Book picks similar to
The Best American Essays by Robert Atwan
essays
non-fiction
nonfiction
collections-anthologies
The Poetry of Robert Frost
Robert Frost - 1969
Frost scholar Lathem, who was also a close friend of the four-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, scrupulously annotated the 350-plus poems in this collection, which has been the standard edition of Frost's work since it first appeared in 1969.
The Best American Essays 2005
Susan Orlean - 2005
Each volume's series editor selects notable works from hundreds of periodicals. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the very best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected--and most popular--of its kind.The Best American Essays 2005 includesRoger Angell • Andrea Barrett • Jonathan Franzen • Ian Frazier • Edward Hoagland • Ted Kooser • Jonathan Lethem • Danielle Ofri • Oliver Sacks • Cathleen Schine • David Sedaris • Robert Stone • David Foster Wallace • and othersSusan Orlean, guest editor, is the author of My Kind of Place, The Orchid Thief, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, and Saturday Night. A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1982, she has also written for Outside, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Vogue.La vie en rose / Roger Angell --The sea of information / Andrea Barrett --Storm county / Paul Crenshaw --Joyas voladoras / Brian Doyle --Sister Bernadette's barking dog / Kitty Burns Florey --The comfort zone / Jonathan Franzen --If memory doesn't serve / Ian Frazier --Against exercise / Mark Greif --Small silences / Edward Hoagland --Small rooms in time / Ted Kooser --Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn / Jonathan Lethem --Mastering the art of French cooking / E.J. Levy --Contributor's note / Michael Martone --My friend Lodovico / David Masello --Living will / Danielle Ofri --Dog days / Sam Pickering --Speed / Oliver Sacks --Dog trouble / Cathleen Schine --Old faithful / David Sedaris --Six seconds / Paula Speck --Skill display in birding groups / Bert O. States --The prince of possibility / Robert Stone --Dining with robots / Ellen Ullman --Consider the lobster / David Foster Wallace --Satin worship / Holly Welker
How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry
Edward Hirsch - 1999
Turn on a single lamp and read it while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone sleeps next to you. Say it over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of culture-the constant buzzing noise that surrounds you-has momentarily stopped. This poem has come from a great distance to find you." So begins this astonishing book by one of our leading poets and critics. In an unprecedented exploration of the genre, Hirsch writes about what poetry is, why it matters, and how we can open up our imaginations so that its message-which is of vital importance in day-to-day life-can reach us and make a difference. For Hirsch, poetry is not just a part of life, it is life, and expresses like no other art our most sublime emotions. In a marvelous reading of world poetry, including verse by such poets as Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, William Wordsworth, Sylvia Plath, Charles Baudelaire, and many more, Hirsch discovers the meaning of their words and ideas and brings their sublime message home into our hearts. A masterful work by a master poet, this brilliant summation of poetry and human nature will speak to all readers who long to place poetry in their lives but don't know how to read it.
Language Myths
Laurie Bauer - 1998
Rarely is there a response from experts in the fields of language and language development. In this book Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill have invited nineteen respected linguists from all over the world to address these "language myths"--showing that they vary from the misconceived to the downright wrong. With essays ranging from "Women Talk Too Much" and "In the Appalachians They Speak Like Shakespeare" to "Italian Is Beautiful, German Is Ugly" and "They Speak Really Bad English Down South and in New York City," Language Myths is a collection that is wide-ranging, entertaining, and authoritative.
Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word
Toni Morrison - 2009
Contributors include literary heavyweights like Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, David Grossman and Nadine Gordimer, and others.In "Witness: The Inward Testimony" Nadine Gordimer discusses the role of the writer as observer, and as someone who sees "what is really taking place." She looks to Proust, Oe, Flaubert, Graham Green to see how their philosophy squares with her own, ultimately concluding "Literature has been and remains a means of people rediscovering themselves." "In Freedom to Write" Orham Pamuk elegantly describes escorting Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter around Turkey and how that experience changed his life.In "The Value of the Word" Salman Rushdie shares a story from Bugakov′s novel The Master and the Margarita in which the Devil talks to a frustrated writer called "The Master" The writer is so upset with his own work he decides to burn it: "How could you do that?" the devil asks... "Manuscripts to not burn." Indeed, manuscripts do not burn, Rushdie argues, but writers do.As Americans we often take our freedom of speech for granted. When we talk about censorship we talk about China, the former Soviet Union. But the recent presidential election has shined a spotlight on profound acts of censorship in our own backyard. Both provocative and timely, Burn this Book include a sterling list of award winning writers; it sure to ignite spirited dialogue.
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002
Dave EggersEric Schlosser - 2002
For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to the twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind.The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002 is a selection for young people of the best literature from mainstream and alternative American periodicals: from the New Yorker, Jane, Rolling Stone, Zyzzyva, Vibe, The Onion, Spin, Epoch, Time, Little Engines, Modern Humorist, Esquire, and more. Dave Eggers has chosen the highlights of 2001 for this genre-busting collection that includes new fiction, essays, satire, journalism -- and much more. From Eric Schlosser on french fries to Elizabeth McKenzie on awful family to Seaton Smith on how to "jive" with your teen, The Best American Nonrequried Reading 2002 is the first and the best.
Neck Deep and Other Predicaments: Essays
Ander Monson - 2007
He reflects on his outsider experience at an exclusive Detroit-area boarding school in the form of a criminal history and invents a new form as he meditates on snow.Outline toward a theory of the mine versus the mind and the Harvard outline --I have been thinking about snow --Cranbrook Schools : adventures in bourgeois topologies --Index for X and the origin of fires --Fragments : on dentistry --Subject to wave action : a there and a back (with orchestral accompaniment) --The long crush --Failure : a meditation, another iteration (with interruptions) --After form and formlessness : bodies, boats, and bathing --The big and sometimes colored foam : four annotated car washes --Afterword: Elegy for telegram and Starflight
Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary
Willard Van Orman Quine - 1987
Quine's areas of interest are panoramic, as this lively book amply demonstrates.Moving from A (alphabet) to Z (zero), Quiddities roams through more than eighty topics, each providing a full measure of piquant thought, wordplay, and wisdom, couched in easy and elegant prose--"Quine at his unbuttoned best," in Donald Davidson's words. Philosophy, language, and mathematics are the subjects most fully represented; tides of entries include belief, communication, free will, idiotisms, longitude and latitude, marks, prizes, Latin pronunciation, tolerance, trinity. Even the more technical entries are larded with homely lore, anecdote, and whimsical humor.Quiddities will be a treat for admirers of Quine and for others who like to think, who care about language, and who enjoy the free play of intellect on topics large and small. For this select audience, it is an ideal book for browsing.
Suppose a Sentence
Brian Dillon - 2020
It is both an experiment in the attentive form of the essay - asking what happens, and where one might wander, when as readers and writers we pay minute attention to the language before us - and a polemic for certain kinds of experiment in prose. In a series of essays, each taking a single sentence as its starting point, the book explores style, voice and context. But it also uses its subjects - from George Eliot to Joan Didion, John Donne to Annie Dillard - to ask what the sentence is today and what it might become next.
Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories
C.S. Lewis - 1966
S. Lewis's adult religious books, a repackaged edition of the revered author’s treasury of essays and stories which examine the value of creative writing and imaginative exploration.C. S. Lewis—the great British writer, scholar, lay theologian, broadcaster, Christian apologist, and bestselling author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia, and many other beloved classics—presents a well-reasoned case for the importance of story and wonder, elements often ignored by critics of his time. He also discusses his favorite kinds of stories—children’s stories and fantasies—and offers insights into his most famous works, The Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy.
The Best American Science Writing 2010
Jerome Groopman - 2010
Distinguished by new and impressive voices as well as some of the foremost names in science writing—David Dobbs, Elizabeth Kolbert, and Larissa MacFarquhar among them—this eleventh edition features outstanding journalism from a wide variety of publications, providing a comprehensive overview of the year’s most compelling, relevant, and exciting developments in the world of science. Provocative and engaging, The Best American Science Writing 2010 reveals just how far science has brought us—and where it is headed next.
The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction
Richard Bausch - 1978
The classroom standard for readers and aspiring writers of fiction, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction offers the most comprehensive, engaging selection of classic and contemporary stories in the field.
Falling Into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature
David H. Richter - 1999
Falling into Theory is a brief and inexpensive collection of essays that asks literature students to think about the fundamental questions of literary studies today.
Signs of Life in the U.S.A.: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers
Sonia Maasik - 1994
Its unique critical method of cultural analysis continues to make this the most widely adopted of all composition readers that focus on American popular culture -- now revised to respond to students' increasing need to understand and analyze visual culture.
The Best American Travel Writing 2009
Simon Winchester - 2009
"Full of insights, humor, the exotic and distant, and the ordinary and near" (Library Journal) this collection finds "a perfect mix of exotic locale and elegant prose" (Publishers Weekly).