This collection brings together the six international winners of the Notting Hill Editions £20,000 Essay Prize. From the coolly analytical to the impassioned winning entry 'A Eulogy for Nigger', these essays showcase the dazzling literary range of the form.

Enter the haunting, beautiful and provocative world of Yukio Mishima, one of Japan's greatest writers, whose extraordinary life ended as dramatically as his fictionConsidered one of the greatest Japanese writers of the twentieth century, Mishima fused traditional Japanese aesthetics with modern ideas in works that explored sexuality, death, and political change and broke cultural boundaries. His extraordinary life was as provocative as his fiction, culminating in h...

Lily Cole stars as Helen of Troy, ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’, in Simon Armitage’s vivid, visceral adaptation of Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s AeneidFor ten years, the Greeks have been laying siege to Troy to win back their abducted queen, Helen. But as the war drags on, and the battlefields run scarlet with blood, the opposing forces are entrenched in a bitter stalemate. As Gods and mortals squabble amongst themselves for the spoils of...

Join Egyptologist Garry J. Shaw on an entertaining tour up the Nile, through a beautiful and fascinating landscape populated with a rich mythology: the stories of Horus, Isis, Osiris, and their enemies and allies in tales of vengeance, tragedy, and fantastic metamorphoses. Shaw retells these stories with his characteristic wit, and reconnects them to the temples and monuments that still stand today, offering a fresh look at the most visited sites of Egypt.The myths of ancient Egypt...

From the New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed comes a brave, frank, and exquisitely written memoir that will change the way you see the world.Barbara Ehrenreich is one of the most important thinkers of our time. Educated as a scientist, she is an author, journalist, activist, and advocate for social justice. In Living With a Wild God, she recounts her quest-beginning in childhood-to find "the Truth" about the universe and...

"A mock self-help book designed not to help but to provoke . . . to inveigle us into thinking about who we are and how we got into this mess." ( Los Angeles Times Book Review).Filled with quizzes, essays, short stories, and diagrams, Lost in the Cosmos is National Book Award–winning author Walker Percy's humorous take on a familiar genre—as well as an invitation to serious contemplation of life's biggest questions.One part parody and two p...

The legendary reporter and author of The Right Stuff takes on Darwin, Chomsky, and the origin of language in "his boldest bit of dueling yet" ( The New York Times).Tom Wolfe, the great journalist-provocateur, aims his piercing wit at the presiding theories of what makes us human. The Kingdom of Speech is a captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech—not evolution—is responsible for humanity's com...

“A delightful compendium of the kind of facts you immediately want to share with anyone you encounter . . . . Simon Winchester has firmly earned his place in history . . . as a promulgator of knowledge of every variety, perhaps the last of the famous explorers who crisscrossed the now-vanished British Empire and reported what they found to an astonished world.” — New York TimesFrom the creation of the first encyclopedia to Wikipedia, from ancient m...

The definitive biography of the fascinating William James, whose life and writing put an indelible stamp on psychology, philosophy, teaching, and religion—on modernism itself.Often cited as the "father of American psychology," William James was an intellectual luminary who made significant contributions to at least five fields: psychology, philosophy, religious studies, teaching, and literature.A member of one of the most unusual and notable of American fami...

A collection of the year's best essays selected by André Aciman, author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name."An essay is the child of uncertainty," André Aciman contends in his introduction to The Best American Essays 2020. "The struggle to write what one hopes is entirely true, and the long incubation every piece of writing requires of a writer who is thinking difficult thoughts, are what ultimately give the writing its depth, its ma...

"Enthralling." —Frans de Waal, New York Times Book ReviewSurvival of the fittest or survival of the nicest? Since the dawn of time man has contemplated the mystery of altruism, but it was Darwin who posed the question most starkly. From the selfless ant to the stinging bee to the man laying down his life for a stranger, evolution has yielded a goodness that in theory should never be.Set against the sweeping tale of 150 years of scientific attempts ...

The National Book Award–winning author compiles a "thought-provoking volume" of essays by Joyce Carol Oates, Oliver Sacks, Jaquira Diaz and others ( Publishers Weekly).As Jonathan Franzen writes in his introduction, his main criterion for selecting The Best American Essays 2016 "was whether an author had taken a risk." The resulting volume showcases authorial risk in a variety of forms, from championing an unpopular opinion to the possibility of r...