Download or read book Crystal Clear written by Jaya Saxena and published by Quirk Books. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From amethyst to obsidian, Basic Witches author Jaya Saxena explores the multi-faceted meanings and history behind eleven popular crystals in this relatable personal essay collection. Highly prized for their beauty, crystals can take the shape of jewelry, household objects, and an array of self-care products. But it’s the ideas they stand for that draw people to their raw forms. Like astrology, tarot, and modern witchcraft, crystals help practitioners understand themselves and the wider world around them. In this collection of sharply observed essays, Jaya Saxena reflects on—and challenges—the ideas associated with eleven popular stones, including unconditional love (rose quartz), happiness and success (citrine), balance (amethyst), self-care (black tourmaline), purity (pearl), imposter syndrome (pyrite), toxic positivity (carnelian), change (opals), traditional concepts of marriage (diamonds), presentation versus identity (obsidian), and death (amber). The result is a deeply personal book with universal appeal, exploring how we assign meaning and power to crystals in order to give meaning and power to our lives.
Download or read book The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick written by Elizabeth Hardwick and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first-ever collection of essays from across Elizabeth Hardwick's illustrious writing career, including works not seen in print for decades. A New York Times Notable Book of 2017 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, though her reading is wide and international. She contemplates writers’ lives—women writers, rebels, Americans abroad—and the literary afterlife of biographies, letters, and diaries. Selected and with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney, the Collected Essays gathers more than fifty essays for a fifty-year retrospective of Hardwick’s work from 1953 to 2003. “For Hardwick,” writes Pinckney, “the poetry and novels of America hold the nation’s history.” Here is an exhilarating chronicle of that history.
Download or read book The Oxford Book of Essays written by John Gross and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2008 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essay is one of the richest of literary forms. Its most obvious characteristics are freedom, informality, and the personal touch--though it can also find room for poetry, satire, fantasy, and sustained argument. All these qualities, and many others, are on display in The Oxford Book of Essays. The most wide-ranging collection of its kind to appear for many years, it includes 140 essays by 120 writers: classics, curiosities, meditations, diversions, old favorites, recent examples that deserve to be better known. A particularly welcome feature is the amount of space allotted to American essayists, from Benjamin Franklin to John Updike and beyond. This is an anthology that opens with wise words about the nature of truth, and closes with a consideration of the novels of Judith Krantz. Some of the other topics discussed in its pages are anger, pleasure, Gandhi, Beau Brummell, wasps, party-going, gangsters, plumbers, Beethoven, potato crisps, the importance of being the right size, and the demolition of Westminster Abbey. It contains some of the most eloquent writing in English, and some of the most entertaining.
Download or read book We Are Never Meeting in Real Life written by Samantha Irby and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This essay collection from the “bitches gotta eat” blogger, writer on Hulu’s Shrill, and “one of our country’s most fierce and foulmouthed authors” (Amber Tamblyn, Vulture) is sure to make you alternately cackle with glee and cry real tears. Whether Samantha Irby is talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making “adult” budgets; explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette (she's "35-ish, but could easily pass for 60-something"); detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father's ashes; sharing awkward sexual encounters; or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms (hang in there for the Costco loot!); she’s as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.
Download or read book The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison written by Ralph Ellison and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, this Modern Library Paperback Classic includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as “a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions that focus on race,” and Going to the Territory (1986), an exploration of literature and folklore, jazz and culture, and the nature and quality of lives that black Americans lead. “Ralph Ellison,” wrote Stanley Crouch, “reached across race, religion, class and sex to make us all Americans.”
Download or read book A Collection Of Essays written by George Orwell and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 1970-10-21 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this bestselling compilation of essays, written in the clear-eyed, uncompromising language for which he is famous, Orwell discusses with vigor such diverse subjects as his boyhood schooling, the Spanish Civil War, Henry Miller, British imperialism, and the profession of writing.
Download or read book Writers on Writing written by and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2002-05 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects inspirational essays celebrating the art of writing, including contributions from Russell Banks, Saul Bellow, and E.L. Doctorow.
Download or read book Book of Days written by Emily Fox Gordon and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-08-17 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sexual politics of a faculty wives dinner. The psychological gamesmanship of an inappropriate therapist. The emotional minefield of an extended family wedding . . . Whatever the subject, Emily Fox Gordon’s disarmingly personal essays are an art form unto themselves—reflecting and revealing, like mirrors in a maze, the seemingly endless ways a woman can lose herself in the modern world. With piercing humor and merciless precision, Gordon zigzags her way through “the unevolved paradise” of academia, with its dying breeds of bohemians, adulterers, and flirts, then stumbles through the perils and pleasures of psychotherapy, hoping to find a narrative for her life. Along the way, she encounters textbook feminists, partying philosophers, perfectionist moms, and an unlikely kinship with Kafka—in a brilliant collection of essays that challenge our sacred institutions, defy our expectations, and define our lives.
Download or read book Proxies written by Brian Blanchfield and published by Nightboat Books. This book was released on 2016-06-22 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Past compunction, expressly unbeholden, these twenty-four single-subject essays train focus on a startling miscellany of topics - Foot Washing, Dossiers, Br'er Rabbit, Housesitting, Man Roulette, the Locus Amoenus - that begin to unpack the essayist himself and his life's rotating concerns: sex and sexuality, poetry and poetics, subject positions in American labor (not excluding academia), and his upbringing in working-class, Primitive Baptist, central-piedmont North Carolina. In Proxies an original constraint, a "total suppression of recourse to authoritative sources," engineers Brian Blanchfield's disarming mode of independent intellection. The "repeatable experiment" to draw only from what he knows, estimates, remembers, and misremembers about the subject at hand often opens onto an unusually candid assessment of self and situation. The project's driving impulse, courting error, peculiar in an era of crowd-sourced Wiki-knowledge, is at least as old as the one Montaigne had when, putting all the books back on the shelf, he asked, "What do I know?"
Download or read book Had I Known written by Barbara Ehrenreich and published by Twelve. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, HAD I KNOWN contains the most provocative, incendiary, and career-making pieces by bestselling author, essayist, political activist, and "veteran muckraker" Barbara Ehrenreich (The New Yorker). A self-proclaimed "myth buster by trade," Barbara Ehrenreich has covered an extensive range of topics as a journalist and political activist, and is unafraid to dive into intellectual waters that others deem too murky. Now, Had I Known gathers the articles and excerpts from a long-ranging career that most highlight Ehrenreich's brilliance, social consciousness, and wry wit. From Ehrenreich's award-winning article "Welcome to Cancerland," published shortly after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, to her groundbreaking undercover investigative journalism in Nickel and Dimed, to her exploration of death and mortality in the New York Times bestseller, Natural Causes, Barbara Ehrenreich has been writing radical, thought-provoking, and worldview-altering pieces for over four decades. Her reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review, among others, while her essays, op-eds and feature articles have appeared in the New York Times, Harper's Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, Time, the Wall Street Journal, and many more. Had I Known pulls from the vast and varied collection of one of our country's most incisive thinkers to create one must-have volume.
Download or read book The Hall of Uselessness written by Simon Leys and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2013-07-30 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NYRB Classics Original Simon Leys is a Renaissance man for the era of globalization. A distinguished scholar of classical Chinese art and literature and one of the first Westerners to recognize the appalling toll of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Leys also writes with unfailing intelligence, seriousness, and bite about European art, literature, history, and politics and is an unflinching observer of the way we live now. The Hall of Uselessness is the most extensive collection of Leys’s essays to be published to date. In it, he addresses subjects ranging from the Chinese attitude to the past to the mysteries of Belgium and Belgitude; offers portraits of André Gide and Zhou Enlai; takes on Roland Barthes and Christopher Hitchens; broods on the Cambodian genocide; reflects on the spell of the sea; and writes with keen appreciation about writers as different as Victor Hugo, Evelyn Waugh, and Georges Simenon. Throughout, The Hall of Uselessness is marked with the deep knowledge, skeptical intelligence, and passionate conviction that have made Simon Leys one of the most powerful essayists of our time.
Download or read book Collected Essays written by Thomas Henry Huxley and published by . This book was released on 1896 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays written by Ilan Stavans and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intriguing collection of more than 70 Latin American essays, some never before translated into English, gives us the whole spectrum of concerns that have animated some of the greatest writers of our time--from Andres Bello, Pablo Neruda, and Alfonso Reyes to Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Rosario Ferre--an assembly confident, ingenious, aware.
Download or read book Both Flesh and Not written by David Foster Wallace and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2012-11-06 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brilliant, dazzling, never-before-collected nonfiction writings by "one of America's most daring and talented writers" (Los Angeles Times Book Review): Both Flesh and Not gathers fifteen of Wallace's seminal essays, all published in book form for the first time. Never has Wallace's seemingly endless curiosity been more evident than in this compilation of work spanning nearly 20 years of writing. Here, Wallace turns his critical eye with equal enthusiasm toward Roger Federer and Jorge Luis Borges; Terminator 2 and The Best of the Prose Poem; the nature of being a fiction writer and the quandary of defining the essay; the best underappreciated novels and the English language's most irksome misused words; and much more. Both Flesh and Not restores Wallace's essays as originally written, and it includes a selection from his personal vocabulary list, an assembly of unusual words and definitions.
Download or read book Nobody s Home written by Dubravka Ugrešić and published by Open Letter Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her long career, Ugresic has published several novels (e.g., The Ministry of Pain), but she made her name with her essay collections, which have caused controversy and earned her the admiration of writers and critics abroad. In these latest musings, written over the course of several years, Ugresic leaves no stone unturned and no thought contained, doing what she does best: writing about the human condition through her own experience. Refusing to establish a central theme, she touches upon a wide range of topics: the paradox of multiculturalism, metaphors as our "defense against nightmares," the eerie similarities between capitalism and communism, and ways in which we try to rise hopelessly above our less-than-perfect existence. Along the way, she pays homage to the works of literature that have influenced her own creative process, in an effort to pay "a symbolic literary tax on narcissim" because "writing is not the humblest of vocations." Perhaps not, but Ugresic certainly knows how to balance being a critic with being criticized. Recommended for all libraries collecting cultural criticism.--Mirela Roncevic, Library Journal Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Download or read book Collected Essays written by Graham Greene and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-10-02 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected Essays contains nearly eighty essays, reviews and occasional pieces composed between novels, plays and travel books over four prolific decades. From Henry James and Somerset Maugham to Ho Chi Minh and Kim Philby, the range of subjects is eclectic and stimulating; his subjects brought vividly to life. The resulting collection is as revealing as autobiography and characteristically rich in humour, insight and doubt.
Download or read book These Precious Days written by Ann Patchett and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays. "The elegance of Patchett’s prose is seductive and inviting: with Patchett as a guide, readers will really get to grips with the power of struggles, failures, and triumphs alike." —Publisher's Weekly “Any story that starts will also end.” As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. At the center of These Precious Days is the title essay, a surprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that explores “what it means to be seen, to find someone with whom you can be your best and most complete self.” When Patchett chose an early galley of actor and producer Tom Hanks’ short story collection to read one night before bed, she had no idea that this single choice would be life changing. It would introduce her to a remarkable woman—Tom’s brilliant assistant Sooki—with whom she would form a profound bond that held monumental consequences for them both. A literary alchemist, Patchett plumbs the depths of her experiences to create gold: engaging and moving pieces that are both self-portrait and landscape, each vibrant with emotion and rich in insight. Turning her writer’s eye on her own experiences, she transforms the private into the universal, providing us all a way to look at our own worlds anew, and reminds how fleeting and enigmatic life can be. From the enchantments of Kate DiCamillo’s children’s books (author of The Beatryce Prophecy) to youthful memories of Paris; the cherished life gifts given by her three fathers to the unexpected influence of Charles Schultz’s Snoopy; the expansive vision of Eudora Welty to the importance of knitting, Patchett connects life and art as she illuminates what matters most. Infused with the author’s grace, wit, and warmth, the pieces in These Precious Days resonate deep in the soul, leaving an indelible mark—and demonstrate why Ann Patchett is one of the most celebrated writers of our time.
