A follow-up to Patrick Madden’s award-winning debut, this introspective and exuberant collection of essays is wide-ranging and wild, following bifurcating paths of thought to surprising connections. In Sublime Physick, Madden seeks what is common and ennobling among seemingly disparate, even divisive, subjects, ruminating on midlife, time, family, forgiveness, loss, originality, a Canadian rock band, and much more, discerning the ways in which the natural world (fisica) t...

15 Bytes Book Award2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards, Gold Medal WinnerIn English disparate means “different” or “miscellaneous”—apt descriptors of these essays by Patrick Madden. In Spanish, however, disparate means “nonsense,” “folly,” or “absurdity,”—words appropriate to Madden’s goal of undercutting any notion that essays must be serious business. Thus, in this collection, the essays are frivolous and lively, aiming to make readers laugh while they...

Fourth Genre: Twenty-Five Essays from Our First Twenty-Five Years is an anthology of outstanding creative nonfiction published since the journal’s first issue in 1999. Describing it as an anthology, though, feels too dry for this collection. Is it a mixtape, maybe? A literary festival or a potluck? A mosaic of voices, a tapestry, or an open mic? This volume includes essays on grief and guns, prayer and parenthood, fear and family, race and religion, hometowns and home cooking. It ...

Writers of the modern essay can trace their chosen genre all the way back to Michel de Montaigne (1533–92). But save for the recent notable best seller How to Live: A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell, Montaigne is largely ignored. After Montaigne—a collection of twenty-four new personal essays intended as tribute—aims to correct this collective lapse of memory and introduce modern readers and writers to their stylistic forebear.Though it’s been over four hundre...

The Lichtenberg Figures, winner of the Hayden Carruth Award, is an unconventional sonnet sequence that interrogates the relationship between language and memory, violence and form. “Lichtenberg figures” are fern-like electrical patterns that can appear on (and quickly fade from) the bodies of people struck by lightning.Throughout this playful and elegiac debut—with its flashes of autobiography, intellection, comedy, and critique—the vocabulary of academic theory collides w...

In the past year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child. Now, in a New York of increasingly frequent superstorms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water.In prose that Jonatha...

We all want to be happy but what is happiness? Haim Shapira navigates the terrain of happiness, exploring and contemplating an eclectic range of theories and insights into the conflicts we face on our journey to creating our own happiness.What is your happiest moment? How can you know it? Do we waste time or does time waste us? Are questions about meaning truly meaningful? What’s really important? Drawing on literary and philosophical sources ranging from Alice in Wonderland and Th...

'Punchy and compassionate' OBSERVERA collection of gorgeously written and timely pieces in which prize-winning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life's inevitable hardships.In "We Kin" he thinks about the garden (especially around August, when the zucchini and tomatoes come on) as a laboratory of mutual aid; in "Share Your Bucket" he explores skate-boarding's reclama...

In the wee hours of the night, when inspiration strikes unexpectedly, don't let it slip away.If you write, you know what it's like. Insight and creativity—the desire to push the boundaries of your writing—strike when you least expect it. And you're often in no position to act: in the shower, driving the kids to school...in the middle of the night.The 3 A.M. Epiphany offers more than 200 intriguing writing exercises designed to help you think, write...

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 stunning masterclass on the creative process, the craft of writing, and the art of finding inspiration from Stephen King, Elizabeth Gilbert, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, Roxane Gay, Neil Gaiman, and more of the most acclaimed writers at work today"For artists in need of a creative fix, Light the Dark is as good as a visit from the divine muse." -Bookpage**What inspires you? That's the simple, but profound question posed to forty-six renowned authors in LI...

From This American Life alum David Rakoff comes a hilarious collection that single-handedly raises self-deprecation to an art form. Whether impersonating Sigmund Freud in a department store window during the holidays, climbing an icy mountain in cheap loafers, or learning primitive survival skills in the wilds of New Jersey, Rakoff clearly demonstrates how he doesn’t belong–nor does he try to.In his debut collection of essays, Rakoff uses his razor-sharp wit and snarky hum...