Showing titles in Essays

Iceland is home to only 330,000 people but more than 265 museums and public collections, ranging from the intensely physical, like the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which collects the penises of every mammal known to exist in Iceland, to the vaporously metaphysical, like the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, which poses a particularly Icelandic problem: how to display what can't be seen?

Virginia Hamilton (1936-2002) was not only one of the most magnificent writers who ever lived — winning honors such as the Newbery Medal, Newbery Honor, National Book Award, and the Coretta Scott King Award for classics like The House of Dies Drear, The People Could Fly, M. C. Higgins the Great, and Her Stories — she was one of the greatest thinkers we ever had on children's literature.

数学者として将来活躍する少年少女を見抜くことはできるか．答えが一つの数学の試験採点は容易か．どのようなコースをたどって数学者になるのか．数学者のピークはいつごろで，どのくらいの年齢までアクティブに研究できるのか．

看護の世界で75年、生と死に向き合い〝人間らしく生きる〟ことを問い続けてきた92歳の現役看護師。生命を輝かせ自己治癒力を引き出すには、あたり前の暮らしを見直すこと。ぴんぴんキラリ健康長寿の秘訣決定版。

ダチョウはホンマにアホな鳥。でも地球を救ってくれるんです――。家族が入れ替わったことにも気づかないほど鈍感力が高いが、卵から取り出す抗体は感染症予防やがん治療、メタンガス削減に役立つとされ、世界中の企業が熱視線を送る。

Embark on a journey of moral courage and social conscience with “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” audiobook, a timeless manifesto penned by the celebrated American philosopher and transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau. Narrated with passion and clarity, this audiobook brings to life Thoreau’s powerful call to individual conscience and nonviolent resistance in the face of unjust laws and government oppression.

How do we justify the hardships of the human condition with reality? When suffering comes, will life fall apart? Or will the principles of our lives hold us together? Embedded within this audiobook are questions about the inevitability of death, the longing for a full life, and the disappointment of loss. With factual stories ranging from alpine mountain rescues to an armed intruder trying to kill his family, G. R. Burns writes a candid reflection on suffering and explores the possibilities of recovery. Can suffering be avoided? Can trauma be minimized? Is recovery possible?

Too personal for an almanac, too sophisticated for a domestic history, and too funny and self-doubting for a literary journal, One Man's Meat can best be described as a primer of a countryman's lessons and a timeless recounting of experience that will never go out of style.

A genre-bending work of nonfiction, Samantha Hunt’s The Unwritten Book explores the broadest sense of ghosts, ghost stories, and haunting. What is it to be haunted, to be a ghost, to die, to live, to read? Books are ghosts; reading is communion with the dead. Alcohol is a way of communing, too, as well as a way of dying. Each chapter gathers subjects that haunt: dead people, the forest, the towering library of all those books we’ll never have time to read or write. Hunt, like a mad crossword puzzler, looks for patterns and clues.

Dismissed by a bored author at a book signing, a betrayed young man named David Sedaris made a vow. Someday, when it was his turn at the table, he’d connect with his readers. The experience has been even more revealing than he’d hoped.In this hilarious and perceptive essay, the celebrated humorist reflects on the unusual patterns of forced socialization between author and audience, and the obligations and sometimes surprising returns of not-so-chance encounters with strangers: jokes, secrets, insights, and even charity.

Stephen King once said that books are “a uniquely portable magic.” Here, Emma Smith takes listeners on a literary adventure that spans centuries and circles the globe to uncover the reasons behind our obsession with this captivating object. From disrupting the Western myth that the Gutenberg Press was the original printing project, to the decorative gift books that radicalized women to join the anti-slavery movement, to paperbacks being weaponized during World War II, to a book made entirely of cheese, Portable Magic explores how, when, and why books became so iconic.

In this powerful and wide-ranging collection of essays, Rebecca Solnit turns her attention to the war at home. This is a war, she says, "[W]ith so many casualties that we should call it by its true name, this war with so many dead by police, by violent ex-husbands and partners and lovers, by people pursuing power and profit at the point of a gun or just shooting first and figuring out who they hit later."

When we talk about sex, we talk about womanhood and motherhood, infidelity and exploitation, consent and respect, fairness and egalitarianism, love and hate, pleasure and pain. And yet for many reasons—some complicated, some not—so many of us don’t talk about it. Our deepest, most intimate fears and fantasies remain locked away inside of us, until someone comes along with the key. Here’s the key. In this generation-defining book, Gillian Anderson collects and introduces the anonymous letters of hundreds of self-identifying women from around the world (along with her own anonymous letter).

In a future world under attack from the undead, the powerful Church of Real Truth, in charge since the government fell, has sworn to reimburse citizens being harassed by the deceased. Consequently, there are many false claims of hauntings from those hoping to profit. Enter Chess Putnam, a fully-tattooed witch and freewheeling ghost hunter. She’s got a real talent for nailing human liars and banishing the wicked dead.

Con el espectro de la anarquía invocado por la derecha para sembrar el miedo, nunca ha sido más urgente una explicación convincente de la filosofía política conocida como anarquismo. Sobre el anarquismo arroja una luz muy necesaria sobre los fundamentos del pensamiento de Chomsky, específicamente su constante cuestionamiento de la legitimidad del poder atrincherado. El libro reúne algunos de sus ensayos y entrevistas, para proporcionar una breve y accesible introducción a su visión distintivamente optimista del anarquismo.

Here is an audiobook that transcends the limits of how-to guides and honors the act of childbirth in the 21st century. Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon have gathered true birth stories by women who have made self-expression their business, including Cheryl Strayed, Julia Glass, Lauren Groff, Dani Shapiro, and many other luminaries. In Labor Day, you'll hear about women determined to give birth naturally and others begging for epidurals; women who pushed for hours and women whose labors were over practically before they'd started; women giving birth to twins and to 10-pound babies.

The crônica, a literary genre peculiar to Brazilian newspapers, allows writers, or even soccer stars, to address a wide readership on any theme they like. Chatty, mystical, intimate, flirtatious, and revelatory, Clarice Lispector’s pieces for the Saturday edition of Rio’s leading paper, the Jornal do Brasil, from 1967 to 1973, take the forms of memories, essays, aphorisms, and serialized stories. Endlessly delightful, her insights make one sit up and think, whether about children or social ills or pets or society women or the business of writing or love.

The critic and essayist Meghan O'Gieblyn was born into an evangelical family, attended the famed Moody Bible Institute in Chicago for a time before she had a crisis of belief, and still lives in the Midwest, aka "Flyover Country". She writes of her "existential dizziness, a sense that the rest of the world is moving while you remain still", and that rich sense of ambivalence and internal division inform the 15 superbly thoughtful and ironic essays in this collection.  

From Pulitzer Prize-winner John McPhee, author of The Founding Fish, comes the fascinating story of an often overlooked, yet vitally important part of America. This first-hand account of the transportation sector features evocative portraits of the men and women who deliver our consumer and industrial goods.

Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in 20th-century literature. In this charged collection of 15 essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope.