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).

Desolation Angels


Jack Kerouac - 1958
    Along with such visionaries as William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac changed the face of American literature, igniting a counterculture revolution that even now, decades later, burns brighter than ever in Desolation Angels.In one of the major cinematic events of 2012, Jack Kerouac's legendary Beat classic, On the Road, finally hits the big screen. Directed by Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries; Paris, Je T'Aime) and with a cast of some of Hollywood's biggest young stars, including Kristen Stewart (The Twilight Saga), Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams (Julie & Julia, The Fighter), Tom Sturridge, and Viggo Mortensen (the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Road), the film will attract new fans who will be inspired by Kerouac's revolutionary writing.

Index Cards: Selected Essays


Moyra Davey - 2020
    While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists—Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman, and Roland Barthes, among many others—in a way that is both elliptical and direct, clearheaded and personal, prismatic and self-examining, layering narratives to reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life.

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby


Tom Wolfe - 1965
    Wolfe's brilliant first book -- a collection of essays that introduced us to the Sixties, to extravagant new styles of life that had nothing to do with the "elite" culture of the past.

Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics


Selah Saterstrom - 2017
    Film. Religion & Spirituality. How does one participate (read and write) from within the membranous precinct between our multiple bodies, from within the larger rhizomic field of resonances, where much is sounding and also unsounded? By employing various divinatory generators (instructions, methods, trances), the essays in IDEAL SUGGESTIONS: ESSAYS IN DIVINATORY POETICS genuflect to practices that celebrate engagement with uncertainty while cultivating strategies through which one might collaborate with both rupture and rapture.

Lyrical and Critical Essays


Albert Camus - 1967
    As might be expected, the main interest of these writings is that they illuminate new facets of his usual subject matter."--The New York Times Book Review"A new single work for American readers that stands among the very finest."--The Nation

Stop-Time


Frank Conroy - 1967
    Here is Frank Conroy's wry, sad, beautiful tale of life on the road; of odd jobs and lost friendships, brutal schools and first loves; of a father's early death and a son's exhilarating escape into manhood.

Jesus' Son


Denis Johnson - 1992
    In their intensity of perception, their neon-lit evocation of a strange world brought uncomfortably close to our own, the stories in Jesus' Son offer a disturbing yet eerily beautiful portrayal of American loneliness and hope.Contains:Car Crash While HitchhikingTwo MenOut on BailDundunWorkEmergencyDirty WeddingThe Other ManHappy HourSteady Hands at Seattle GeneralBeverly Home'

Modern Love: 50 True and Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit, and Devotion


Daniel Jones - 2007
    Editor Daniel Jones has arranged these tales to capture the ebb and flow of relationships, from seeking love and tying the knot to having children and finding love that endures. (Cynics and melancholics can skip right to the section on splitting up.) Taken together, these essays show through a modern lens how love drives, haunts, and enriches us. For anyone who’s loved, lost, stalked an ex, or made a lasting connection, and for the voyeur in all of us, Modern Love is the perfect match.

Essays, Speeches & Public Letters


William Faulkner - 1966
    This unique volume includes Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, a review of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (in which he suggests that Hemingway has found God), and newly collected gems, such as the acerbic essay “On Criticism” and the beguiling “Note on A Fable.” It also contains eloquently opinionated public letters on everything from race relations and the nature of fiction to wild-squirrel hunting on his property. This is the most comprehensive collection of Faulkner’s brilliant non-fiction work, and a rare look into the life of an American master.

My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro


Jeffrey Eugenides - 2008
    But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.... It is perhaps only in reading a love story (or in writing one) that we can simultaneously partake of the ecstasy and agony of being in love without paying a crippling emotional price. I offer this book, then, as a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery. Read these love stories in the safety of your single bed. Let everybody else suffer." --Jeffrey Eugenides, from the introduction to My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead All proceeds from My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead will go directly to fund the free youth writing programs offered by 826 Chicago. 826 Chicago is part of the network of seven writing centers across the United States affiliated with 826 National, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.

Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts


William H. Gass - 2012
     It begins with the personal, both past and present. It emphasizes Gass’s lifelong attachment to books and moves on to the more analytical, as he ponders the work of some of his favorite writers (among them Kafka, Nietzsche, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Proust). He writes about a few topics equally burning but less loved (the Nobel Prize–winner and Nazi sympathizer Knut Hamsun; the Holocaust).   Finally, Gass ponders theoretical matters connected with literature: form and metaphor, and specifically, one of its genetic parts—the sentence.   Gass embraces the avant-garde but applies a classic standard of writing to all literature, which is clear in these essays, or, as he describes them, literary judgments and accounts. Life Sentences is William Gass at his Gassian best.The personals column: The literary miracle --Slices of life in a library --Spit in the mitt --The first fourth following 9/11 --What freedom of expression means, especially in times like these --Retrospection --Old favorites and fresh enemies: A wreath for the grave of Gertrude Stein --Reading Proust --Nietzsche: in illness and in health --Kafka: half a man, half a metaphor --Unsteady as she goes: Malcolm Lowry's cinema inferno --The bush of belief --Henry James's curriculum vitae --An introduction to John Gardner's Nickel mountain --Katherine Anne Porter's fictional self --Knut Hamsun --Kinds of killing --The Biggs lectures in the classics: Form: Eidos --Mimesis --Metaphor --Theoretics: Lust --Narrative sentences --The aesthetic structure of the sentence

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men


James Agee - 1941
    Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when in 1941 "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" was first published to enormous critical acclaim. This unsparing record of place, of the people who shaped the land, and of the rhythm of their lives today stands as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.

Blueberries: Essays Concerning Understanding


Ellena Savage - 2020
    These essays traverse cities and spaces, bodies and histories, moving through forms and modes to find a closer kind of truth. Blueberries is ripe with acid, promise, and sweetness.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018


Sheila HetiSeo-Young Chu - 2018
    Their compilation includes new fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, and the category-defying gems that have become one of the hallmarks of this lively collection.Divine Providence / Quim Monzo --An excerpt from Notes of a Crocodile / Qiu Miaojin --This Rain / Catherine Pond --My Family's Slave / Alex Tizon --Eight Bites / Carmen Maria Machado --The Deaths of Henry King / Jesse Ball and Brain Evenson --A Refuge for Jae-In Doe: Fugues in the key of English major / Seo-Young Chu --In conversation with Vi Khi Nao / Stacey Tran --Come and Eat the World's largest shrimp cocktail in Mexico's Massacre Capital / Diego Enrique Osorno --The Uninhabitable Earth / David Wallace-Wells --An excerpt from Hunger / Roxane Gay --An excerpt from Blacks and the Master/Slave Relation / Frank B Wilderson III --A Tribute to Alvin Buenaventura / Andrew Leland, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes and Anders Nilsen --Six selected comics / Chris (Simpsons artist) --Artist's Statement / Kara Walker --Wave at the People Walking Upside Down / Tongo Eisen-Martin --Meanwhile, on Another Planet / Gunnhild Oyehaug --The David Party / David Leavitt --The Reenactors / Katherine Augusta Mayfield --Your Black Friend / Ben Passmore --Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild / Kathy Fish --Cat Person / Kristen Roupenian --An Excerpt from The Antipodes / Annie Baker --A Fair Accusation of Sexual Harassment or a Witch Hunt? / Lucy Huber --Lizard-Baby / Benjamin Schaefer --Chasing Waterfalls / László Krasznahorkai --Love, Death & Trousers: Eight Found Stories / Laura Francis and Alexander Masters --On Future and Working Through What Hurts / Hanif Abdurraqib --The Universe Would Be So Cruel / Souvankham Thammavongsa --A Love Story / Samantha Hunt