Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter reveals Maya Angelou’s path to living well and living a life with meaning. Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that taught Angelou lessons in compassion and fortitude: how she was brought up by her indomitable grandmother in …
A brilliant, life-affirming, and hilarious memoir from a “genius” (The New York Times) and master storyteller.The seven years between the birth of Etgar Keret’s son and the death of his father were good years, though still full of reasons to worry. Lev is born in the midst of a terrorist attack. Etgar’s father gets cancer. The threat of …
A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works
The classic A Year with C.S. Lewis is an intimate day-to-day companion by C.S. Lewis, the most important Christian writer of the 20th century. The daily meditations have been culled from Lewis’ celebrated signature classics: Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, and A Grief Observed, as well as from the distinguished …
Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color . . .A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists.Maggie Nelson is the author of …
Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books
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. Michael Dirda has been hailed as “the best-read person in America” (The Paris Review) and “the best book critic in America” (The New York Observer). In addition to the Pulitzer …
Saloon-keepers and street preachers, gypsies and steel-walking Mohawks, a bearded lady and a 93-year-old “seafoodetarian” who believes his specialized diet will keep him alive for another two decades. These are among the people that Joseph Mitchell immortalized in his reportage for The New Yorker and in four books—McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, …
“All of us are creatures of a day,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, “rememberer and remembered alike.” In his long-awaited new collection of stories, renowned psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom describes his patients’ struggles—as well as his own—to come to terms with the two great challenges of existence: how to have a meaningful life, and how to reckon with its inevitable …
“No denunciation without its proper instrument of close analysis,” Roland Barthes wrote in his preface to Mythologies. There is no more proper instrument of analysis of our contemporary myths than this book―one of the most significant works in French theory, and one that has transformed the way readers and philosophers view the world around them.Our age is a …
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 a survey. The editors composed a list of more than …
A Confession and Other Religious Writings (Penguin Classics)
Describing Tolstoy’s crisis of depression and estrangement from the world, A Confession (1879) is an autobiographical work of exceptional emotional honesty. By the time he was fifty, Tolstoy had already written the novels that would assure him of literary immortality; he had a wife, a large estate and numerous children; he was a happy man’ and in good …