Essays

Italo Calvino in Collection of Sand claimed that 'the brain begins in the eye'. The essays collected here display his fascination with the visual universe, in which the things we see tell a truth about the world. With encyclopedic knowledge and engaging...

Italo Calvino in Collection of Sand claimed that 'the brain begins in the eye'. The essays collected here display his fascination with the visual universe, in which the things we see tell a truth about the world. With encyclopedic knowledge and engaging...

Essays are enjoying renewed popularity, from the personal essays of Lewis Thomas, to the intellectual treats of Marguerite Yourcenar, to the political and social commentary of Michael Parenti in this superb collection. Parenti covers the myth of the...

Award-winning poet Pete "the Temp" Bearder presents the unwritten history, science and skill of spoken word. Stage Invasion answers some strangely unaddressed questions: How was the live art of spoken verse kicked out of the Kingdom of Poetry? What is...

Award-winning poet Pete "the Temp" Bearder presents the unwritten history, science and skill of spoken word. Stage Invasion answers some strangely unaddressed questions: How was the live art of spoken verse kicked out of the Kingdom of Poetry? What is...

No gamble in history has been more momentous than the landfall of Columbus's ship the Santa Maria in the Americas in 1492 - an event that paved the way for the conquest of a 'New World'. The accounts collected here provide a vivid narrative of his...

Long recognized as perhaps the greatest non-fiction writer at work in Ireland, for his vast, polymathic accounts of nature and culture in the Aran Islands and Connemara, Tim Robinson is also an essayist of genius whose fascinations range across the globe...

Examining the connections between history and the imagination, ethics and action, she explores the possible meanings of being white, female, lesbian, Jewish, and a United States citizen, both at this particular time and through the lens of the past.About...

In this classic of American literature, Thoreau gives an account of his two years experience of the 'simple life' in the woods, telling how he sought and found material and spiritual sustenance in the solitude of the cabin which he built for himself on...

Born Deaf into an ASL-speaking family and blind by adolescence, John Lee Clark learned to embrace the possibilities of his tactile world. He is on the frontlines of the Protactile movement, which gave birth to an unprecedented tactile language and a way...

By the author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace Curious Pursuits is a collection of personal essays, book reviews and articles from the fierce, ingenious mind of Margaret Atwood, ranging from 1970 to the present. Atwood remembers moving to London...

With the same dazzling mix of emotion and idea that characterizes his novels he illuminates the art and artists who remain important to him and whose work helps us better understand the world. An astute and brilliant reader of fiction, Kundera applies...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780593137048Author Daniel JonesFormat PaperbackPage Count 304Imprint Broadway Books (A Division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc)Publisher...

The definitive Norman Mailer collection, as he writes on Marilyn Monroe, culture, ideology, boxing, Hemingway, politics, sex, celebrity and - of course - Norman MailerFrom his early 'A Credo for the Living', published in 1948, when the author was...

'Whether you agree with him or not, P.J. writes a helluva piece.' Richard Nixon P.J. O'Rourke has had a prolific career as one of America's most celebrated humourists. But that career almost didn't happen. As he tells it, 'I began to write for pay in the...

Completed in 1980 but published here for the first time, My Prizes is an accounting - prize by prize, blow by blow - of the background and circumstances of reception of nine literary prizes that Thomas Bernhard was awarded between 1963 and 1980, followed...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.AwardsShort-listed for The Orion Book Award 2009.Book InformationISBN 9780375725197Author Terry Tempest WilliamsFormat PaperbackPage Count 432Imprint Random House IncPublisher...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781515096122Author Thomas CarlyleFormat PaperbackPage Count 126Imprint Createspace Independent Publishing PlatformPublisher Createspace Independent...

'To open a book by David Jones is to walk in the ley lines of his dreaming, a dreaming offered to believer and non-believer alike. Like Blake, John Clare and D H Lawrence, he is one of Albion's great secret imaginers, his prophetic work radiant with "the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780544570313Author Donald HallFormat PaperbackPage Count 144Imprint Houghton MifflinPublisher Houghton Mifflin

The philosopher-statesman on ethics and rhetoric.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 rise,...

The essential and defining new collection of the best British nature writing'Tim Dee has brought together a wonderous array of talent for this life-affirming, often magical anthology' ObserverWe are living in the anthropocene - an epoch where everything...

Isaiah Berlin's celebrated radio lectures on six formative anti-liberal thinkers were delivered on the BBC's Third Programme in 1952. They are published here for the first time, fifty years on. Freedom and its Betrayal is one of Isaiah Berlin's earliest...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780814255414Author Desirae MatherlyFormat PaperbackPage Count 288Imprint Ohio State University PressPublisher Ohio State University PressWeight(grams)...

In the years since the perennially popular In Short and In Brief were published, readers have come to delight in the deft focus of the succinct piece we now call The Short. Extending this trend, Short Takes presents over seventy-five writers whose range...

A self-proclaimed 'myth buster by trade', over her long-ranging career as a journalist and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich has delved with devastating wit and insight into the social and political fabric of America. Had I Known gathers together...

With an introduction by Kamila Shamsie'Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.'GEORGE ORWELL is one of the world's most famous writers and social commentators. Through his writing he exposed the...

The bestselling author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name returns to the essay form with this collection of thoughts on time, the creative mind, and great lives and works. The irrealis mood knows no boundaries between what is and what isn't, between...

This is the French anthropologist as we've never heard him before: Marc Auge coined the term `non-place' to describe uniquitous, global airports, hotels and motorways filled with anonymous individuals. In this new book, he casts his anthropologist's eye...

Herman Hesse remained clear-sighted and consistent in his political views and his passionate espousal of pacifism and the bloody absurdity of war from the start of the First World War to the end of his life. He wrote the earliest essay in this book in...

George Steiner, the eminent professor of English at Cambridge and Geneva universities, has outlined seven books he has never written, but has always wanted to write, in seven sections.In this fiercely original and audacious work, George Steiner tells of...

George Orwell set out 'to make political writing into an art', and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature - his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding...

Menander was the greatest writer of Attic New Comedy. He wrote prolifically in the late fourth century BC, and nearly one hundred titles of his plays are known. Due to the plays' exclusion from the Greek school curriculum in the fifth century AD and...

"He loads his head full of coal and diamonds shoot out of his finger tips. What a trick. The mole genius has left us with another digest. It's a full house--read 'em and weep."--Tom Waits After toiling in obscurity for years, Charles Bukowski suddenly...

In this heartwarming collection edited by Joseph Heller's daughter, dozens of contributors imagine one last lunch with someone they cherished A few years ago, Erica Heller, daughter of novelist Joseph Heller, realized how universal the longing is for...

Real Stories from Wildly Creative Women"If you need an extra boost of bravery, read this book! If you want to simply feel more positive about the world, read this book!" -Sherry Richert Belul, founder of Simply Celebrate and author of Say It Now#1 New...

'Over a hundred years ago, the German poet Heine warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy a civilisation' - Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty,...

Eclectic and illuminating, these essays are the last that Maugham published. Ranging from an appreciation of Goethe's novels, to an encounter with an Indian holy man, with a considered analysis of the form at which Maugham himself excelled - the short...

'We seem to live, intellectually and emotionally, in sealed-off universes,' writes Gabriel Josipovici in an essay on Hebrew poetry in medieval Spain, just one in a lively multiverse of writings gathered in The Teller and the Tale. The book draws on a...

Proud to be a Mammal (1942-97) is Czeslaw Milosz's moving and diverse collection of essays. Among them, he covers his passion for poetry, his love of the Polish language that was so nearly wiped out by the violence of the twentieth century, and his happy...