Download or read book Essayists on the Essay written by Carl H. Klaus and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first historically and internationally comprehensive collection of its kind, Essayists on the Essay is a path-breaking work that is nothing less than a richly varied sourcebook for anyone interested in the theory, practice, and art of the essay. This unique work includes a selection of fifty distinctive pieces by American, Canadian, English, European, and South American essayists from Montaigne to the present—many of which have not previously been anthologized or translated—as well as a detailed bibliographical and thematic guide to hundreds of additional works about the essay. From a buoyant introduction that provides a sweeping historical and analytic overview of essayists’ thinking about their genre—a collective poetics of the essay—to the detailed headnotes offering pointed information about both the essayists themselves and the anthologized selections, to the richly detailed bibliographic sections, Essayists on the Essay is essential to anyone who cares about the form. This collection provides teachers, scholars, essayists, and readers with the materials they need to take a fresh look at this important but often overlooked form that has for too long been relegated to the role of service genre—used primarily to write about other more “literary” genres or to teach young people how to write. Here, in a single celebratory volume, are four centuries of commentary and theory reminding us of the essay’s storied history, its international appeal, and its relationship not just with poetry and fiction but also with radio, film, video, and new media.
Download or read book Essayism written by Brian Dillon and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling ode to the essay form and the great essaysists themselves, from Montaigne to Woolf to Sontag. Essayism is a book about essays and essayists, a study of melancholy and depression, a love letter to belle-lettrists, and an account of the indispensable lifelines of reading and writing. Brian Dillon’s style incorporates diverse features of the essay. By turns agglomerative, associative, digressive, curious, passionate, and dispassionate, his is a branching book of possibilities, seeking consolation and direction from Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Georges Perec, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Susan Sontag, to name just a few of his influences. Whether he is writing on origins, aphorisms, coherence, vulnerability, anxiety, or a number of other subjects, his command of language, his erudition, and his own personal history serve not so much to illuminate or magnify the subject as to discover it anew through a kaleidoscopic alignment of attention, thought, and feeling, a dazzling and momentary suspension of disparate elements, again and again.
Download or read book The Art of the Personal Essay written by Phillip Lopate and published by Anchor. This book was released on 1997-01-15 with total page 833 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than four hundred years, the personal essay has been one of the richest and most vibrant of all literary forms. Distinguished from the detached formal essay by its friendly, conversational tone, its loose structure, and its drive toward candor and self-disclosure, the personal essay seizes on the minutiae of daily life-vanities, fashions, foibles, oddballs, seasonal rituals, love and disappointment, the pleasures of solitude, reading, taking a walk -- to offer insight into the human condition and the great social and political issues of the day. The Art of the Personal Essay is the first anthology to celebrate this fertile genre. By presenting more than seventy-five personal essays, including influential forerunners from ancient Greece, Rome, and the Far East, masterpieces from the dawn of the personal essay in the sixteenth century, and a wealth of the finest personal essays from the last four centuries, editor Phillip Lopate, himself an acclaimed essayist, displays the tradition of the personal essay in all its historical grandeur, depth, and diversity.
Download or read book Heavy written by Kiese Laymon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times* *Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, BuzzFeed (Nonfiction), The Undefeated, Library Journal (Biography/Memoirs), The Washington Post (Nonfiction), Southern Living (Southern), Entertainment Weekly, and The New York Times Critics* In this powerful, provocative, and universally lauded memoir—winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and finalist for the Kirkus Prize—genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon “provocatively meditates on his trauma growing up as a black man, and in turn crafts an essential polemic against American moral rot” (Entertainment Weekly). In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to time in New York as a college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. Heavy is a “gorgeous, gutting…generous” (The New York Times) memoir that combines personal stories with piercing intellect to reflect both on the strife of American society and on Laymon’s experiences with abuse. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, he asks us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free. “A book for people who appreciated Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family through years of haunting implosions and long reverberations. “You won’t be able to put [this memoir] down…It is packed with reminders of how black dreams get skewed and deferred, yet are also pregnant with the possibility that a kind of redemption may lie in intimate grappling with black realities” (The Atlantic).
Download or read book Why I Write written by George Orwell and published by Renard Press Ltd. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times
Download or read book The Return of the Author written by Eugen Simion and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work traces the debate of biographical criticism.
Download or read book Essays of E B White written by E. B. White and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Some of the finest examples of contemporary, genuinely American prose. White's style incorporates eloquence without affection, profundity without pomposity, and wit without frivolity or hostility. Like his predecessors Thoreau and Twain, White's creative, humane, and graceful perceptions are an education for the sensibilities." — Washington Post The classic collection by one of the greatest essayists of our time. Selected by E.B. White himself, the essays in this volume span a lifetime of writing and a body of work without peer. "I have chosen the ones that have amused me in the rereading," he writes in the Foreword, "alone with a few that seemed to have the odor of durability clinging to them." These essays are incomparable; this is a volume to treasure and savor at one's leisure.
Download or read book The Word Pretty written by Elisa Gabbert and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. Memoir. Cultural Criticism. In THE WORD PRETTY Elisa Gabbert brings together humor and observational intelligence to create a roving and curious series of lyrical essays on writing, reading, and living. Combining elements of criticism, meditation, and personal essay, this book reveals a poet's attention turned to subjects from translation to aphorism, from unreliable memory to beauty and the male gaze.
Download or read book One With the Tiger written by Steven Church and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2016-10-17 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On September 21, 2012, twenty-five year old David Villalobos purchased a pass for the Bronx Zoo and a ticket for a ride on the Bengali Express Monorail. Biding his time, he waited until the monorail was just near the enclosure of a four hundred pound Siberian tiger named Bashuta before leaping into it. They spent ten long minutes together in the tiger’s cage before nature took its course, with one exception: The tiger did not kill him. David’s only response: “It’s a spiritual thing. I wanted to be at one with the tiger.” One with The Tiger: On Savagery and Intimacy uses David’s story, and other moments of violent encounters between humans and predators, to explore the line between human and animal. Exposing what the author defines as the “shared liminal space between peace and violence,” Church posits that the animal is always encroaching on the civilization —and those seeking its wildness are in fact searching for an ecstatic moment that can define what it means to be human. Using examples from Timothy Treadwell to Mike Tyson, or such television icons as Grizzly Adams and The Incredible Hulk, Church shows how this ecstasy can seep its way into the less natural world of popular culture, proving time and again that each of us can be our own worst predator.
Download or read book The Glorious American Essay written by Phillip Lopate and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 929 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith—selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate "Not only an education but a joy. This is a book for the ages." —Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances The essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves—sometimes critically—to American values. We see the Puritans, the Founding Fathers and Mothers, and the stars of the American Renaissance struggle to establish a national culture. A grand tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity. Lopate has cast his net wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, literary, polemical, autobiographical, and humorous essays. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is a dazzling overview of the riches of the American essay.
Download or read book Dear Cyborgs written by Eugene Lim and published by FSG Originals. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Vol. 1 Brooklyn's Favorite Fiction Books of 2017, a Literary Hub Staff Favorite Book of 2017, and one of BOMB Magazine's "Looking Back on 2017: Literature" Selections. "Wondrous . . . [A] sense of the erratic and tangential quality of everyday life—even if it’s displaced into a bizarre, parallel world—drifts off the page, into the world you see, after reading Dear Cyborgs." —Hua Hsu, The New Yorker In a small Midwestern town, two Asian American boys bond over their outcast status and a mutual love of comic books. Meanwhile, in an alternative or perhaps future universe, a team of superheroes ponder modern society during their time off. Between black-ops missions and rescuing hostages, they swap stories of artistic malaise and muse on the seemingly inescapable grip of market economics. Gleefully toying with the conventions of the novel, Dear Cyborgs weaves together the story of a friendship’s dissolution with a provocative and timely meditation on protest. Through a series of linked monologues, a lively cast of characters explores narratives of resistance—protest art, eco-terrorists, Occupy squatters, pyromaniacal militants—and the extent to which any of these can truly withstand and influence the cold demands of contemporary capitalism. All the while, a mysterious cybernetic book of clairvoyance beckons, and trusted allies start to disappear. Entwining comic-book villains with cultural critiques, Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs is a fleet-footed literary exploration of power, friendship, and creativity. Ambitious and knowing, it combines detective pulps, subversive philosophy, and Hollywood chase scenes, unfolding like the composites and revelations of a dream.
Download or read book This Chair Rocks written by Ashton Applewhite and published by Celadon Books. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author, activist, and TED speaker Ashton Applewhite has written a rousing manifesto calling for an end to discrimination and prejudice on the basis of age. In our youth obsessed culture, we’re bombarded by media images and messages about the despairs and declines of our later years. Beauty and pharmaceutical companies work overtime to convince people to purchase products that will retain their youthful appearance and vitality. Wrinkles are embarrassing. Gray hair should be colored and bald heads covered with implants. Older minds and bodies are too frail to keep up with the pace of the modern working world and olders should just step aside for the new generation. Ashton Applewhite once held these beliefs too until she realized where this prejudice comes from and the damage it does. Lively, funny, and deeply researched, This Chair Rocks traces her journey from apprehensive boomer to pro-aging radical, and in the process debunks myth after myth about late life. Explaining the roots of ageism in history and how it divides and debases, Applewhite examines how ageist stereotypes cripple the way our brains and bodies function, looks at ageism in the workplace and the bedroom, exposes the cost of the all-American myth of independence, critiques the portrayal of elders as burdens to society, describes what an all-age-friendly world would look like, and offers a rousing call to action. It’s time to create a world of age equality by making discrimination on the basis of age as unacceptable as any other kind of bias. Whether you’re older or hoping to get there, this book will shake you by the shoulders, cheer you up, make you mad, and change the way you see the rest of your life. Age pride! “Wow. This book totally rocks. It arrived on a day when I was in deep confusion and sadness about my age. Everything about it, from my invisibility to my neck. Within four or five wise, passionate pages, I had found insight, illumination, and inspiration. I never use the word empower, but this book has empowered me.” —Anne Lamott, New York Times bestselling author
Download or read book George Orwell the Essayist written by Peter Marks and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-04-06 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Orwell is acclaimed as one of English literature's great essayists. Yet, while many are considered classics, as a body of work his essays have been neglected. Peter Marks provides the first sustained study of Orwell the essayist, giving these compelling pieces the critical attention they merit. Orwell employed the essay as a tool to entertain, illuminate and provoke readers across an array of topics. Marks situates the essays in their original contexts, exploring how journals influenced the type of essay Orwell wrote. Acknowledging this periodical culture helps explain the tactics Orwell employed, the topics he chose and the audiences he addressed. Orwell's first and last published works were essays, providing evidence of the development of his cultural and political views over two decades. Essays helped him fashion his distinctive literary 'voice' and Mark traces how their afterlife contributes to Orwell's posthumous reputation. Arguing the essays are central to Orwell's enduring literary, political and cultural value, Marks shows how we understand the complexities, subtleties, and contradictions of Orwell better when we understand his essays.
Download or read book Everyone Remain Calm written by Megan Stielstra and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-15 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stories in Everyone Remain Calm reveal landscapes where the surreal and the familiar clash, to visceral effect. A woman yearns for—and dreads—the snowfall that arrives whenever her ex-boyfriend returns to the home she shares with their son. Another character reassures herself after breakups by seeking out the monster under her bed, the Incredible Hulk himself, for rebound sex that can be hot, heavy, and unnerving. Marching bands blare all the way from New Orleans to the Midwest. There are wild shootouts, rising tides, and perils embedded in the act of storytelling itself. “There are words that can kill you if you’re not careful,” Stielstra writes. And the stories we tell ourselves are the most fantastic tales of all. Everyone Remain Calm is eerie, hilarious, moving, and down-to-earth, even as its characters defy the rules—sometimes in the ways we wish we could.
Download or read book The Essayist at Work written by Lee Gutkind and published by Heinemann Drama. This book was released on 1998 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, creative nonfiction/literary journalism encompasses the length and breadth of the literary spectrum. The Essayist at Work offers proven methods for making a mark in this competitive genre.
Download or read book A Carnival Of Losses written by Donald Hall and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Former poet laureate of the United States Donald Hall’s final collection of essays, from the vantage point of very old age, once again “alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny.”* *(New York Times) “Why should a nonagenarian hold anything back?” Donald Hall answers his own question in these self-knowing, fierce, and funny essays on aging, the pleasures of solitude, and the sometimes astonishing freedoms arising from both. Nearing ninety at the time of writing, he intersperses memories of exuberant days in his youth, with uncensored tales of literary friendships spanning decades—with James Wright, Richard Wilbur, Seamus Heaney, and other luminaries. Cementing his place alongside Roger Angell and Joan Didion as a generous and profound chronicler of loss, this final work is as original and searing as anything Hall wrote during his extraordinary literary lifetime.
Download or read book Interior States written by Meghan O'Gieblyn and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of The Believer Book Award for Nonfiction "Meghan O'Gieblyn's deep and searching essays are written with a precise sort of skepticism and a slight ache in the heart. A first-rate and riveting collection." --Lorrie Moore A fresh, acute, and even profound collection that centers around two core (and related) issues of American identity: faith, in general and the specific forms Christianity takes in particular; and the challenges of living in the Midwest when culture is felt to be elsewhere. What does it mean to be a believing Christian and a Midwesterner in an increasingly secular America where the cultural capital is retreating to both coasts? The critic and essayist Meghan O'Gieblyn was born into an evangelical family, attended the famed Moody Bible Institute in Chicago for a time before she had a crisis of belief, and still lives in the Midwest, aka "Flyover Country." She writes of her "existential dizziness, a sense that the rest of the world is moving while you remain still," and that rich sense of ambivalence and internal division inform the fifteen superbly thoughtful and ironic essays in this collection. The subjects of these essays range from the rebranding (as it were) of Hell in contemporary Christian culture ("Hell"), a theme park devoted to the concept of intelligent design ("Species of Origin"), the paradoxes of Christian Rock ("Sniffing Glue"), Henry Ford's reconstructed pioneer town of Greenfield Village and its mixed messages ("Midwest World"), and the strange convergences of Christian eschatology and the digital so-called Singularity ("Ghosts in the Cloud"). Meghan O'Gieblyn stands in relation to her native Midwest as Joan Didion stands in relation to California - which is to say a whole-hearted lover, albeit one riven with ambivalence at the same time.
