Essays

A Tale of a Tub is the masterpiece of Swift's earlier years. It is presented here with The Battle of the Books, The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, and the Additions. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available...

In this remarkable little book, Will Durant answers the questions that most people would have wanted to ask him - what are the conclusions he drew from the experience of a long lifetime; what eras, individuals, and achievements stand out as being the...

Andrew Motion was appointed Poet Laureate in 1999, but alongside his work as a poet he also had a significant career as a prize-winning biographer and an illuminating critic. Ways of Life celebrates this talent with a selection of his articles about...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781583220726Author Moyra DaveyFormat PaperbackPage Count 345Imprint Seven Stories Press,U.S.Publisher Seven Stories Press,U.S.Weight(grams) 518g

An essay with the reach and momentum of a novel, Kate Briggs's This Little Art is a genre-bending song for the practice of literary translation, offering fresh, fierce and timely thinking on reading, writing and living with the works of others. Taking...

'Words connect the visible track to the invisible thing ... like a fragile makeshift bridge cast across the void'With imagination and wit, Italo Calvino sought to define the virtues of the great literature of the past in order to shape the values of...

Aged 15 and on track to be an Olympic gymnast, Lucia Osborne-Crowley was violently raped on a night out. The injuries she sustained that evening ended her gymnastics career, and eventually manifested in life-long chronic illnesses, which medical...

A Roman farmer on farming.Columella (Lucius Iunius Moderatus) of Gades (Cadiz) lived in the reigns of the first emperors to about AD 70. He moved early in life to Italy where he owned farms and lived near Rome. It is probable that he did military service...

In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale,...

Inspired by Voltaire's two-year stay in England (1726-8), this is one of the key works of the Enlightment. Exactly contemporary with Gulliver's Travels and The Beggar's Opera, Voltaire's controversial pronouncements on politics, philosophy, religion, and...

At a time when opinion trumps facts and truth is treated as nothing more than another perspective, free speech has become a battleground. While authoritarians and algorithms threaten democracy, we argue over who has the right to speak.To protect...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780394752099Author H.L. MenckenFormat PaperbackPage Count 656Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 527gDimensions(mm) 202mm *...

Can't and Won't is the new collection from Lydia Davis, one of the greatest short story writers alive.WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2013Lydia Davis has been universally acclaimed for the wit, insight and genre-defying formal inventiveness...

20-something and uncertain about her future, Florentyna Leow is exhilarated when an old acquaintance offers her an opportunity for work and cohabitation in a little house in the hills of Kyoto. Florentyna begins a new job as a tour guide, taking...

A collection of gorgeously written and timely pieces in which prize-winning poet and author Ross Gay considers the joy we incite when we care for each other, especially during life's inevitable hardships.In "We Kin" he thinks about the garden (especially...

Twain's account of travelling in Europe, A TRAMP ABROAD (1880), sparkles with the author's shrewd observations and highly opinionated comments on Old World culture, and showcases his unparalleled ability to integrate humorous sketches, autobiographical...

'The most dazzling biography of a female writer to have come my way for a decade...' - Financial Times'To be savoured for its vivid and sympathetic recreation of the tragic life and brilliant times of the gifted Mary Shelley' - Times Literary Supplement...

'Wodehouse said letters make "a wonderful oblique form for an autobiography," and Sophie Ratcliffe's expertly edited collection amply proves the point.'SpectatorOne of the funniest and most admired writers of the twentieth century, P. G. Wodehouse always...

From the International Man Booker Prize-winning author of Can't and Won't and The End of the Story - a crystalline collection of literary essays for fans of Susan Sontag and Joan Didion'She's a joy. There's no writer quite like her' Ali Smith 'Among my...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780062880857Author Jonny SunFormat HardbackPage Count 256Imprint Harper PerennialPublisher Harper PerennialWeight(grams) 454g

The beginnings of the anti-colonial struggle in Jamaica coincided with the childhood and early adolescence of Sylvia Wynter, providing the motivation for this, the first phase of her important body of work. The essays and articles collected here go...

Michael Longley's prose centres on poetry. This is so, even when he is writing autobiographically, or reflecting on war and memory, or enthusing about music and painting. Since Longley writes relatively little criticism, readers of his poetry have lacked...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780486600062Author G. AgricolaFormat PaperbackPage Count 672Imprint Dover Publications Inc.Publisher Dover Publications Inc.Weight(grams)...

Antiquity's original travel guide.Pausanias, born probably in Lydia in Asia Minor, was a Greek of the second century AD, about 120-180, who traveled widely not only in Asia Minor, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa, but also in Greece and in Italy, ...

This selection from the writings of C. S. Lewis gathers together forty book reviews, never before reprinted, as well as four major essays which have been unavailable for many decades. A fifth essay, 'Image and Imagination', is published for the first...

'No one else casts such a shrewd and gimlet eye on contemporary life.' - William BoydComic, dark and insightful, What Happened? is Hanif Kureishi's new collection of essays and fiction. No topic is too fringe or too mainstream for this insatiable-and...

Drawing from two political and several literary homelands, this collection presents a remarkable series of trenchant essays, demonstrating the full range and force of Salman Rushdie's remarkable imaginative and observational powers. With candour,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781838003906Author K Allado-McDowellFormat PaperbackPage Count 232Imprint Ignota BooksPublisher Ignota Books

Dirty Realism is the fiction of a new generation of American authors. They write about the belly-side of contemporary life - a deserted husband, an unwed mother, a car thief, a pickpocket, a drug addict - but they write about it with a disturbing...

Cheating at Canasta - an outstanding collection of stories by the master storyteller William Trevor'There is no better short story writer in the English-speaking world' Wall Street Journal''No matter what,' Julia had said, aware then of what was coming,...

A collection of vibrant essays to inform, stimulate and inspire every nature lover. Through unparallelled expertise as a field naturalist, Roy Dennis is able to write about the natural world in a way that considers both the problems and the progress in...

A.A. Milne, best known as the author of the classic Winnie-the-Pooh stories, was a successful writer long before his children's stories launched him to overnight success. Milne himself disliked being relegated as a children's author. At the age of...

An intimate study of three of Ireland's greatest writers from one of its best-loved contemporary voices, Colm Toibin__________________In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know Colm Toibin takes three of Ireland's greatest writers - Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and James...

In the first days of spring in his eighty-second year, Gerald Murnane - perhaps the greatest living writer of English prose - began a project that would round off his strange career as a novelist. He would read all of his books in turn and prepare a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781609806101Author Kurt VonnegutFormat PaperbackPage Count 208Imprint Seven Stories Press,U.S.Publisher Seven Stories Press,U.S.

'One of the most dazzling luminaries of contemporary American fiction' Sunday Times 'The most commanding and exciting and inventive rhetorical virtuosity of any writer alive... [He] nailed it like nobody else ever had' Jonathan Franzen'[He was] first...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781907970429Author Hermione LeeFormat HardbackPage Count 100Imprint Daunt BooksPublisher Daunt BooksWeight(grams) 192g

There is a line that stretches from the northernmost tip of Denmark to where the Wadden Sea meets Holland in the south-west. Dorthe Nors, one of Denmark's most acclaimed contemporary writers, grew up on this line; a native Jutlander, her childhood was...

The works collected in this volume provide an illuminating introduction to George Eliot's incisive views on religion, art and science, and the nature and purpose of fiction. Essays such as 'Evangelical Teaching' show her rejecting her earlier religious...

Take a walk around 1920s Berlin with one of its greatest luminaries. In this timeless guide, originally published in Germany in 1929, Franz Hessel invites his readers to join him on a stroll through Weimar-era Berlin, taking in some of the most...