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 ...

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...

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...

"Clever. . . magical. . . beautifully crafted. Kingsolver spins you around the philosophic world a dozen times." — Milwaukee Sentinel"Kingsolver's essays should be savored like quiet afternoons with a friend." —New York Times Book ReviewIn this brilliant essay collection, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Kingsolver turns to her favored literary terrain to explore themes of family, community, and the natural wo...

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...

A “hilarious” (The New York Times Book Review) collection of essays, articles, observations—and even some country-music lyrics—that offer a rare overview of the eclectic sensibility of an American original“[Tom] Robbins is fearless, original, mind-expanding, and funny as hell.”—San Diego Union-Tribune“Part philosopher, part court jester, Robbins uses sparkling phrases mixed with over-the-top puns to impart his Zenl...

Join Ursula K. Le Guin as she explores a broad array of subjects, ranging from Tolstoy, Twain, and Tolkien to women's shoes, beauty, and family life. With her customary wit, intelligence, and literary craftsmanship, she offers a diverse and highly engaging set of readings. The Wave in the Mind includes some of Le Guin's finest literary criticism, rare autobiographical writings, performance art pieces, and, most centrally, her reflections on the arts of writing and reading.

'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 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...