This collection brings together the six international winners of the Notting Hill Editions £20,000 Essay Prize. Covering an array of subjects, from the meaning of art to supermarket shopping, these pieces were chosen for their originality, literary style and above all their ability to persuade. Includes essays by William Max Nelson, Laura Esther Wolfson, Garret Keizer, Karen Holmberg, Patrick McGuiness and Dasha Shkurpela

Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language by Eva Hoffman (107,000 words)The late poet and memoirist Czeslaw Milosz wrote, "I am enchanted. This book is graceful and profound."Since its publication in 1989, many other readers across the world have been enchanted by Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, a classic of exile and immigrant literature, as well as a girl’s coming-of-age memoir. Lost in Translation moves from Hoffman's childhood in Crac...

The new book of articles and opinion from Jonathan Franzen, author of ‘Freedom’ and ‘The Corrections’.Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Freedom’ was the runaway most-discussed novel of 2010, an ambitious and searching engagement with life in America in the 21st century. Now, a new collection of Franzen’s non-fiction brings fresh demonstrations of his vivid, moral intelligence, confirming his status not only as a great American novelist but also as a master noticer, social critic, and self-invest...

Award winning essayist Scott Russell Sanders once compared the art of essay writing to "the pursuit of mental rabbits"-a rambling through thickets of thought in search of some brief glimmer of fuzzy truth. While some people persist in the belief that essays are stuffy and antiquated, the truth is that the personal essay is an ever-changing creative medium that provides an ideal vehicle for satisfying the human urge to document truths as we experience them and share them with others-to capt...

With the death of her aunt, Maria Stepanova is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sont...

After critiquing―and infuriating―the art world with The Painted Word, the award-winning author Tom Wolfe shares his less-than-favorable thoughts about modern architecture in From Bauhaus to Our House.In this examination of the strange saga of twentieth-century architecture, Wolfe takes such European architects as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Bauhaus art school founder Walter Gropius to task for their glass-and-steel-box buildings th...

BONUS: This edition contains excerpts from Arthur Phillips's The Tragedy of Arthur, The Song Is You, The Egyptologist, and Angelica.A first novel of startling scope and ambition, Prague depicts an intentionally lost Lost Generation as it follows five American expats who come to Budapest in the early 1990s to seek their fortune—financial, romantic, and spiritual—in an exotic city newly opened to the West. They harbor the vague suspicion that their ...

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...

**“A sharp and unconventional book — a swirl of memoir, travelogue and biography of some of history's champion day-dreamers.” —Maureen Corrigan, "Fresh Air"A spirited inquiry into the lost value of leisure and daydream**The Art of the Wasted Day is a picaresque travelogue of leisure written from a lifelong enchantment with solitude. Patricia Hampl visits the homes of historic exemplars of ease who made repose a goal, even an art form. She begins with two celebrated...

'Language is a body, a living creature ... and this creature's home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate'. John Berger's work has revolutionized the way we understand visual language. In this new book he writes about language itself, and how it relates to thought, art, song, storytelling and political discourse today. Also containing Berger's own drawings, notes, memories and reflections on everything from Albert Camus to global capitalism, Confabulations takes us to what...

Roaming from Tashkent to San Francisco, this is the true story of one budding writer's strange encounters with the fanatics who are devoted - absurdly! melancholically! ecstatically! - to the Russian classics. Combining fresh readings of the great Russians from Gogol to Goncharov with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence, The Possessed introduces a brilliant and distinctive new voice: comic, humane, charming, poignant and completely, and unpretentiousl...

From the author of The Bad Book Affair comes a witty, personal, and entertaining meditation on the history and significance of paper—an international cultural study and a series of personal reflections on the meaning of this essential product.Let us suppose for a moment that paper were to disappear. Would anything be lost? Everything would be lost.Paper surrounds us. Not only as books, letters and diaries, but as beer mats and birth certificates, board games and business ca...