Essays

Bringing together a series of ingeniously linked myths and legends, Ovid's deliciously witty and poignant Metamorphoses describes a magical world in which men and women are transformed - often by love - into flowers, trees, animals, stones and stars...

With an Introduction by Professor Stuart Sim. John Bunyan was variously a tinker, soldier, Baptist minister, prisoner and writer of outstanding narrative genius which reached its apotheosis in this, his greatest work. It is an allegory of the Christian...

After Rain - Twelve remarkable stories by the master storyteller William Trevor 'There is no better short story writer in the English-speaking world' Wall Street JournalIn this collection of twelve dazzling, acutely rendered tales, William Trevor plumbs...

An honest and accessible guide to finding light in the darkest of times. In a world that isn't short of darkness, there could be few more urgent priorities than to spend time rehearsing for ourselves why life - despite all its challenges - still has so...

A Room of One's Own, is one of Virginia Woolf's most influential works and is widely recognized for its extraordinary contribution to the women's movement. Based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, it is one of the great feminist polemics,...

At what point does faith turn into tyranny? In Immanuel, winner of the inaugural Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, Matthew McNaught explores his upbringing in an evangelical Christian community in Winchester. As he moved away from the faith of his...

From the fiery intellectual provocateur - and one of our most fearless advocates of gender equality - a brilliant, urgent essay collection that both celebrates modern feminism and affirms the power of men and women and what we can accomplish together...

John Locke was one of the greatest figures of the Enlightenment, whose assertion that reason is the key to knowledge changed the face of philosophy. These writings on thought, ideas, perception, truth and language are some of the most influential in the...

J.G.Ballard is the author of the novels "Crash", "Empire of the Sun" and "Rushing to Paradise". Throughout his career he has also been a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers. This book collects together pieces of his journalism, grouped under...

From global literary superstar Karl Ove Knausgaard, an achingly beautiful collection of daily meditations and love letters addressed directly to Knausgaard's unborn daughterIn Winter, we rejoin the great Karl Ove Knausgaard as the birth of his daughter...

A Room of One's Own is Virginia Woolf's most powerful feminist essay, justifying the need for women to possess intellectual freedom and financial independence. Based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, the essay is one of the great feminist...

'Too good... You should read her and not look away' Anne Enright, Guardian 'The stories are essays, the essays are stories. Even when they are not literally true, they contain the kind of truth that great fiction thrives on' The Times 'Literature's...

A window into a life of insatiable desire and uninhibited sex - this is Parisian art critic Catherine M.'s account of her sexual awakening and her unrestrained pursuit of pleasure. From the glamorous singles clubs of Paris to the Bois de Boulogne, she...

'We stand on the shoulders of giants. Now we learn their names.' THE QUEER BIBLE is a collection of essays written by queer icons, about the queer trailblazers throughout history who inspired them. From Elton John on Divine to...

Over the last seven years Etgar Keret has had plenty of reasons to worry. His son, Lev, was born in the middle of a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv. His father became ill. And he has been constantly tormented by nightmarish visions of the Iranian president...

These two works on life's fleeting pleasures are by Buddhist monks from medieval Japan, but each shows a different world-view. In the short memoir Hojoki, Chomei recounts his decision to withdraw from worldly affairs and live as a hermit in a tiny hut in...

Martha Gellhorn was one of the twentieth century's greatest war correspondents. The Face of War is a selection of her reports, on the conflicts in Spain, Finland, China and World War II, with later reports on Vietnam, Israel and Central America.Reports...

This is one of the few records published by Gurdjieff in which he offers guidance to his 'community of seekers', the pupils from many countries who joined him in Paris and New York.The first section is mainly autobiographical, relating material crucial...

'I mean who cares about opinions, gossip, whatever, when bodies are so vulnerable, in search only of love and breath.' Brilliant young writer Ellena Savage explores Portuguese police stations and Portland college campuses, suburban Melbourne libraries...

Addressed to educators and general readers-the "consumers of literature" from all walks of life-this important new book explores the value and uses of literature in our time. Dr. Frye offers, in addition, challenging and stimulating ideas for the...

A defining collection from Alistair Cooke's legendary BBC Radio broadcasts, guiding us through nearly sixty years of changing life in the United States'No one else succeeded in explaining to the English-speaking world ... the idiosyncrasies of a country...

A collection of the New Yorker's groundbreaking writing on race in America, including work by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hilton Als, Zadie Smith, and more From the pages of the New Yorker comes a...

A Guest at the Feast uncovers the places where politics and poetics meet, where life and fiction overlap, where one can be inside writing and also outside of it.From the melancholy and amusement within the work of the writer John McGahern to an...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781891241574Author Lucy SanteFormat PaperbackPage Count 336Imprint Verse Chorus Press,U.S.Publisher Puncture Publications

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...

Admiral of the Fleet Lord 'Jacky' Fisher (1841-1920) was one of the greatest naval reformers in history. He was also a colossal figure to contemporaries, both loved and loathed, a man of exceptional charm, presence and charisma. Since the late 1940s, Jan...

Containing drafts of stories later rewritten for other collections (including Carry On, Jeeves), My Man Jeeves offers a fascinating insight into the genesis of comic literature's most celebrated double-act. All the stories are set in New York, four of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780486275482Author Euripides EuripidesFormat PaperbackPage Count 64Imprint Dover Publications Inc.Publisher Dover Publications Inc.Weight(grams)...

'To be taught to write or to speak - but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think - nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at...

Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, mystery – Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman’s long awaited first original book, a kaleidoscopic study of the late West German filmmaker Rainer Werner...

Fuelled by innumerable cigarettes, Martin Amis provides dazzling portraits of contemporaries and mentors alike: Larkin and Rushdie; Greene and Pritchett; Ballard and Burgess and Nicholson Baker; John Updike - warts and all. Vigorously zipping across to...

The texts in this volume represent Kristin Ross's attempt to think the question of the everyday across a range of discourses, practices and knowledges, from philosophy to history, from the visual arts to popular fiction, all the way to the forms taken by...

Benedictine nun, poet and musician, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was one of the most remarkable figures of the Middle Ages. She undertook preaching tours throughout the German empire at the age of sixty, and was consulted not only by her religious...

Disdainful of America's booming commercialism and industrialism, Henry David Thoreau left Concord, Massachusetts, in 1845 to live in solitude in the woods near Walden Pond. Walden, the account of his stay, conveys at once a naturalist's wonder at the...

Passionate, independent-minded nonfiction from the international bestselling author of 'The Corrections'. Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom' was the literary sensation of 2010, whilst 'The Corrections' was the best-loved and most written-about novel...

***AMAZON BEST BOOK OF DECEMBER******A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF THE YEAR******LA TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER***A young queer science writer on some of the ocean's strangest creatures and what they can teach us about human empathy and survival'A miraculous,...

Le Morte D'Arthur is Sir Thomas Malory's richly evocative and enthralling version of the Arthurian legend. Recounting Arthur's birth, his ascendancy to the throne after claiming Excalibur, his ill-fated marriage to Guenever, the treachery of Morgan le...

a poignant description of Cambodia, Laos & Vietnam in 1950, with all their beauty, gentleness, grandeur and intricate political balance intact - Restores this lost world, like a phoenix, from the ashes of the Vietnam war and its aftermath - shows the...

How do the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art? How does art affect our relationship to our bodies? T Fleischmann uses Felix Gonzales-Torres's artworks-piles of candy, stacks of paper, puzzles-as a path through questions of love and loss,...

A new edition of Britain's Changing Towns (1967), introduced, edited and updated by Owen Hatherley: "These essays show him writing about cities and towns as wholes rather than as collections of individual buildings. In each of them, there are several...