Mostrando títulos en Ensayos

The Inconvenient Indian is at once a “history” and the complete subversion of a history - in short, a critical and personal meditation that the remarkable Thomas King has conducted over the past 50 years about what it means to be “Indian” in North America. Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, this book distills the insights gleaned from that meditation, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since the two first encountered each other.

Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality - or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it?

It's a report tempered by hard times. In "Matricide", Daum unflinchingly describes a parent's death and the uncomfortable emotions it provokes; and in "Diary of a Coma" she relates her own journey to the twilight of the mind. But Daum also operates in a comic register. With perfect precision, she reveals the absurdities of the marriage-industrial complex, of the New Age dating market, and of the peculiar habits of the young and digital.

One of the most powerful questions humans ask about the cosmos is: Are we alone? While the science behind this inquiry is fascinating, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is a reflection of our values, our fears, and most importantly, our enduring sense of hope. In The Possibility of Life, acclaimed science journalist Jaime Green traces the history of our understanding, from the days of Galileo and Copernicus to our contemporary quest for exoplanets. Along the way, she interweaves insights from science fiction writers who construct worlds that in turn inspire scientists.

The Fable of the Bees—a satirical poem, prose discussion, three essays and six dialogues completed in 1729—exposes human vices but defends them as a necessity within a wealthy society. Mandeville’s bees thrive until they start living by honesty and virtue… then they are impoverished. Mandeville did not play by the rules: he satirized the sins of society but also ridiculed the widespread hypocrisy of deploring these sins whilst reaping their benefits. He and his work were attacked for the rest of the century.

Brilliant and uncompromising, piercing and funny, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is essential listening. This new edition of award-winning author Kiese Laymon’s first work of nonfiction looks inward, drawing heavily on the author and his family’s experiences, while simultaneously examining the world—Mississippi, the South, the United States—that has shaped their lives. With subjects that range from an interview with his mother to reflections on Ole Miss football, Outkast, and the labor of Black women, these insightful essays highlight Laymon’s profound love of language.

In Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman is more entertaining and incisive than ever. Whether he's dissecting the boredom of voyeurism, the reason why music fan's inevitably hate their favorite band's latest album, or why we love watching can't-miss superstars fail spectacularly, Klosterman remains obsessed with the relationship between expectation, reality, and living history. It's amateur anthropology for the present tense, and sometimes it's incredibly funny.

Anais Nin wrote her diary at the end of 1931, at the close of a sexually tumultuous and emotional year as part of a ménage a trois with fellow writer Henry Miller and his beautiful wife June Mansfield. 'I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife.' Nin's passionate and consuming relationship with Henry & June transformed a previously monogamous wife into an uninhibited and sexually liberated woman.

New York Times best-selling author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name André Aciman returns to the essay form in Homo Irrealis to explore what the present tense means to artists who cannot grasp the here and now. Irrealis is not about the present, or the past, or the future, but about what might have been but never was - but could in theory still happen. Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection of the imagination's power to shape our memories under time's seemingly intractable hold.

A companion volume to Illuminations, the first collection of Walter Benjamin’s writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin.

In My Remaining Years, by creative juggernaut Jean Grae, debunks the myth that coming-of-age narratives should be reserved for the kids, providing a much-needed rallying cry for those of us still trying to figure it out in our forties.

Celebrated author and newspaper columnist Rick Bragg brings us an ode to the stories and history of the Deep South, filled with “eclectic nuggets about places and people he knows well” (USA Today) and written with honesty, wit, and deep affection. A collection of wide-ranging and endearingly personal columns — from Bragg’s love of Tupperware (his mother preferred margarine tubs and thought Tupperware was “just showing off”) to the decline of country music, from the legacy of Harper Lee to the metamorphosis of the pickup truck.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) has influenced philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Oswald Spengler, George Grant, Emil Cioran, Albert Camus, Ayn Rand, Jacques Derrida, Leo Strauss, Max Scheler, Michel Foucault and Bernard Williams. His writings on aesthetics, language, truth, morality, cultural theory, history, nihilism, power, and the meaning of existence have exerted a vast influence on Western philosophy and intellectual history.

Scaachi Koul deploys her razor-sharp humor to share all the fears, outrages, and mortifying moments of her life. She learned from an early age what made her miserable, and for Scaachi anything can be cause for despair. Whether it’s a shopping trip gone awry; enduring awkward conversations with her bikini waxer; overcoming her fear of flying while vacationing halfway around the world; dealing with Internet trolls, or navigating the fears and anxieties of her parents.

Ostensibly about death and its attendant rituals, The Undertaking is in the end about life. In each case, he writes, it is the one that gives meaning to the other. A funeral director in Milford, Michigan, Lynch is that strangest of hyphenates, a poet-undertaker, but according to Lynch, all poets share his occupation, "looking for meaning and voices in life and love and death." Looking for meaning takes him to all sorts of unexpected places, both real and imagined. He embalms the body of his own father, celebrates the rebuilt bridge to his town's old cemetery, and more.

When Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker’s art critic and the leading art writer of his generation, published his eye-opening autobiographical essay, “The Art of Dying,” in December 2019, he reported that he had lung cancer and had been given six months of life. Fortunately, his treatment was showing some improvement, and so, he wrote, “These extra months are a luxury that I hope to have put to good use.”

This edition brings together some of Ephron’s most famous writing on a generation of women (and men) who helped shape the way we live now, and on events ranging from the Watergate scandal to the Pillsbury Bake-Off. In these sharp, hilariously entertaining, and vividly observed pieces, Ephron illuminates an era with wicked honesty and insight. From the famous "A Few Words About Breasts" to important pieces on her time working for the New York Post and Gourmet Magazine, these essays show Ephron at her very best.

From her creation of the “Approval Matrix” in New York magazine in 2004 to her Pulitzer Prize–winning columns for The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum has argued for a new way of looking at TV. In this collection, including two never-before-published essays, Nussbaum writes about her passion for television, beginning with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the show that set her on a fresh intellectual path. She explores the rise of the female screw-up, how fans warp the shows they love, the messy power of sexual violence on TV, and the year that jokes helped elect a reality-television president.

Sir Francis Bacon, sometimes known as the father of empiricism, was one of the major political figures of his day, his career culminating as Lord Chancellor under King James I in 1617. Bacon wrote widely, but it is the Essays (published in its third edition in 1625, the year before his death) for which he is best known. Deftly written and often displaying a cutting wit, they cover a wide range of subjects including death, love, marriage, ambition and atheism.

G. K. Chesterton was a journalist, playwright, poet, biographer, novelist, essayist, literary commentator, editor, orator, artist, and theologian. Orthodoxy is his great apologia for the Christian faith, which was prompted by a serious attack in 1903 against Christianity by well-known newspaper editor Robert Blatchford.