ABC of Reading


Ezra Pound - 1934
    With characteristic vigor and iconoclasm, Pound illustrates his precepts with exhibits meticulously chosen from the classics, and the concluding “Treatise on Meter” provides an illuminating essay for anyone aspiring to read and write poetry. The ABC of Reading emphasizes Pound's ability to discover neglected and unknown genius, distinguish originals from imitations, and open new avenues in literature for our time.

Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978


Seamus Heaney - 1980
    Subsequent essays include critical work on Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Lowell, William Butler Yeats, John Montague, Patrick Kavanagh, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, and Philip Larkin.

In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage


Joseph Epstein - 2007
    Taking his title from the wounded cry of the once great Max Bialystock in The Producers -- “Look at me now! Look at me now! I’m wearing a cardboard belt!” -- Epstein gives us his largest and most comprehensive collection to date.Writing as a memoirist, polemicist, literary critic, and amused observer of contemporary culture, he uses to deft and devastating effect his signature gifts: wide-ranging erudition, sparkling humor, and a penetrating intelligence. In personally revealing essays about his father and about his years as a teacher, in deeply considered examinations of writers from Paul Valery to Truman Capote, and in incisive take-downs of such cultural pooh-bahs as Harold Bloom and George Steiner, this remarkable collection presents us with the best work of our country’s most singular talent, engaged with the richness and variety of life, witty in his response to the world, and always entertaining.

The Ant and the Ferrari


Kerry Spackman - 2012
    this is one of those rare books that will change your beliefs - and in doing so will change your life. tHE ANt AND tHE FERRARI offers readers a clear, navigable path through the big questions that confront us all today. What is the meaning of life? Can we be ethical beings in today's world? Can we know if there is life after death? Is there such a thing as Absolute truth? What caused the Big Bang and why should you care?

Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room


Geoff Dyer - 2012
    (“Every single frame,” declared Cate Blanchett, “is burned into my retina.”) As Dyer guides us into the zone of Tarkovsky’s imagination, we realize that the film is only the entry point for a radically original investigation of the enduring questions of life, faith, and how to live. In a narrative that gives free rein to the brilliance of Dyer’s distinctive voice—acute observation, melancholy, comedy, lyricism, and occasional ill-temper—Zona takes us on a wonderfully unpredictable journey in which we try to fathom, and realize, our deepest wishes.Zona is one of the most unusual books ever written about film, and about how art—whether a film by a Russian director or a book by one of our most gifted contemporary writers—can shape the way we see the world and how we make our way through it.

Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost


Stanley Fish - 1971
    S. Lewis) that the poet's sympathies are obviously with God and the angels loyal to him.The achievement of Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin was to reconcile the two camps by subsuming their claims in a single overarching thesis: Paradise Lost is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are--that is, fallen--and the poem's lesson is proven on a reader's impulse every time he or she finds a devilish action attractive or a godly action dismaying.Fish's argument reshaped the face of Milton studies; thirty years later the issues raised in Surprised by Sin continue to set the agenda and drive debate.

What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World


Robert Hass - 2011
    Poet Laureate’s Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poetry collection, Time and Materials, as well as his earlier book of essays, the NBCC Award-winner Twentieth Century Pleasures. Haas brilliantly discourses on many of his favorite topics—on writers ranging from Jack London to Wallace Stevens to Allen Ginsberg to Cormac McCarthy; on California; and on the art of photography in several memorable pieces—in What Light Can Do, a remarkable literary treasure that might best be described as “luminous.”

Bringing Up Children


Osho - 2012
    Osho responds to a question about the right way to help children to grow without interfering in their natural potentiality.

REAL: The Inside-Out Guide to Being Yourself


Clare Dimond - 2018
     ‘I want to be’ I said. ‘But who am I?’ Have you ever noticed that what you think about who you are, how you should be, how well you are doing changes? This is because our idea of who we are is created in thought and it is the nature of thought to change. Looking at this more clearly takes us on a breath-taking exploration into what is real about us. We discover what is permanent, unchanging. And it is never what we think. The first part of REAL looks at everything that cannot be true about who we are. It looks at what is transient, momentary and ever-changing such as our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, insecurities, habits, stress. These are all the things we can stop paying attention to because the only thing we know for sure about them is that they will change. And this leaves us with one important question: who are we? The second part of REAL explores what remains when our thought-created idea of self dissolves. It explores what is constant, what is always there regardless of transient thought and belief. By looking for the constant we get closer to the truth of us. When we live from this understanding, we have more freedom, integrity and wholeness than we had ever thought possible.

Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth


John C. Wright - 2014
    

Black Sheep: My Journey from Evangelical Christianity to Atheism


Cassie Fox - 2019
     Raised in the confines of evangelical Christianity from a young age, Cassie Fox served and sought the God she loved with all of her heart. A true believer, she attended Bible college and became an ordained minister, fervently preaching the Gospel to others with passion. After years of living a life dedicated to her faith in God, she learned information that cast her religious beliefs in a different light. In this raw, transparent, and sometimes heartbreaking autobiography, Cassie Fox shares her gripping journey as she battled and agonized over the implications of her newfound understanding until she ultimately found peace and healing in the least expected of places. Walk through this incredible, life changing story of triumph, and discover the message of optimism and hope she found at the end. Buy Black Sheep: My Journey from Evangelical Christianity to Atheism today!

The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography


Angela Carter - 1978
    So says the Marquis de Sade, philosopher and pornographer. His virtuous Justine, who keeps to the rules, is rewarded with rape and humiliation; his Juliette, Justine's triumphantly monstrous antithesis, viciously exploits her sexuality.With brilliance and wit, Angela Carter takes on these outrageous figments of de Sade's extreme imagination and transforms them into symbols of our time: The Hollywood sex goddesses, mothers and daughters, pornography, even the sacred shrines of sex and marriage lie devastatingly exposed before our eyes.Author Bio: Angela Carter (1940-1992) was best known for her subversive short stories, including her most famous collection, The Bloody Chamber. Carter translated the fairy tales of Charles Perrault, and wrote the screenplay for Neil Jordan's 1984 film, The Company of Wolves, based on her short story.

Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society


Reinhart Koselleck - 1959
    This first English translation of Koselleck's tour de force demonstrates a chronological breadth, a philosophical depth, and an originality which are hardly equalled in any scholarly domain. It is a history of the Enlightenment in miniature, fundamental to our understanding of that period and its consequences. Like Tocqueville, Koselleck views Enlightenment intellectuals as an uprooted, unrealistic group of onlookers who sowed the seeds of the modern political tensions that first flowered in the French Revolution. He argues that it was the split that developed between state and society during the Enlightenment that fostered the emergence of this intellectual elite divorced from the realities of politics. Koselleck describes how this disjunction between political authority proper and its subjects led to private spheres that later became centers of moral authority and, eventually, models for political society that took little or no notice of the constraints under which politicians must inevitably work. In this way progressive bourgeois philosophy, which seemed to offer the promise of a unified and peaceful world, in fact produced just the opposite. The book provides a wealth of examples drawn from all of Europe to illustrate the still relevant message that we evade the constraints and the necessities of the political realm at our own risk.Critique and Crisis is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.

Bill W.: A Biography of Alcoholics Anonymous Cofounder Bill Wilson


Francis Hartigan - 2000
    Bob Smith, founded Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935, his hope was that AA would become a safe haven for those who suffered from this disease. Thirty years after his death, AA continues to help millions of alcoholics recover from what had been commonly regarded as a hopeless addiction. Still, while Wilson was a visionary for millions, he was no saint. After cofounding Alcoholics Anonymous, he stayed sober for over thirty-five years, helping countless thousands rebuild their lives. But at the same time, Wilson suffered form debilitating bouts of clinical depression, was a womanizer, and experimented with LSD.Francis Hartigan, the former secretary and confidant to Wilson's wife, Lois, has exhaustively researched his subject, writing with a complete insider's knowledge. Drawing on extensive interviews with Lois Wilson and scores of early members of AA, he fully explores Wilson's organizational genius, his devotion to the cause, and almost martyr-like selflessness. That Wilson, like all of us, had to struggle with his own personal demons makes this biography all the more moving and inspirational. Hartigan reveals the story of Wilson's life to be as humorous, horrific, and powerful as any of the AA vignettes told daily around the world.

The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber


Nicholson Baker - 1996
    368 pp. 15,000 print.