Essays

Rome, from the beginning.Livy (Titus Livius), the great Roman historian, was born at or near Patavium (Padua) in 64 or 59 BC; he may have lived mostly in Rome but died at Patavium, in AD 12 or 17. Livy's only extant work is part of his history of Rome...

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...

Philosopher John Dewey called Ralph Waldo Emerson "the one citizen of the New World fit to have his name uttered in the same breath with that of Plato."Through his writing and his own personal philosophy, Emerson unburdened his young country of Europe's...

A TRUE STORY THAT HAS TOUCHED THE HEARTS OF THOUSANDS'Unmitigated delight from cover to cover' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'A real-life love story . . . A timeless period piece. Do read it' WALL STREET JOURNAL 'Beguile an hour of your time and put you in tune with...

In his most extraordinary book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. These are case studies of people who have lost their...

Set on a Bengali noble's estate in 1908, this is both a love story and a novel of political awakening. The central character, Bimala, is torn between the duties owed to her husband, Nikhil, and the demands made on her by the radical leader, Sandip. Her...

Terry Pratchett in his own wordsWith a foreword by Neil GaimanTerry Pratchett earned a place in the hearts of readers the world over with his bestselling Discworld series - but in recent years he became equally well-known as an outspoken campaigner for...

'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...

In Burning Questions Atwood aims her constant curiosity and impish humour at our world and reports back to us on what she finds.In it she seeks answers to Burning Questions such as:Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories?How can we live...

Over the past few decades, the bestselling author of Hitch-22 has crisscrossed the globe debating religious scholars, Catholic clergy, rabbis, and devout Christians on the existence of God- appearances that have attracted thousands of people on both...

Amid the corruption and power struggles of the collapse of the Roman Republic, Cicero (106-43BC) produced some of the most stirring and eloquent speeches in history. A statesman and lawyer, he was one of the only outsiders to penetrate the aristocratic...

John Milton was celebrated and denounced in his own time both as a poet and as a polemicist. Today he is remembered first and foremost for his poetry, but his great epic Paradise Lost was published very late in his life, in 1667, and in his own time most...

No poetry has touched readers' hearts more deeply than the soldier poets of the First World War. Published to commemorate the centenary of 1914, this stunning set of books, with specially commissioned covers by leading print makers, is an essential...

Lyric essayists draw on memoir, poetry, and prose to push against the arbitrary genre restrictions in creative nonfiction, opening up space not only for new forms of writing, but also new voices and a new literary canon. This anthology features some of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780679783220Author Ralph Waldo EmersonFormat PaperbackPage Count 880Imprint Modern Library IncPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 612gDimensions(mm)...

'They are memorials to times and countries whose best is probably past and gone . . . I was lucky to have known them when I did, before darkness began to fall from the air.'When Laurie Lee first left his country village aged nineteen, he discovered a...

'A joyous multiplicity of writings incorporating collective manifestos, poetry, fiction, and autobiography... endlessly fascinating' Catherine Taylor, Financial Times'A tour de force of feminist thinking, spanning seven centuries and multiple...

For the great Roman orator and statesman Cicero, 'the good life' was at once a life of contentment and one of moral virtue - and the two were inescapably intertwined. This volume brings together a wide range of his reflections upon the importance of...

As the Amazon burns, Fabio Zuker shares stories of resistance, self-determination, and kinship with the land. In 2007, a seven-ton minke whale was found stranded on the banks of the Tapajos River, hundreds of miles into the Amazon rainforest. For...

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...

'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...

Featuring a gathering of more than fifty of contemporary literature's finest voices, this volume will enchant, move, and inspire readers with its tales of The Writing Life . In it, authors divulge professional secrets: how they first discovered they...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780954440909Author Cecil CollinsFormat PaperbackPage Count 51Imprint Fools' PressPublisher Fools' Press

Marie `Missie' Vassiltchikov as a White Russian emigree caught with her family in Hitler`s Germany at the outbreak of the war. She was a Bright Young Thing, part of the cosmopolitan set who managed to maintain a trance-like normality until as late as...

"Farnsworth beautifully integrates his own observations with scores of quotations from Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne and others. This isn't just a book to read-it's a book to return to, a book that will provide perspective and consolation...

Collecting the most incisive and influential writings of one of Rome's finest orators, Cicero's Selected Works is translated with an introduction by Michael Grant in Penguin Classics.Lawyer, philosopher, statesman and defender of Rome's Republic, Cicero...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780679724841Author W. H. AudenFormat PaperbackPage Count 544Imprint Random House USA IncPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 395gDimensions(mm) 203mm...

Louise Labe (1522-66) remains one of the most important and influential women writers of the Renaissance. Best known for her exquisite collection of love sonnets, Labe played off the Petrarchan male tradition with wit and irony, and her elegies respond...

'Dazzling ... in her kaleidoscopic essays, memoir has been shattered into sliding and overlapping pieces ... mind-expanding' The New York Times Book Review Esme Weijun Wang was officially diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in 2013, although the...

'To create today means to create dangerously'This new collection contains some of Camus' most brilliant political writing as he reflects on moral responsibility and the role of the artist in the world. Letters to a German Friend, written and published...

'It was the discovery of the essays celebrating his childhood and youth that altered my perception of Camus, from a thinker to a writer whose intellectual lucidity was a product of the wealth - the sensual immediacy and clarity - that had been heaped on...

'... a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food...'Swift's devastating short satire on how to solve a famineIntroducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity 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...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781984899422Author Alice WongFormat PaperbackPage Count 240Imprint Random House USA IncPublisher Random House USA Inc

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780593653197Author Renee FlemingFormat HardbackPage Count 464Imprint VikingPublisher Penguin Putnam Inc

'A masterpiece ... a moving image of post-war Poland, and the first breathing of one of the essential voices of the twentieth century... the master of literary reportage' The Times Literary SupplementWhen the great traveller-reporter Ryszard...

The war on the old has been declared.In the post-Brexit world, intergenerational conflict has become a visible phenomenon. There is an overwhelming sense of blame from younger generations: it was 'the wrinklies', the grey-haired plutocracy, who voted...

'Masterly, hilarious, truly insightful' - Philip Hensher, The Spectator A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2019 The last major collection of Nabokov's published material, Think, Write, Speak brings together a treasure trove of previously...

'Determination, grit and humour shine through' Lindsey Hilsum, ObserverNineteen Arab women journalists speak out about what it's like to report on their changing homelands in this first-of-its-kind essay collection.A growing number of intrepid Arab and...

From M.R. James to Shirley Jackson, the Uncanny has long provided fertile ground for writers - and recent years have seen a notable resurgence in both literature and film. But how does the Uncanny work? What can a writer do to ensure their fiction haunts...