Showing titles in Essays

Leopold's essays on conservation will open the mind of any listener who gives them a chance. The first part uses essays for each of the 12 months to share the rhythm of life on his restored Wisconsin farmland, and uses the stories to branch into eye opening lessons on the history of man's use and abuse of it. The second part continues using stories from Leopold's experiences in wild places across North America to expand the lessons to a much wider view. The final part of the work seeks to lay out a better path for humanity, using solid logic and deep philosophical questioning.

Brought to you by Penguin. ‘We were so happy and didn’t know it…’ A thirty-three-year-old writer lives in a quiet European suburb with his wife and his dog. His parents have bought an apartment nearby. On weekends they go out for brunch, cook and see friends. Life is good; it is normal...

Brought to you by Penguin. 'Do you know it, do you remember it, the drives, the attitudes, the terrors and, yes, the joys?' Thus Steinbeck introduces his collection of poignant and hard-hitting dispatches for the New York Herald Tribune when the Second World War was at its height. He begins in...

Brought to you by Penguin. From one of the great thinkers and writers of our time, comes the highly anticipated final instalment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed 'Living Autobiography' Following the international critical acclaim of The Cost of Living, this final volume of Deborah Levy's...

James Baldwin's breakthrough essay collection made him the voice of his generation. Ranging over Harlem in the 1940s, movies, novels, his preacher father and his experiences of Paris, they capture the complexity of black life at the dawn of the civil rights movement with effervescent wit and prophetic wisdom.

‘I salute him with the most heartfelt respect and admiration’ PHILIP PULLMAN ‘Entrancing … a creative manifesto’ TELEGRAPH ‘Mesmerising … vibrating with life and curiosity’ OBSERVER In this lyrical and revelatory memoir, Alan Garner, Booker shortlisted author of Treacle Walker...

From one of the most important chroniclers of our time, come two extended excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooks–writings that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary writer. Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of overheard dialogue, observations...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Things I Don't Want to Know by Deborah Levy, read by Juliet Stevenson. Things I Don't Want to Know is the first in Deborah Levy's essential three-part 'Living Autobiography' on writing and womanhood. Taking George Orwell's famous essay, 'Why I Write', as...

The great insights of the Stoics are spread over a wide range of ancient sources. This book brings them all together for the first time. It systematically presents what the various Stoic philosophers said on every important topic, accompanied by an eloquent commentary that is clear and concise. The result is a set of philosophy lessons for everyone - the most valuable wisdom of ages past made available for our times, and for all time. 

'A mine of treasures, a source of visions, a microcosm of human experience and suffering, the philosopher's stone: Migraine is a remarkable achievement' - Sunday Telegraph. Migraine is an age-old – the first recorded instances date back over two thousand years – and often debilitating...

To overcome a crisis of melancholy after the death of his father, Montaigne withdrew to his country estates and began to write, and in the highly original essays that resulted he discussed themes such as fathers and children, conscience and cowardice, coaches and cannibals, and, above all, himself.

Some of us found ourselves in rooms with sticky floors. Dollar drinks. Music loud enough to feel in your sternum. Strangers who became your people before you even knew their names. A world that existed before the apps, before the algorithms, before you had to optimize yourself for someone else's checklist. We are human first. Gay second. And this is a book about the human underneath. Boys Bars Becoming is a collection of essays about gay men of a certain age — who we were in those rooms, who we became outside of them, and who we are still trying to figure out how to be.

When it comes to how societies commemorate their own distant dreams and catastrophes, we often think of books, archives, or memorials carved from stone. But in Time's Echo, Jeremy Eichler makes a revelatory case for the power of music as culture's memory, an art form uniquely capable of carrying forward meaning from the past. Eichler shows how four towering composers - Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich - lived through the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust and later transformed their experiences into deeply moving works of music.

Best-selling author of Fire and Fury, Siege and Landslide and chronicler of the Trump White House Michael Wolff dissects more of the major monsters, media moguls and vainglorious figures of our time. His scalpel opens their lives, careers and always equivocal endgames with the same vividness and wit he brought to his evisceration of the former president. These brilliant and biting profiles form a mesmerising portrait of the hubris, overreach and periodic self-destruction of some of the most famous faces of the last 20 years.

Brought to you by Penguin. *Narrated by Academy, Tony and Primetime Emmy Award winner Ellen Burstyn* From the beloved bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a posthumous collection of newly discovered writing, offering a fresh perspective on the remarkable literary mind behind To Kill a...

In 1572, Montaigne - nobleman, humanist, and thoroughly Renaissance man - retired to the seclusion of his estate in the Dordogne and started to write. From his pen poured a stream of "essays" - attempts to capture the observations that came to him on an idiosyncratic range of subjects, from ancient customs, cannibals, and books to thumbs, war-horses, and the wearing of clothes. He made the study of himself the starting point for investigations into how to live, and wrote with a startlingly modern candor about love, grief, friendship, sex, and death.

A stunning collection of essays and memoir from twice Booker Prize winner and international bestseller Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the Light In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, ‘I have no critical...

In Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction outing, an examination of the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life through an insightful, unsparing argument that proves the greatest horrors are not the products of our imagination but instead are found in reality. "There is a signature motif discernible in...

From acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin, and with an introduction by Karen Joy Fowler, a collection of thoughts - always adroit, often acerbic - on aging, belief, the state of literature, and the state of the nation. Ursula K. Le Guin has taken listeners to imaginary worlds for decades. Now she's in the last great frontier of life, old age, and exploring new literary territory: the blog, a forum where her voice - sharp, witty, as compassionate as it is critical - shines. No Time to Spare collects the best of Ursula's blog, presenting perfectly crystallized dispatches on what matters.

Brought to you by Penguin. In this short sequel to his acclaimed memoir, the legendary filmmaker and global cultural icon explores one of his favourite topics: the nature of truth. What if a lie is told to reveal some underlying truth? Are feelings that seem inappropriate, such as the hysteria...