Consisting of contributions from a host of international scholars (in fields as diverse as literature, architecture, philosophy, and education), Alain Beauclair and Josh Toth’s Nature and Its Unnatural Relations: Points of Access intercedes in ongoing debates about accessing, defining, and respecting a world humans continue to misuse and misunderstand—and that, as a result, is becoming increasingly inhospitable. The chapters shuttle between a variety of aesthetic and philosophical...

Vanished poets, overlooked artists, hapless visionaries: The Purgatory Press opens a tantalizing window on a publisher's catalogue of improbable books. Dark, comical, and startlingly inventive, After the End is a dazzling display of postmodern storytelling. These short fictions showcase the many talents of an emerging author.

A timely, powerful collection of essays from one of our sharpest minds and most sparkling stylists.How much joy can a person tolerate? How many kinds of boredom make up a life? Who owns the story of black America? Should Justin Bieber be more like Socrates? And why is there a dead art collector floating in the swimming pool?Dazzlingly insightful, explosively funny and ever-timely, Zadie Smith is back with a second unmissable collection of essays. From German...

**Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for BiographyLonglisted for The Orwell Prize for Political WritingAn electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silent, from the author of Orwell's Roses**In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on t...

A collection of essays on life and literature, from one of the most iconic authors and astute critics in contemporary letters.Words Are My Matter is essential reading: a collection of talks, essays, and criticism by Ursula K. Le Guin, a literary legend and unparalleled voice of our social conscience. Here she investigates the depth and breadth of contemporary fiction—including landmark discussions of science fiction and fantasy—and, through the lens of lit...

A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of LoveAll narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.How does on...

“One of the finest writers of the new nonfiction” (Harper’s Bazaar) explores the role of art in our tumultuous modern era.In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century.Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, examining their role ...

Elizabeth Costello is an Australian writer of international renown. Famous principally for an early novel that established her reputation, she has reached the stage where her remaining function is to be venerated and applauded.Her life has become a series of engagements in sterile conference rooms throughout the world - a private consciousness obliged to reveal itself to a curious public: the presentation of a major award at an American college where she is required to deliver a le...

From Holbein to Hockney, from Norman Rockwell to Pablo Picasso, from sixteenth-century Rome to 1980s SoHo, Robert Hughes looks with love, loathing, warmth, wit and authority at a wide range of art and artists, good, bad, past and present.As art critic for Time magazine, internationally acclaimed for his study of modern art, The Shock of the New, he is perhaps America’s most widely read and admired writer on art. In this book: nearly a hundred of his finest essays o...

A blazingly intelligent first book of essays from the award-winning author of Open City and Every Day Is for the ThiefNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BYTime • The Guardian • Harper's Bazaar • San Francisco Chronicle • The Atlantic • Financial Times • KirkusFinalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and PEN/Jean Stein Book Award

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...

The most precious treasure of this collection is that it gives us the rich back-story and diverse range of influences on Margaret Atwood's work. From the aunts who encouraged her nascent writing career to the influence of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four on The Handmaid's Tale, we trace the movement of Atwood's fertile and curious mind in action over the years. Atwood's controversial political pieces, Napoleon's Two Biggest Mistakes and Letter to America -- both not-so-veiled warnings ...