Category
Essays
From the mailbox of the Prime Minister's Office to your bookshelf, a list of more than 100 books that every Canadian should read. This largely one-sided correspondence from the "loneliest book club in the world" is a compendium for bibliophiles and those who follow the Canadian political scene....
Bento's Sketchbook 2025
The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza (a.k.a. Bento) spent the most intense years of his short life writing. He also carried with him a sketchbook. After his sudden death, his friends rescued letters, manuscripts, notes—but no drawings.
For years, without knowing what its pages might...
A meditation on the ever-constant allure of risk, fortune and fate from Booker Prize-winner DBC Pierre.
Big Snake Little Snake is a cascade of true stories by DBC Pierre, recorded while on his way to make a short film with a parrot in Trinidad, which not only examines the nature of gambling, the...
Bite by Bite 2024
In Bite by Bite, poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores the way food and drink evoke our associations and remembrances—a subtext or layering, a flavor tinged with joy, shame, exuberance, grief, desire, or nostalgia.
Nezhukumatathil restores our astonishment and wonder about food through...
Abominations 2024
Novelist, cultural observer, and social satirist Lionel Shriver is among the sharpest talents of our age. A writer who embraces “under-expressed, unpopular or downright dangerous” points of view, she filets cherished shibboleths and the conformity of thought and attitude that has overtaken...
George Saunders's first foray into nonfiction is comprised of essays on literature, travel, and politics. At the core of this unique collection are Saunders's travel essays based on his trips to seek out the mysteries of the "Buddha Boy" of Nepal; to attempt to indulge in the extravagant pleasures...
Changing My Mind 2010
Split into five sections--Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering--Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural.
This engaging collection of essays, some published here for the first time, reveals Smith as a passionate and precise...
Changing My Mind 2025
“We always believe that changing our mind is an improvement, bringing a greater truthfulness to our dealings with the world and other people. It puts an end to vacillation, uncertainty, weak-mindedness. It seems to make us stronger and more mature. Well, we would think that, wouldn't we?”
In these...
A masterful evocation of the city that never sleeps, The Colossus of New York captures the city’s inner and outer landscapes in a series of vignettes, meditations, and personal memories. Colson Whitehead conveys with almost uncanny immediacy the feelings and thoughts of longtime residents and of...
Coventry 2020
Coventry encompasses memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about literature, with pieces on family life, gender, and politics, and on D. H. Lawrence, Françoise Sagan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Named for an essay Cusk published in Granta (“Every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother...
Dancing on My Own 2024
In Robyn’s 2010 track *Dancing on My Own*, the Swedish pop singer chronicles a night on the dance floor in the shadow of a former lover. She is bitter, angry, and at times desperate, and yet by the time the chorus arrives her frustration has melted away. She decides to dance on her own, and in this...
Dead and Alive 2025
In this eagerly awaited new collection, Zadie Smith brings her unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years.
She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kara Walker and Celia Paul. She invites us along to the...
A brilliant and unsparing examination of America in the early twenty-first century, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely invents a new genre to confront the particular loneliness and rapacious assault on selfhood that our media have inflicted upon our lives. Fusing the lyric, the essay, and the...
Feel Free 2018
Sharp, witty, and intellectually restless, Feel Free brings together a wide-ranging collection of essays by Zadie Smith that explore the cultural and personal landscapes of contemporary life. Moving effortlessly between subjects—from literature and film to politics, technology, and everyday...
Havanas in Camelot 2009
After the great success in 1990 of Darkness Visible, his memoir of depression and recovery, William Styron wrote more frequently in an introspective, autobiographical mode. Havanas in Camelot brings together fourteen of his personal essays, including a reminiscence of his brief friendship with John...
Intimations 2020
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...
Just Us 2021
In Just Us, Claudia Rankine invites us into a necessary conversation about Whiteness in America. What would it take for us to breach the silence, guilt, and violence that arise from addressing Whiteness for what it is? What are the consequences if we keep avoiding this conversation? What might it...
Languages of Truth 2022
Gathering pieces written between 2003 and 2020, Languages of Truth chronicles Rushdie’s intellectual engagement with a period of momentous cultural shifts. Immersing the reader in a wide variety of subjects, he delves into the nature of storytelling as a human need, and what emerges is, in myriad...
Letters From London 1995
With brilliant wit, idiosyncratic intelligence, and a bold grasp of intricate political realities, the celebrated author of Flaubert's Parrot turns his satiric glance homeward to England, in a sparkling collection of essays that illustrates the infinite variety of contemporary London life.
In Like the Flowing River, Paulo Coelho invites readers into a journey through his life, sharing reflections, personal stories, and moments of insight gathered over decades of travel, writing, and encounters with people from all walks of life. Each chapter is a small story, a lesson, or a...
Siri Hustvedt's novels are known for being as thought-provoking as they are emotionally involving. In these essays, Hustvedt shows what lies behind her fiction - an abiding curiosity about who we are and how we got that way, which has led her into the realms of psychology and neuroscience, as well...
In *Magically Black and Other Essays*, Jerald Walker elegantly blends personal revelation and cultural critique to create a bracing and often humorous examination of Black American life.
He thoughtfully addresses the inherent complexities of topics as eclectic as incarceration, home renovations,...
Mantel Pieces 2021
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 training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.’ This collection of twenty reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three...
My Generation 2015
My Generation is the definitive gathering of William Styron’s nonfiction, exposing the core of this greatly gifted, highly convivial, and profoundly serious artist from his literary emergence in the 1950s to his death in 2006.
Here are fifty years of Styron’s essays, memoirs, reviews, op-eds,...
Nobody Knows My Name 1992
Told with Baldwin's characteristically unflinching honesty, this collection of illuminating, deeply felt essays examines topics ranging from race relations in the United States to the role of the writer in society, and offers personal accounts of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer and other writers.
Opinions 2024
Since the publication of the groundbreaking *Bad Feminist* and *Hunger*, Roxane Gay has continued to tackle big issues embroiling society—state-sponsored violence and mass shootings, women’s rights post-Dobbs, online disinformation, and the limits of empathy—alongside more individually personalized...
Passions of the Mind 1993
Whether she is writing about George Eliot or Sylvia Plath; Victorian spiritual malaise or Toni Morrison; mythic strands in the novels of Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow; politics behind the popularity of Barbara Pym or the ambitions that underlie her own fiction, Byatt manages to be challenging,...
Release the Bats 2017
Part biography, part reflection and part practical guide, Release the Bats explores the mysteries of why and how we tell stories, and the craft of writing fiction. DBC Pierre reveals everything he learned the hard way.
Something to Declare 2003
Julian Barnes’s appreciation extends from France’s vanishing peasantry to its hyper-literate pop singers, from the gleeful iconoclasm of nouvelle vague cinema to the orgy of drugs and suffering that is the Tour de France. Above all, Barnes is an unparalleled connoisseur of French writing and...
Chuck Palahniuk’s world has always been, well, different from yours and mine. In his first collection of nonfiction, Chuck Palahniuk brings us into this world, and gives us a glimpse of what inspires his fiction.
At the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival in Missoula, Montana, average people...
This Quiet Dust 1993
In an age when much American writing was either glacially noncommittal or heremetically personal, William Styron persisted in addressing great moral issues with incendiary passion. Seriousness and ardor characterize all the essays in This Quiet Dust, the first book of nonfiction by the Pulitzer...
A Town Without Time 2024
For over six decades, Gay Talese has told New York stories. They are the stories of daring bridge builders, disappearing gangsters, intrepid Vogue editors, unassuming doormen who’ve seen too much. They are set in the star-studded salons of George Plimpton’s apartment, in the tense newsroom of a...
Triage 2026
Claudia Rankine has widened contemporary literature with her consciousness-raising, genre-defying works. In her first book after her celebrated American trilogy, presented with full-color visuals, Rankine shifts into sustained narrative, memory, criticism, and essay to offer her most personal and...
Attention 2026
For thirty years Anne Enright—one of our greatest living novelists (Times)—has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature, and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights. These essays, collated from across Enright’s career, take us from...
The winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, Howard Jacobson, brims with life in this collection of his most acclaimed journalism. From the unusual disposal of his father-in-law's ashes and the cultural wasteland of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to the melancholy sensuality of Leonard Cohen and desolation of...
Women in Clothes 2014
Women in Clothes is a book unlike any other. It is essentially a conversation among hundreds of women of all nationalities—famous, anonymous, religious, secular, married, single, young, old—on the subject of clothing, and how the garments we put on every day define and shape our lives. It began with...
Bite by Bite 2024
In Bite by Bite, poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores the way food and drink evoke our associations and remembrances—a subtext or layering, a flavor tinged with joy, shame, exuberance, grief, desire, or nostalgia.
Nezhukumatathil restores our astonishment and wonder about food through...
Triage August 4, 2026
Claudia Rankine has widened contemporary literature with her consciousness-raising, genre-defying works. In her first book after her celebrated American trilogy, presented with full-color visuals, Rankine shifts into sustained narrative, memory, criticism, and essay to offer her most personal and...
Attention April 7, 2026
For thirty years Anne Enright—one of our greatest living novelists (Times)—has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature, and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights. These essays, collated from across Enright’s career, take us from...
Dead and Alive October 28, 2025
In this eagerly awaited new collection, Zadie Smith brings her unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years.
She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kara Walker and Celia Paul. She invites us along to the...
Magically Black and Other Essays September 9, 2025
In *Magically Black and Other Essays*, Jerald Walker elegantly blends personal revelation and cultural critique to create a bracing and often humorous examination of Black American life.
He thoughtfully addresses the inherent complexities of topics as eclectic as incarceration, home renovations,...
Bento's Sketchbook March 25, 2025
The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza (a.k.a. Bento) spent the most intense years of his short life writing. He also carried with him a sketchbook. After his sudden death, his friends rescued letters, manuscripts, notes—but no drawings.
For years, without knowing what its pages might...
Changing My Mind March 18, 2025
“We always believe that changing our mind is an improvement, bringing a greater truthfulness to our dealings with the world and other people. It puts an end to vacillation, uncertainty, weak-mindedness. It seems to make us stronger and more mature. Well, we would think that, wouldn't we?”
In these...
A Town Without Time December 3, 2024
For over six decades, Gay Talese has told New York stories. They are the stories of daring bridge builders, disappearing gangsters, intrepid Vogue editors, unassuming doormen who’ve seen too much. They are set in the star-studded salons of George Plimpton’s apartment, in the tense newsroom of a...
Opinions November 12, 2024
Since the publication of the groundbreaking *Bad Feminist* and *Hunger*, Roxane Gay has continued to tackle big issues embroiling society—state-sponsored violence and mass shootings, women’s rights post-Dobbs, online disinformation, and the limits of empathy—alongside more individually personalized...
Abominations September 17, 2024
Novelist, cultural observer, and social satirist Lionel Shriver is among the sharpest talents of our age. A writer who embraces “under-expressed, unpopular or downright dangerous” points of view, she filets cherished shibboleths and the conformity of thought and attitude that has overtaken...
Don't Let Me Be Lonely July 9, 2024
A brilliant and unsparing examination of America in the early twenty-first century, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely invents a new genre to confront the particular loneliness and rapacious assault on selfhood that our media have inflicted upon our lives. Fusing the lyric, the essay, and the...
Dancing on My Own June 25, 2024
In Robyn’s 2010 track *Dancing on My Own*, the Swedish pop singer chronicles a night on the dance floor in the shadow of a former lover. She is bitter, angry, and at times desperate, and yet by the time the chorus arrives her frustration has melted away. She decides to dance on her own, and in this...
Bite by Bite April 30, 2024
In Bite by Bite, poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores the way food and drink evoke our associations and remembrances—a subtext or layering, a flavor tinged with joy, shame, exuberance, grief, desire, or nostalgia.
Nezhukumatathil restores our astonishment and wonder about food through...
Languages of Truth December 12, 2022
Gathering pieces written between 2003 and 2020, Languages of Truth chronicles Rushdie’s intellectual engagement with a period of momentous cultural shifts. Immersing the reader in a wide variety of subjects, he delves into the nature of storytelling as a human need, and what emerges is, in myriad...
Big Snake Little Snake April 14, 2022
A meditation on the ever-constant allure of risk, fortune and fate from Booker Prize-winner DBC Pierre.
Big Snake Little Snake is a cascade of true stories by DBC Pierre, recorded while on his way to make a short film with a parrot in Trinidad, which not only examines the nature of gambling, the...
Mantel Pieces November 30, 2021
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 training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.’ This collection of twenty reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three...
Just Us September 7, 2021
In Just Us, Claudia Rankine invites us into a necessary conversation about Whiteness in America. What would it take for us to breach the silence, guilt, and violence that arise from addressing Whiteness for what it is? What are the consequences if we keep avoiding this conversation? What might it...
Intimations July 28, 2020
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...
Coventry July 14, 2020
Coventry encompasses memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about literature, with pieces on family life, gender, and politics, and on D. H. Lawrence, Françoise Sagan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Named for an essay Cusk published in Granta (“Every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother...
Feel Free February 6, 2018
Sharp, witty, and intellectually restless, Feel Free brings together a wide-ranging collection of essays by Zadie Smith that explore the cultural and personal landscapes of contemporary life. Moving effortlessly between subjects—from literature and film to politics, technology, and everyday...
Release the Bats September 7, 2017
Part biography, part reflection and part practical guide, Release the Bats explores the mysteries of why and how we tell stories, and the craft of writing fiction. DBC Pierre reveals everything he learned the hard way.
My Generation June 2, 2015
My Generation is the definitive gathering of William Styron’s nonfiction, exposing the core of this greatly gifted, highly convivial, and profoundly serious artist from his literary emergence in the 1950s to his death in 2006.
Here are fifty years of Styron’s essays, memoirs, reviews, op-eds,...
Women in Clothes September 4, 2014
Women in Clothes is a book unlike any other. It is essentially a conversation among hundreds of women of all nationalities—famous, anonymous, religious, secular, married, single, young, old—on the subject of clothing, and how the garments we put on every day define and shape our lives. It began with...
101 Letters to a Prime Minister October 30, 2012
From the mailbox of the Prime Minister's Office to your bookshelf, a list of more than 100 books that every Canadian should read. This largely one-sided correspondence from the "loneliest book club in the world" is a compendium for bibliophiles and those who follow the Canadian political scene....
Living, Thinking, Looking June 5, 2012
Siri Hustvedt's novels are known for being as thought-provoking as they are emotionally involving. In these essays, Hustvedt shows what lies behind her fiction - an abiding curiosity about who we are and how we got that way, which has led her into the realms of psychology and neuroscience, as well...
Whatever It Is, I Don't Like It March 6, 2012
The winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, Howard Jacobson, brims with life in this collection of his most acclaimed journalism. From the unusual disposal of his father-in-law's ashes and the cultural wasteland of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to the melancholy sensuality of Leonard Cohen and desolation of...
Changing My Mind October 26, 2010
Split into five sections--Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering--Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural.
This engaging collection of essays, some published here for the first time, reveals Smith as a passionate and precise...
Havanas in Camelot August 11, 2009
After the great success in 1990 of Darkness Visible, his memoir of depression and recovery, William Styron wrote more frequently in an introspective, autobiographical mode. Havanas in Camelot brings together fourteen of his personal essays, including a reminiscence of his brief friendship with John...
The Braindead Megaphone September 4, 2007
George Saunders's first foray into nonfiction is comprised of essays on literature, travel, and politics. At the core of this unique collection are Saunders's travel essays based on his trips to seek out the mysteries of the "Buddha Boy" of Nepal; to attempt to indulge in the extravagant pleasures...
Like the Flowing River January 1, 2006
In Like the Flowing River, Paulo Coelho invites readers into a journey through his life, sharing reflections, personal stories, and moments of insight gathered over decades of travel, writing, and encounters with people from all walks of life. Each chapter is a small story, a lesson, or a...
Stranger Than Fiction May 10, 2005
Chuck Palahniuk’s world has always been, well, different from yours and mine. In his first collection of nonfiction, Chuck Palahniuk brings us into this world, and gives us a glimpse of what inspires his fiction.
At the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival in Missoula, Montana, average people...
The Colossus of New York October 21, 2003
A masterful evocation of the city that never sleeps, The Colossus of New York captures the city’s inner and outer landscapes in a series of vignettes, meditations, and personal memories. Colson Whitehead conveys with almost uncanny immediacy the feelings and thoughts of longtime residents and of...
Something to Declare September 9, 2003
Julian Barnes’s appreciation extends from France’s vanishing peasantry to its hyper-literate pop singers, from the gleeful iconoclasm of nouvelle vague cinema to the orgy of drugs and suffering that is the Tour de France. Above all, Barnes is an unparalleled connoisseur of French writing and...
Letters From London June 24, 1995
With brilliant wit, idiosyncratic intelligence, and a bold grasp of intricate political realities, the celebrated author of Flaubert's Parrot turns his satiric glance homeward to England, in a sparkling collection of essays that illustrates the infinite variety of contemporary London life.
Passions of the Mind March 31, 1993
Whether she is writing about George Eliot or Sylvia Plath; Victorian spiritual malaise or Toni Morrison; mythic strands in the novels of Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow; politics behind the popularity of Barbara Pym or the ambitions that underlie her own fiction, Byatt manages to be challenging,...
This Quiet Dust January 4, 1993
In an age when much American writing was either glacially noncommittal or heremetically personal, William Styron persisted in addressing great moral issues with incendiary passion. Seriousness and ardor characterize all the essays in This Quiet Dust, the first book of nonfiction by the Pulitzer...
Nobody Knows My Name December 1, 1992
Told with Baldwin's characteristically unflinching honesty, this collection of illuminating, deeply felt essays examines topics ranging from race relations in the United States to the role of the writer in society, and offers personal accounts of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer and other writers.