Essays

Perhaps more than any other writer, Juvenal (c. AD 55-138) captures the splendour, the squalor and the sheer energy of everyday Roman life. In The Sixteen Satires he evokes a fascinating world of whores, fortune-tellers, boozy politicians, slick lawyers,...

A passionate defence of religious faith by the great seventeenth-century philosopher, mathematician and physicistBlaise Pascal was the precociously brilliant contemporary of Descartes, but it is his unfinished apologia for the Christian religion upon...

'A mine of treasures, a source of visions, a microcosm of human experience and suffering, the philosopher's stone: Migraine is a remarkable achievement' - Sunday Telegraph. Migraine is an age-old - the first recorded instances date back over two thousand...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780525562795Author Toni MorrisonFormat PaperbackPage Count 368Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 238gDimensions(mm) 203mm *...

Alexander Pushkin was Russia's first true literary genius. Best known for his poetry, he also wrote sparkling prose that revealed his national culture with elegance and understated humour. Here, his gift for portraying the Russian people is fully...

Acclaimed author of On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored and On KindnessA collection of literary essays like no other - exploring the deep connections between literature and psychoanalysis - from Britain's leading psychoanalyst.For Adam Phillips - as for...

Two weeks before his death, Oliver Sacks outlined the contents of The River of Consciousness, the last book he would oversee. The bestselling author of On the Move, Musicophilia, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks is known for his...

The international community of letters mourns the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France's greatest poets of the last half-century. A prolific author, he was often considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize and published a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781590177181Author William H. GassFormat PaperbackPage Count 112Imprint NYRB ClassicsPublisher The New York Review of Books, IncWeight(grams)...

A selection of the most popular and relevant essays from Adam Phillips, the man New Yorker called 'Britain's foremost psychoanalytic writer' 'Phillips's prose is poetic in the best sense: it is muscular, resonant, and thrums with a dark music that is...

_______________ '[An] acutely observed collection of occasional pieces that pick at absurdist life and reveal him to be a quiz, a cultural critic gifted with precise comic timing' - The Times 'Yes, Jacobson is an entertainer ... And he does indeed...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781914198441Author Nona FernandezFormat PaperbackPage Count 136Imprint Daunt BooksPublisher Daunt Books

Since The Paris Review was founded in 1953, it has given us invaluable conversations with the greatest writers of our age, vivid self-portraits that are themselves works of finely-crafted literature. The magazine has spoken with most of the world's...

'I've lived through ten iOS upgrades on my Mac - and that's just something I use to muck about on Twitter. Surely capitalism is due an upgrade or two?'When Caitlin Moran sat down to choose her favourite pieces for her new book she realised that they all...

An instant New York Times bestseller, I'll Show Myself Out is the eagerly anticipated second essay collection from Jessi Klein, author of the acclaimed debut You'll Grow Out of It.Longlisted for the PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the...

When the famous anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss arrived in Rio de Janeiro, he had one book in his pocket: "Jean de Lery's History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil". Lery had undertaken his fascinating and arduous voyage in 1556, as a youthful member...

The inspiration for the annual Pleasure of Reading Prize A charming and revealing collection of essays from some of our best-loved writers about the pleasures of reading, with royalties donated to the Give a Book charity In this delightful...

Correspondence from a distinguished and eventful life.The Younger Pliny was born in AD 61 or 62, the son of Lucius Caecilius of Comum (Como) and the Elder Pliny's sister. He was educated at home and then in Rome under Quintilian. He was at Misenum at the...

An intellectual tour de force: the major essays of the esteemed author of international bestseller The Sleepwalkers Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers has become one of the most influential history books of our century: a remarkable rethinking of the...

Aurochs and Auks is a deeply moving and intelligent meditation on the natural processes of death and extinction, renewal and continuity. Prompted by his own near-death in a time of pandemic, John Burnside explores the history of the auroch (Bos...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781681371542Author Darryl PinckneyFormat PaperbackPage Count 640Imprint The New York Review of Books, IncPublisher The New York Review of Books,...

LONGLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2021'One of the year's funniest books' i Paper'Funny, smart, soulful and sometimes devastating ... It made me laugh and cry' EMILIE PINE, author of Notes to Self_______________Patrick Freyne has tried a lot of...

A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by award-winning writer Vivian Gornick.Vivian Gornick, renowned essayist and celebrated feminist writer, selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the...

Here, in one volume, are three major novels by the Marquis de Sade, including the only authentic and complete British edition of his most famous work JUSTINE: one of his most daring works, PHILOSOPHY IN THE BEDROOM: and the eighteenth-century...

Erudite and entertaining in equal measure, Somewhere Becoming Rain is a love letter from the much-loved writer Clive James to one of the world's most cherished poets: Philip Larkin.'This is the finest critic of his generation on the best poet of his...

Some of the extraordinary women whose writings are including in this collection are observers of the world in which they wander; their prose rich in description, remarkable in detail. Mary McCarthy conveys the vitality of Florence while Willa Cather's...

In this collection of eight witty and sharply written essays, Orwell looks at, among others, the joys of spring (even in London), the picture of humanity painted by Gulliver and his travels, and the strange benefit of the doubt that the public permit...

The life story of Isabel Allende - one of the world's favourite writers - is as exotic, passionate and inspiring as one of her novels. Just three when her parents divorced, Isabel Allende was raised in her grandparents' home in Chile. She left...

William Burroughs' work was dedicated to an assault upon language, traditional values and all agents of control. Produced at a time when he was at his most extreme and messianic, The Job lays out his abrasive, incisive, paranoiac, maddened and maddening...

In the midst of the hurt and the mundane, the questions and the not yets, you can forget just how far you have come. This illustrated collection of poetry and essays invites you to reclaim moments of brokenness, division, and pain and re-envision them as...

'Luminous' The Times'Beautiful' Caught by the RiverBringing together contemporary Scottish writing on nature and landscape, this inspiring collection takes us from walking to wild swimming, from red deer to pigeons and wasps, from remote islands to back...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781914221163Author Gargi BhattacharyyaFormat PaperbackPage Count 118Imprint Hajar PressPublisher Hajar Press

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781681377780Author Phillip LopateFormat PaperbackPage Count 150Imprint The New York Review of Books, IncPublisher The New York Review of Books, Inc

A testament to the energy and creativity of a writer and journalist without equal, Charles Dickens's Selected Journalism 1850-1870 is edited with an introduction and notes by David Pascoe in Penguin Classics.Throughout his writing career Charles Dickens...

This ravishing book opens a window onto the lives, designs, and passions of two charismatic artists. Born a generation apart, they were seeming opposites: Mariano Fortuny, a Spanish aristocrat thrilled by the sun-baked cultures of Crete and Knossos;...

"Today the ideal home remains a site of illusory ease, a space that can be wiped clean of the residues of living..." In this radical and elegiac essay, Sam Johnson-Schlee invites readers to consider the dreams and fantasies we have about our...

Glimpse into the life of one of Britain's best-loved comic writers - Sue Townsend - with this hilarious collection of her anecdotes and musings. ___________Enter the world of Susan Lilian Townsend - all our welcome! This sparkling collection of Sue...

'Gay has an ability to blend the personal and political in a way that feels simultaneously gentle and brutal . . . you look at a cultural moment through Gay's eyes and, by the end, you see the world differently' Arwa Mahdawi, GuardianSince the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780679776109Author Pico IyerFormat PaperbackPage Count 336Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 278gDimensions(mm) 203mm * 134mm...

The Penguin Classics edition of Jonathan Swift's savagely satirical A Modest Proposal and Other Writings is edited with an introduction and notes by Carol Fabricant.To ease poverty in Ireland by eating the children of the poor was the satirical...