Essays

'Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor'Fuelled by anger at injustice and optimism about humankind's ability to make a better, truly communal society, the anarchist writings of Peter Kropotkin have...

Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the most revolutionary thinkers in Western philosophy. Here he sets out his subversive views in a series of aphorisms on subjects ranging from art to arrogance, boredom to passion, science to vanity, rejecting conventional...

Blending intellectual speculation with anecdote and personal reflection, the Renaissance thinker and writer Montaigne pioneered the modern essay. This selection contains his idiosyncratic and timeless writings on subjects as varied as the virtues of...

'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...

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...

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 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...

'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...

The "Father of History."Herodotus the great Greek historian was born about 484 BC, at Halicarnassus in Caria, Asia Minor, when it was subject to the Persians. He traveled widely in most of Asia Minor, Egypt (as far as Aswan), North Africa, Syria, the...

'A woman's defiant fight to write.' ObserverBeing categorised as black and female does not constrain my writing. Writing assures me that I am more the merely blackness and femaleness. Writing assures me I am.This paradigm shifting essay collection weaves...

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...

'The most prescient of British public intellectuals' Pankaj Mishra, Financial TimesUpdated with a new foreword and two new chapters of John Gray's writing.Why is progress a pernicious myth? Why do beliefs that humanity can be improved end in farce or...

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, ...

'A major achievement.' CLAUDIA RANKINE'Endlessly absorbing.' SINEAD GLEESON 'A probing tour of capitalism and class.' MAGGIE NELSON'Exhilarating.' JENNY OFFILLA personal reckoning with the intricacies of money, class and capitalism from the New York...

Virginia Woolf began writing reviews for the Guardian 'to make a few pence' from her father's death in 1904, and continued until the last decade of her life. The result is a phenomenal collection of articles, of which this selection offers a fascinating...

A Sunday Times bestsellerChristopher Hitchens was an unparalleled, prolific writer, who raised the polemical essay to a new art form, over a lifetime of thinking and debating the defining issues of our times. As an essayist he contributed to the New...

First published on the anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut's death, Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of twelve new writings - a fitting tribute to the author, and an essential contribution to the discussion of war, peace and humanity's tendency towards...

In this accessible and distilled craft guide, acclaimed poet Tony Hoagland approaches poetry through the frame of poetic voice, that mysterious connective element that binds the speaker and reader together. A poem strong in the dimension of voice is an...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!"Savagery appeased can only grow. Once you give in to it, it must escalate, like a fire searching for air."The man who won the Pulitzer Prize for GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, who wrote the classic films THE VERDICT and WAG THE DOG...

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 philosopher-statesman on Epicureanism, Stoicism, and the Old Academy.Cicero (Marcus Tullius, 106-43 BC), Roman lawyer, orator, politician, and philosopher, of whom we know more than of any other Roman, lived through the stirring era that saw the...

'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 9781609806101Author Kurt VonnegutFormat PaperbackPage Count 208Imprint Seven Stories Press,U.S.Publisher Seven Stories Press,U.S.

Creative nonfiction, also known as narrative nonfiction, liberated journalism by inviting writers to dramatize, interpret, speculate, and even re-create their subjects. Lee Gutkind collects twenty-five essays that flourished in this new turf, all...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781937073725Author Peter Lamborn WilsonFormat PaperbackPage Count 164Imprint Bottle of Smoke PressPublisher Bottle of Smoke PressWeight(grams)...

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...

Gore Vidal's reputation as America's finest essayist is an enduring one. This collection, chosen by the author from 40 years of work, contains about two-thirds of what he published in various magazines and journals. He has divided the essays into three...

Gore Vidal's reputation as America's finest essayist is an enduring one. This collection, chosen by the author from 40 years of work, contains about two-thirds of what he published in various magazines and journals. He has divided the essays into three...

'If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light, If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. I will capture nights all over the world and bring them to you.'Henry Rollins,...

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...

Few, if any, English-language critics have written as perceptively as Isaiah Berlin about Russian thought and culture. Russian Thinkers is his unique meditation on the impact that Russia's outstanding writers and philosophers had on its culture. In...

New essays by the Women's Prize and Pulitzer Prize winning author of Gilead, Home and Lila. In this collection, Marilynne Robinson impels us to action and offers us hope.'Grace and intelligence ...[her work] defines universal truths about what it means...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780452011847Author Ayn RandFormat PaperbackPage Count 304Imprint Penguin Putnam IncPublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 255gDimensions(mm) 202mm *...

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...

To celebrate the centenary of the publication of Ulysses, the most important literary work of the twentieth century, eighteen artists, writers and thinkers respond to an episode each of the great modernist text. Each essayist is an expert in one of...

'Will Self may not be the last modernist at work but at the moment he's the most fascinating of the tradition's torch bearers.' New YorkFrom one of the most unusual and distinctive writers working today, dubbed 'the most daring and delightful novelist of...

'This book is a glowing achievement by one of the best essayists of her generation' Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff 'Witty, fresh and full of life' Liv Little 'I can't...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781593761950Author Mattilda Bernstein SycamoreFormat PaperbackPage Count 360Imprint Soft Skull PressPublisher Soft Skull PressWeight(grams) 446g

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...