“Writing an essay is like catching a wave,” posits guest editor Ariel Levy. “To catch a wave, you need skill and nerve, not just moving water.” This year’s writers are certainly full of nerve, and have crafted a wide range of pieces awash in a diversity of moods, voices, and stances. Leaving an abusive marriage, parting with a younger …
From the bestselling author of Stitches and Help, Thanks, Wow comes her long-awaited collection of new and selected essays on hope, joy, and grace.Anne Lamott writes about faith, family, and community in essays that are both wise and irreverent. It’s an approach that has become her trademark. Now in Small Victories, Lamott offers a new message of hope …
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
In this exuberantly praised book – a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner – David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal …
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
This celebrated New York Times bestseller — now poised to reach an even wider audience in paperback — is a book that is changing the way Americans think about selling products and disseminating …
Since the Second World War ended, America has performed like a gyroscope losing its balance, wobbling this way and that, unable to settle into itself and its own great promise. Wendell Berry has been a voice for that promise, a voice for reason and hope and urgent concern.As the United States prepares to leave its long war in …
Essayist, poet, and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) propounded a transcendental idealism emphasizing self-reliance, self-culture, and individual expression. The six essays and one address included in this volume, selected from Essays, First Series (1841) and Essays, Second Series (1844), offer a representative sampling of his views outlining that moral idealism as well as a hint of the later …
Dear Santa: Children’s Christmas Letters and Wish Lists, 1870 – 1920
This first-ever collection of children’s letters to Santa—written between 1870 and 1920—presents more than 100 charming missives, each one yet more endearing. Along with its vintage charm, timeless sentiments, and non-denominational perspective, this heartwarming book is filled with historical discoveries that will delight everyone who loves this holiday ritual. Dear Santa is a celebration of one of Christmas’s …
D’Ambrosio is already considered one of America’s premier short story writers, but Loitering cements his place as one of our great living essayists. Charles D’Ambrosio’s essay collection Orphans spawned something of a cult following. In the decade since the tiny limited-edition volume sold out its print run, its devotees have pressed it upon their friends, students, and colleagues, …
A 16th-century mystic who wrote of man’s relationship with God, St. John of the Cross was also a Carmelite monk who helped reform the Order and aided St. Teresa of Avila in establishing new convents for women. In this book — his spiritual masterpiece and a classic of Christian literature and mysticism — he addresses several subjects, among …
@font-face { font-family: “Cambria”; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } “All first-rate criticism first defines what we are confronting,” the late, great jazz critic Whitney Balliett once wrote. By that measure, the essays of Christopher Hitchens are in the first …