"In Farewell Transmission, Will McGrath guides us on a rambling quest into the enlightenment of other lives. Funny and heartbreaking, intimate and galvanizing, these essays venture from Yemen to Lesotho to the Bronx and beyond. We find Caravaggio at an Arizona homeless shelter and meet Elvis in rural Canada. We encounter diamond miners and professional wrestlers, night watchmen and righteous ex-cons--those wilderness prophets too frequently cropped...

"All first-rate criticism first defines what we are confronting," the late, great jazz critic Whitney Balliett once wrote. By that measure, the essays of Christopher Hitchens are in the first tier. For nearly four decades, Hitchens has been telling us, in pitch-perfect prose, what we confront when we grapple with first principles-the principles of reason and tolerance and skepticism that define and inform the foundations of our civilization-principles...

"In The Book of Delights, one of today's most original literary voices offers up a genre-defying volume of lyric essays written over one tumultuous year. The first nonfiction book from award-winning poet Ross Gay is a record of the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives. Among Gay's funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend's unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane, the silent nod of acknowledgment...

The articles collected in George Orwell's Essays illuminate the life and work of one of the most individual writers of this century-a man who elevated political writing to an art. This outstanding collection brings together Orwell's longer, major essays and a fine selection of shorter pieces that includes "My Country Right or Left," "Decline of the English Murder," "Shooting an Elephant," and "A Hanging." With great originality and wit, Orwell unfolds...

Personal essays share the author's adventures after buying a vacation house on the Carolina coast and his reflections on middle age and mortality.

"A woman who worries about carrying a .38 special in her purse, nearly drowns in a desert canyon, flies into the war in Bosnia, dances with the FBI, tells Geraldo he shouldn't put guests in hotel rooms with rats and spends time with murderers, has more than a few stories to tell. 'Gravel on the Side of the Road - True Stories From a Broad Who Has Been There' is a daring and revealing adventure itself. . . . Novelist Kris Radish returns to her non-fiction...

The essential collection of critical essays from a twentieth-century master and author of 1984. As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low. A frequent commentator on literature, language, film, and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical essay in the 1940s,...

"Daniel Mallory Ortberg is known for blending genres, forms, and sources to develop fascinating new hybridsfrom lyric rants to horror recipes to pornographic scripture. In his most personal work to date, he turns his attention to the essay, offering vigorous and laugh-out-loud funny accounts of both popular and highbrow culture while mixing in meditations on gender transition, family dynamics, and the many meanings of faith. From a thoughtful analysis...

A career-spanning anthology of essays on politics and culture by the best-selling author Rachel Kushner includes entries discussing a Palestinian refugee camp, an illegal Baja Peninsula motorcycle race, and the 1970s Fiat factory wildcat strikes. They address the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times-- and illuminates the themes and real-life terrain that underpin her fiction.

"A definitive selection of prose and poetry from the self-described 'black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,' for a new generation of readers. Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. Her incisive essays and passionate poetry-alive with sensuality, vulnerability, and rage-remain indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical...