A collection of both previously unpublished works and classic essays includes discussions of recent cultural and political events, social networking, libraries, and the failure to address global warming. Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world's preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly...

Honoring the author's mastery of the essay form, brings together such classic works as "Shooting an Elephant" with passages from his wartime diary and lesser-known journalistic pieces that weave together the personal and political in studies of his boyhood in an English boarding school and his experiences during the Spanish Civil War.

William Hazlitt's tough, combative writings on subjects ranging from slavery to the imagination, boxing matches to the monarchy, established him as one of the greatest radicals of his age and have inspired journalists and political satirists ever since. -- From publisher's description.

"In Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing songbirds from the Empire State Building as they migrate...

In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches--which range over such crucial writers as Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy, Edmund Wilson, and Mikhail Lermontov--literary critic James Wood offers a panoramic look at the modern novel. He effortlessly connects his encyclopedic, passionate understanding of the literary canon with an equally in-depth analysis of the most important authors writing today, including Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, and Aleksandar...

Joel Golby's writing for Vice and The Guardian, with its wry observation and naked self-reflection, has brought him a wide and devoted following. Now, in his first book, he presents a blistering collection of new and newly expanded essays--including the achingly funny viral hit "Things You Only Know When Both Your Parents Are Dead." In these pages, he travels to Saudi Arabia, where he acts as a perplexed bystander at a camel pageant; offers a survival...

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...

The incomparable Smith melds the tale and the essay into a magical hybrid form, a song of praise to the power of stories in our lives. Refusing to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, this book is narrated by a character who is haunted--literally--by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature.