic strands in the novels of Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow; politics behind the popularity of Barbara Pym or the ambitions that underlie her own fiction, Byatt manages to be challenging,...
Picked-Up Pieces 2013
In John Updike’s second collection of assorted prose he comes into his own as a book reviewer; most of the pieces picked up here were first published in The New Yorker in the 1960s and early ’70s. If one word could sum up the young critic’s approach to books and their authors it would be...
Bite by Bite 2024
In Bite by Bite, poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores the way food and drink evoke our associations and remembrances—a subtext or layering, a flavor tinged with joy, shame, exuberance, grief, desire, or nostalgia.
Nezhukumatathil restores our astonishment and wonder about food through...
Chuck Palahniuk’s world has always been, well, different from yours and mine. In his first collection of nonfiction, Chuck Palahniuk brings us into this world, and gives us a glimpse of what inspires his fiction.
At the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival in Missoula, Montana, average people...
Writing, the Other Life October 27, 2026
Magisterial in scope and size, Annie Ernaux: Writing, The Other Life was compiled and edited by Pierre-Louis Fort and was first published in France by Éditions de L'Herne in 2022, a few months before she received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The anthology includes twenty-four previously...
Life and Art September 15, 2026
Life and Art—these are the twin subjects considered in Richard Russo’s twelve masterful new essays—how they inform each other and how the stories we tell ourselves about both shape our understanding of the world around us.
In “The Lives of Others,” he reflects on the implacable fact that writers...
Revolutionary Subjects August 11, 2026
A literary history spanning borders and centuries to explore radicalization as portrayed in fiction. Tracing the evolution of socialist world literature from the nineteenth century to the present, Benjamin Kohlmann uncovers the formal repertoires through which a set of political ideals found...
Triage August 4, 2026
Claudia Rankine has widened contemporary literature with her consciousness-raising, genre-defying works. In her first book after her celebrated American trilogy, presented with full-color visuals, Rankine shifts into sustained narrative, memory, criticism, and essay to offer her most personal and...
The Wave in the Mind August 4, 2026
Join Ursula K. Le Guin as she turns her writer’s eye to subjects ranging from Tolstoy, Twain, and Tolkien to creativity, feminism, and the joy of imagination. In this collection of essays, talks, and performance pieces, one of our great literary icons shares profound literary criticism, rare...
The Anatomy of Love July 14, 2026
Dryness, paleness, waking, sighing, despair, frenzy, death: love's repercussions can be dire indeed. Perhaps that is why Robert Burton devoted the largest part of his monumental 17th-century psychological work, The Anatomy of Melancholy, to this supreme passion.
Edited to offer the modern reader...
You Won't Get Free of It July 7, 2026
You Won’t Get Free of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other and for themselves. Rachel Aviv explores the complexity of this relationship in seven essays, six originally published in The New Yorker and reconceived for this intimate, revelatory book.
“I wrote some of...
Attention April 7, 2026
For thirty years Anne Enright—one of our greatest living novelists (Times)—has been paying attention: casting her lucid and 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...
Languages of Home November 18, 2025
John Edgar Wideman, acclaimed since the early 1970s for his award-winning fiction and memoirs, has long been engaged in a project to redefine, from the perspective of an American of color, the wondrous and appalling power of his country’s literary culture and history. Now, curated by him, this...
Dead and Alive October 28, 2025
In this eagerly awaited new collection, Zadie Smith brings her unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years.
She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kara Walker and Celia Paul. She invites us along to the...
Magically Black and Other Essays September 9, 2025
In *Magically Black and Other Essays*, Jerald Walker elegantly blends personal revelation and cultural critique to create a bracing and often humorous examination of Black American life.
He thoughtfully addresses the inherent complexities of topics as eclectic as incarceration, home renovations,...
We're Alone September 2, 2025
Tracing a loose arc from Edwidge Danticat’s childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti, the essays gathered in *We’re Alone* include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez, and James Baldwin...
Things in Nature Merely Grow May 20, 2025
“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book.
“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died...
Bento's Sketchbook March 25, 2025
The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza (a.k.a. Bento) spent the most intense years of his short life writing. He also carried with him a sketchbook. After his sudden death, his friends rescued letters, manuscripts, notes—but no drawings.
For years, without knowing what its pages might...
Changing My Mind March 18, 2025
“We always believe that changing our mind is an improvement, bringing a greater truthfulness to our dealings with the world and other people. It puts an end to vacillation, uncertainty, weak-mindedness. It seems to make us stronger and more mature. Well, we would think that, wouldn't we?”
In these...
A Town Without Time December 3, 2024
For over six decades, Gay Talese has told New York stories. They are the stories of daring bridge builders, disappearing gangsters, intrepid Vogue editors, unassuming doormen who’ve seen too much. They are set in the star-studded salons of George Plimpton’s apartment, in the tense newsroom of a...
Opinions November 12, 2024
Since the publication of the groundbreaking *Bad Feminist* and *Hunger*, Roxane Gay has continued to tackle big issues embroiling society—state-sponsored violence and mass shootings, women’s rights post-Dobbs, online disinformation, and the limits of empathy—alongside more individually personalized...
Abominations September 17, 2024
Novelist, cultural observer, and social satirist Lionel Shriver is among the sharpest talents of our age. A writer who embraces “under-expressed, unpopular or downright dangerous” points of view, she filets cherished shibboleths and the conformity of thought and attitude that has overtaken...
Don't Let Me Be Lonely July 9, 2024
A brilliant and unsparing examination of America in the early twenty-first century, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely invents a new genre to confront the particular loneliness and rapacious assault on selfhood that our media have inflicted upon our lives. Fusing the lyric, the essay, and the...
Dancing on My Own June 25, 2024
In Robyn’s 2010 track *Dancing on My Own*, the Swedish pop singer chronicles a night on the dance floor in the shadow of a former lover. She is bitter, angry, and at times desperate, and yet by the time the chorus arrives her frustration has melted away. She decides to dance on her own, and in this...
Bite by Bite April 30, 2024
In Bite by Bite, poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores the way food and drink evoke our associations and remembrances—a subtext or layering, a flavor tinged with joy, shame, exuberance, grief, desire, or nostalgia.
Nezhukumatathil restores our astonishment and wonder about food through...
Languages of Truth December 12, 2022
Gathering pieces written between 2003 and 2020, Languages of Truth chronicles Rushdie’s intellectual engagement with a period of momentous cultural shifts. Immersing the reader in a wide variety of subjects, he delves into the nature of storytelling as a human need, and what emerges is, in myriad...
Big Snake Little Snake April 14, 2022
A meditation on the ever-constant allure of risk, fortune and fate from Booker Prize-winner DBC Pierre.
Big Snake Little Snake is a cascade of true stories by DBC Pierre, recorded while on his way to make a short film with a parrot in Trinidad, which not only examines the nature of gambling, the...
Mantel Pieces November 30, 2021
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 training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.’ This collection of twenty reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three...
Essays Two November 30, 2021
Lydia Davis, who has been called “a magician of self-consciousness” by Jonathan Franzen and “the best prose stylist in America” by Rick Moody, gathered a selection of her essays for the first time in 2019 with *Essays One*. Now she continues her nonfiction project with *Essays Two*.
This edition...
Just Us September 7, 2021
In Just Us, Claudia Rankine invites us into a necessary conversation about Whiteness in America. What would it take for us to breach the silence, guilt, and violence that arise from addressing Whiteness for what it is? What are the consequences if we keep avoiding this conversation? What might it...
Not a Novel September 1, 2020
In this deeply personal collection of essays, reflections, and memoir pieces, Jenny Erpenbeck looks back on the experiences that shaped her life and literary imagination. From her childhood in East Berlin and the final years of the German Democratic Republic to her emergence as one of Germany's most...
Intimations July 28, 2020
Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality--or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what...
Coventry July 14, 2020
Coventry encompasses memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about literature, with pieces on family life, gender, and politics, and on D. H. Lawrence, Françoise Sagan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Named for an essay Cusk published in Granta (“Every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother...
Essays One November 12, 2019
Lydia Davis is a writer whose originality, influence, and wit are beyond compare. Jonathan Franzen has called her “a magician of self-consciousness,” while Rick Moody hails her as "the best prose stylist in America." And for Claire Messud, “Davis's signal gift is to make us feel alive.”
Best known...
Attention August 6, 2019
One of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, Joshua Cohen arrives with his first collection of nonfiction, the culmination of two decades of writing and thought about life in the digital age. In essays, memoir, criticism, diary entries, and letters—many appearing here for the first time—Cohen...
The Destiny Thief June 4, 2019
“I’ve written a lot about destiny in my fiction,” admits Richard Russo, “not because I understand it, but because I’d like to.” In the first of these eleven remarkable essays, Russo shares the story of his onetime fiction workshop classmate who, of the two of them, was considered the class star,...
Pops May 21, 2019
For the September 2016 issue of GQ, Michael Chabon wrote a piece about accompanying his son Abraham Chabon, then thirteen, to Paris Men’s Fashion Week. Possessed with a precocious sense of style, Abe was in his element chatting with designers he idolized and turning a critical eye to the freshest...
Bookends January 22, 2019
In Bookends, Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon offers a compilation of pieces about literature—age-old classics as well as his own—that presents a unique look into his literary origins and influences, the books that shaped his taste and formed his ideas about writing and reading.
In a Narrow Grave May 29, 2018
Originally published in 1968, In a Narrow Grave is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s homage to the past and present of the Lone Star State, where he grew up a precociously observant hand on his father’s ranch. From literature to rodeos, small-town folk to big city intellectuals, McMurtry explores...
Feel Free February 6, 2018
Sharp, witty, and intellectually restless, Feel Free brings together a wide-ranging collection of essays by Zadie Smith that explore the cultural and personal landscapes of contemporary life. Moving effortlessly between subjects—from literature and film to politics, technology, and everyday...
Release the Bats September 7, 2017
Part biography, part reflection and part practical guide, Release the Bats explores the mysteries of why and how we tell stories, and the craft of writing fiction. DBC Pierre reveals everything he learned the hard way.
The Givenness of Things October 25, 2016
In The Givenness of Things, the incomparable Marilynne Robinson delivers an impassioned critique of our contemporary society - our addiction to technology, our materialism - while arguing that reverence must be given to who we are and what we are: creatures of singular interest and value, despite...
My Generation June 2, 2015
My Generation is the definitive gathering of William Styron’s nonfiction, exposing the core of this greatly gifted, highly convivial, and profoundly serious artist from his literary emergence in the 1950s to his death in 2006.
Here are fifty years of Styron’s essays, memoirs, reviews, op-eds,...
Women in Clothes September 4, 2014
Women in Clothes is a book unlike any other. It is essentially a conversation among hundreds of women of all nationalities—famous, anonymous, religious, secular, married, single, young, old—on the subject of clothing, and how the garments we put on every day define and shape our lives. It began with...
When I Was a Child I Read Books January 29, 2013
Marilynne Robinson has built a sterling reputation not only as a major American novelist but also a rigorous thinker and incisive essayist. In this lucid but impassioned collection, Robinson expands upon the themes that have preoccupied her work with renewed vigor. Here she tackles the charged...
Hugging the Shore January 15, 2013
“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea,” writes John Updike in his Foreword to this collection of literary considerations. But the sailor doth protest too much: This collection begins somewhere near deep water, with a flotilla of short...
Picked-Up Pieces January 15, 2013
In John Updike’s second collection of assorted prose he comes into his own as a book reviewer; most of the pieces picked up here were first published in The New Yorker in the 1960s and early ’70s. If one word could sum up the young critic’s approach to books and their authors it would be...
Odd Jobs December 4, 2012
To complement his work as a fiction writer, John Updike accepted any number of odd jobs—book reviews and introductions, speeches and tributes, a “few paragraphs” on baseball or beauty or Borges—and saw each as “an opportunity to learn something, or to extract from within some unsuspected wisdom.” In...
101 Letters to a Prime Minister October 30, 2012
From the mailbox of the Prime Minister's Office to your bookshelf, a list of more than 100 books that every Canadian should read. This largely one-sided correspondence from the "loneliest book club in the world" is a compendium for bibliophiles and those who follow the Canadian political scene....
Living, Thinking, Looking June 5, 2012
Siri Hustvedt's novels are known for being as thought-provoking as they are emotionally involving. In these essays, Hustvedt shows what lies behind her fiction - an abiding curiosity about who we are and how we got that way, which has led her into the realms of psychology and neuroscience, as well...
Whatever It Is, I Don't Like It March 6, 2012
The winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, Howard Jacobson, brims with life in this collection of his most acclaimed journalism. From the unusual disposal of his father-in-law's ashes and the cultural wasteland of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to the melancholy sensuality of Leonard Cohen and desolation of...
The Cows March 29, 2011
The Cows is a meditative and closely observed work centered on three cows living in a field across from the narrator’s home. Through a series of detailed observations recorded over time, Lydia Davis studies the animals’ movements, moods, habits, and interactions with remarkable patience and...
Changing My Mind October 26, 2010
Split into five sections--Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering--Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural.
This engaging collection of essays, some published here for the first time, reveals Smith as a passionate and precise...
The Education of a British-Protected Child October 6, 2009
Chinua Achebe's characteristically measured and nuanced voice is everywhere present in these seventeen beautifully written pieces.
In a preface, he discusses his historic visit to his Nigerian homeland on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of *Things Fall Apart*, the story...