Essays

'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...

'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 SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 'I can't stop talking about this book' Jamie Klingler, co-founder #ReclaimTheseStreets 'What a gem. ... Makes you look at the world, and yourself, afresh.' Minna Salami, author of Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist...

'The best evocation I've read of London in the '80s' Neil Tennant'I loved Souvenir . . . it rescued some things for me - a certain aesthetic, a philosophical engagement with time and poignant beauty and lived history that I have found myself looking for,...

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...

Includes 'The Freedom of the Press', intended as the preface to 'Animal Farm' but undiscovered until 1972. Considered by Noam Chomsky to be Orwell's most important essay. These essays demonstrate the life and work of one of the most individual writers of...

The conquest that begot the Roman Empire.Caesar (C. Iulius, 102-44 BC), statesman and soldier, defied the dictator Sulla; served in the Mithridatic wars and in Spain; entered Roman politics as a "democrat" against the senatorial government; was the real...

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...

Describing his collection of Essays as 'a book consubstantial with its author', Montaigne identified both the power and the charm of a work which introduces us to one of the most attractive figures in European literature. A humanist, a sceptic, an acute...

'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...

While an illness keeps her bedridden, Elisabeth Bailey watches a wild snail that has taken up residence in a terrarium alongside her bed. She enters the rhythm of life of this mysterious creature, and comes to a greater understanding of her own confined...

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)...

'Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.' Immanuel KantIsaiah Berlin was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century - an activist of the intellect who marshalled vast erudition and eloquence in defence...

'The story goes that a sow who had delivered a whole litter of piglets loudly accosted a lioness. "How many children do you breed?" asked the sow. "I breed only one", said the lioness, "but it is very well bred!"' The fables of Aesop have become one...

After the execution of Socrates in 399 BC, a number of his followers wrote dialogues featuring him as the protagonist and, in so doing, transformed the great philosopher into a legendary figure. Xenophon's portrait is the only one other than Plato's to...

John Berger broke new ground with his penetrating writings on life, art and how we see the world around us. Here he explores how the ancient relationship between man and nature has been broken in the modern consumer age, with the animals that used to be...

Campo Santo is a collection of essays by W. G. SebaldWhen W.G. Sebald died tragically in 2001 a unique voice was silenced. Campo Santo is a collection of the pieces he left behind - none of them previously published in book form - which provide a...

'I hope the slave trade may be abolished. I pray it may be an event at hand.' Published a few days before the British parliament first debated the abolition of the slave trade in 1789, Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative gives the author's account...

'Seeing Voices is both a history of the deaf and an account of the development of an extraordinary and expressive language' - Evening Standard Imaginative and insightful, Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks offers a way into a world that is, for many people,...

Where, or what, is home? What has it meant, historically and personally, to be 'Italian' or 'English', or both in a culture that prefers us to choose? What does it mean to have roots? Or to have left a piece of oneself somewhere long since abandoned? ...

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...

Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays showcases the Hitchens' rejection of consensus and cliche, whether he's reporting from abroad in Indonesia, Kurdistan, Iraq, North Korea, or Cuba, or when his pen is targeted mercilessly at the likes of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.AwardsWinner of Nobel Prize 1957.Book InformationISBN 9780525564454Author Albert CamusFormat PaperbackPage Count 160Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA Inc

A brilliantly wide-ranging essay collection from the author of My Struggle, spanning literature, philosophy, art and how our daily and creative lives intertwine.In the Land of the Cyclops is Karl Ove Knausgaard's first collection of essays to be...

'Sebald is the Joyce of the 21st Century' The Times What begins as the record of W. G. Sebald's own journey on foot through coastal East Anglia, from Lowestoft to Bungay, becomes the conductor of evocations of people and cultures past and present. From...

Topics in Stoicism.Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, born at Corduba (Cordova) ca. 4 BC, of a prominent and wealthy family, spent an ailing childhood and youth at Rome in an aunt's care. He became famous in rhetoric, philosophy, money-making, and imperial ...

Selection includes The Portrait of Mr W.H., Wilde's defence of Dorian Gray, reviews, and the writings from 'Intentions' (1891): 'The Decay of Lying, 'Pen, Pencil, Poison', and 'The Critic as Artist'.Wilde is familiar to us as the ironic critic behind the...

'Ought to become a classic. It is an enshrinement of [Meades's] intense baroque and catholic cleverness' Roger Lewis, The Times'One of the foremost prose stylists of his age in any register . . . Probably we don't deserve Meades, a man who apparently has...

To be a journalist is to tell the truth. I Love Russia is Elena Kostyuchenko's fearless attempt to document Russia as experienced by those whom it systematically and brutally erases: village girls recruited into sex work, queer people in the outer...

Georges Perec produced some of the most entertaining and spirited essays of his age. His literary output was amazingly varied in form and style and this generous selection of Perec's non-fictional work also demonstrates his characteristic lightness of...

'I may not be the Jesus Christ I once fondly imagined myself, but I think I must have a talent for journalism' James Joyce's non-fictional writings address diverse issues: aesthetics, the functions of the press, censorship, Irish cultural history,...

A TLS Book of the Year This exhilarating collection of non-fiction sees one of the greatest twentieth-century writers meditating on the moments that make up a life'How did I so unwittingly transform the joy of living into the great luxury of being...

'A brave, beautiful book that could double as a handbook to accompany anyone on their journey through cancer' Jackie Kay, New StatesmanThe Cancer Journals is an intimate, poetic and invigorating account of the experience of breast cancer, from biopsy to...

Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her exams for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labour, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little...

'Intelligent, compassionate, and so fiercely, prodigiously brave. This is the essay at its creative, philosophical best' Eleanor Catton, author of The Luminaries on THE EMPATHY EXAMS A profound exploration of the oceanic depths of longing and...

Once overshadowed by Sartre, Camus has proved the more durable of the two most celebrated French writer-philosophers of the last century. This collection of his work makes the reasons for his survival self-evident. In prose of bleak but piercing clarity,...

In this funny, erudite, endlessly curious, uncannily prescient collection of essays cultural icon Margaret Atwood asks:- Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories?- How much of yourself can you give away without evaporating?- How can we...

Lviv, Lwow, Lvov, Lemberg. Known by a variety of names, the City of Lions is now in western Ukraine. Situated in different countries during its history, it is a city located along the fault-lines of Europe's history. City of Lions presents two essays,...

Composed during a critical time in the evolution of European intellectual life, the works of Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327) are some of the most powerful medieval attempts to achieve a synthesis between ancient Greek thought and the Christian faith...

'A hero of mine, a moral as well as literary giant' Simon SchamaAmos Oz, the internationally acclaimed author of A Tale of Love and Darkness and Judas, grew up in war-torn Jerusalem, where as a boy he witnessed first-hand the poisonous consequences of...