What if the great love of your life is friendship?In their twenties, Lissa Soep and her boyfriend forged deep friendships with two other couples—Mercy and Christine; and Emily and Jonnie—until, decades later, Jonnie died suddenly, in an accident, and Christine passed away after a mysterious illness. Christine had been a writer, Jonnie a storyteller. Lissa couldn’t imagine a world without their letters, postcards, texts—a world without their voices. Then she found c...

This is the first book to take us inside Youth Radio for a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at a unique, Peabody Award-winning organization that produces distinctive content for outlets from National Public Radio to YouTube. Young people come to Youth Radio, headquartered in Oakland, California, from under-resourced public schools and neighborhoods in order to produce media that will transform both their own lives and the world around them. Drop That Knowledge weaves their comp...

An illuminating, intricately woven memoir about friendships, loss, and language—a stunning affirmation of the conversations that shape and sustain us, even in the presence of deathLissa Soep lost two friends in quick succession. Christine died slowly, from a mysterious illness, while Jonnie died suddenly, too young. In the ten years since, Soep has found herself among those left behind—spouses, lovers, family, friends—whose grief could have rendered them silent, at a loss for words...

The everyday world bedevils us. To make sense of it, we tell ourselves stories. Here, in short, vivid, dramatic tales, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz draws from his twenty-year practice to track the collaborative journey of therapist and patient as they uncover the hidden feelings behind ordinary behavior. A woman finds herself daydreaming as she returns home from a business trip; a young man loses his wallet. We learn, too, from more extreme examples: the patient who points an unloaded gun a...

Bestselling writer and psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom puts himself on the couch in this memoir, blending psychological insight with warmth and empathy.**“An amazing storyteller, a gorgeous writer, a great, generous, compassionate thinker, and―quite rightly―one of the world’s most influential mental healthcare practitioners.” ―**GuardianIrvin D. Yalom has made a career of investigating the lives of others. In this memoir, he turns h...

A self-described failed filmmaker falls obsessively in love with her theorist-husband's colleague: a manifesto for a new kind of feminism and the power of first-person narration.In I Love Dick, published in 1997, Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, and Video Green, boldly tore away the veil that separates fiction from reality and privacy from self-expression. It's no wonder that I Love Dick instantly elicit...

Personal reflections on the vital role of the notebook in creative writing, from Dorianne Laux, Sue Grafton, John Dufresne, Kyoko Mori, and more.This collection of essays by established professional writers explores how their notebooks serve as their studios and workshops—places to collect, to play, and to make new discoveries with language, passions, and curiosities. For these diverse writers, the journal also serves as an ideal forum to develop their writing voice...

“A book for the moment and for the ages. It’s questing, pissed, propulsive, funny, generous, pervy, and original—full of love and pain in all their entwined glory.” —Maggie Nelson, author of The ArgonautsWINNER OF THE AMBER HOLLIBAUGH AWARD FOR LGBTQ+ SOCIAL JUSTICE WRITINGThe long-awaited essay collection from one of the most influential voices in disability activism that detonates a bomb in our collective understanding of...

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic ob...

A collection of essays about the joys and struggles of being alone by 22 literary writers including: Lev Grossman, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lena Dunham, Jesmyn Ward, Yiyun Li, and Anthony DoerrIf you’re feeling lonely or if you’ve ever felt unseen, if you’re emboldened by solitude or secretly longing for it: Welcome to The Lonely Stories. This cathartic collection of essays illuminates an experience that so few of us openly discuss. Some stories are heartbreaking, s...

A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by award-winning writer Alexander Chee.Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

Inspired by the website that the New York Times hailed as "redefining mourning," this book is a fresh and irreverent examination into navigating grief and resilience in the age of social media, offering comfort and community for coping with the mess of loss through candid original essays from a variety of voices, accompanied by gorgeous two-color illustrations and wry infographics.At a time when we mourn public figures and national tragedies with hashtags, where intimate p...