"The essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like 'a firefighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them.' For the past twenty-five years, even as his novels have earned him worldwide acclaim, Franzen has led a second life as a risk-taking essayist. Now, at a moment when technology has inflamed tribal hatreds and the planet is beset by unnatural calamities, he is back with a new collection of essays...

"In six wide-ranging essays, Kathleen Hale traces some of the most treacherous fault lines in modern America--from sexual assault to Internet trolling, from environmental illness to our own animal nature. In these thought-provoking stories of predators and prey, Hale proves herself to be an exhilarating new voice whose writing is both fearless and profound. In "First I Got Pregnant. Then I Decided to Kill the Mountain Lion," Hale recounts the month...

Science in the Soul brings together three decades of Richard Dawkins' essays, polemics, and paeans illuminating the wonders of nature and attacking faulty logic. In a passionate introduction, Dawkins calls on us to insist that reason take center stage and that gut feelings -- even when they don't represent the stirred dark waters of xenophobia, misogyny, or other blind prejudice -- should stay out of the voting booth. In the essays themselves, newly...

A timely synthesis of Shriver's expansive work, this collection of thirty-five works curated from her many columns, features, essays, and op-eds reveals a provocative, talented writer at her most assured.

"The first collection from a Whiting Writers' Award winner whose work has become a fixture of The Paris Review and n+1. Can civilization save us from ourselves? That is the question J.D. Daniels asks in his first book, a series of six letters written during dark nights of the soul. Working from his own highly varied experience--as a janitor, a night watchman, an adjunct professor, a drunk, an exterminator, a dutiful son--he considers how far books...

With a wickedly witty touch, Elkin's essays takes readers on a tour of American life in the 20th century. Stanley Elkin was one of our great American writers. A divine exploiter of the idiocies and intricacies of our language, as John Irving put it, and nowhere is that more clear than this collection of essays, which find Elkin wresting hilarity and heartbreak from the most unlikely of sources.

A writer who can imagine the "community belonging to its place" is one who has applied his knowledge and citizenship to achieve the goal to which Wendell Berry has always aspired -- to be a native to his own local culture. And for Berry, what is "local, fully imagined, becomes universal," and the "local" is to know one's place and allow the imagination to inspire and instill "a practical respect for what is there besides ourselves." In Imagination...

A collection of essays from Italian novelist Umberto Eco on a wide range of topics.

Elizabeth Hardwick wrote during the golden age of the American literary essay. For Hardwick, the essay was an imaginative endeavor, a serious form, criticism worthy of the literature in question. In the essays collected here she covers civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s, describes places where she lived and locations she visited, and writes about the foundations of American literature--Melville, James, Wharton--and the changes in American fiction,...

"From graffiti gangs and Grand Theft Auto to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing. Starting with Hodson's own work experience, which ranges from the mundane to the bizarre--including...