Literary essays

'No one else casts such a shrewd and gimlet eye on contemporary life.

At a time when opinion trumps facts and truth is treated as nothing more than another perspective, free speech has become a battleground.

In The Call of the Tribe, Mario Vargas Llosa surveys the readings that have shaped the way he thinks and has viewed the world over the past fifty years.

'Cements her reputation as one of the most fierce and elegant chroniclers of how we live now.

'Hardwick's sentences are burned in my brain.

Hate skews reality even more than love.

In this richly varied selection of Tony Harrison's provocative prose of the last fifty years, the great poet of page, stage and screen presents a lifetime's thinking about art and politics, creativity and mortality.

Conor Cruise O'Brien's brilliant and hugely controversial 1965 essay on the political convictions of W.

In Herod: Reflections on Political Violence (first published in 1978) Conor Cruise O'Brien collects a number of essays alongside three short plays that dramatise political arguments through the infamous figure of the Roman king of Judaea for whom the collection is named.

The Suspecting Glance (first published in 1972) collects Conor Cruise O'Brien's four T.

Arguably Conor Cruise O'Brien's most influential and admired book was this brilliant collection of essays - on history, literature and public affairs - first published in 1965.

Michael Hofmann - a poet, translator, and intellectual vagabond - has established himself as one of the keenest critics of contemporary literature.

A blazingly intelligent first collection of essays from the award-winning author of Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief.

Paul Kingsnorth was once an activist, an ardent environmentalist.

Written between the late 1930s and the late 1950s, Epoch and Artist represents those essays that David Jones wished to see preserved in his lifetime.

An enlightening collection of essays, reviews and speeches by 'one of the greatest writers of our era' (Hilary Mantel) and 'the Irish novelist everyone should read' (Colm Toibin).

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREMario Vargas Llosa has been making waves in cultural and political spheres for over thirty years.

Arts, Truth and Politics is Harold Pinter's lecture on receipt of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE'The most approachable and exhilarating Latin American writer of our times.

Paul Auster and J.

Philip Larkin's Required Writing, a selection from his miscellaneous prose from 1953-82, was highly praised and enjoyed when it appeared in 1983.

This collection begins in the early 1980s with The Rainbow Sign, which was written as the Introduction to the screenplay of My Beautiful Laundrette.

'Oh prams on concrete balconies, what will your children see?

As he grew up, Andrew O'Hagan witnessed the decline of Britain and the rise of America, the end of British industry and the rise of Blair and the tabloids.

'A rich, deep moral view of fiction and life: the lessons from this book were essential to my development as an artist.

A dazzling collection of occasional writings by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist on subjects ranging from Thermopylae to the English Channel, and from Coral Island to Jules Verne.

Finders Keepers is a gathering of Seamus Heaney's prose of three decades.

The celebrated author of The New York Trilogy, The Book of Illusions and Invisible presents here a highly personal collection of essays, prefaces and occasional pieces written for magazines and newspapers.

The four pieces that make up this work are taken from Muldoon's Oxford Clarendon Lectures of 1998.

Playful and provocative, irreverent and inspiring, Capek is perhaps the best-loved Czech writer of all time.

This is an extraordinary collection of essays by one of this country's most exciting and dramatic thinkers.

'This book is important-and portentous-for if it is true that tragedy is dead, we face a vital cultural loss.

A "e;category-defying [and] engaging"e; collection of short fiction and nonfiction by Phil Klay, George Saunders, Jess Walter, Nora Krug, and more (Kirkus Reviews).

"e;The literary 'Oscars' features twenty outstanding examples of the best of the best in American short stories.

The Best American Series(R)First, Best, and Best-SellingThe Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction.

From twenty-seven of today's leading writers, an anthology of original pieces on the author of WaldenFeatures essays by Jennifer Finney Boylan * Kristen Case * George Howe Colt * Gerald Early * Paul Elie * Will Eno * Adam Gopnik * Lauren Groff * Celeste Headlee * Pico Iyer * Alan Lightman * James Marcus * Megan Marshall * Michelle Nijhuis * Zoe Pollak * Jordan Salama * Tatiana Schlossberg * A.

From the photographer who brought Thoreau's Walden and Cape Cod to life comes a new work combining classic literature with brand-new photography.

The essential collection of critical essays from a twentieth-century master and author of 1984.

In this bestselling compilation of essays, written in the clear-eyed, uncompromising language for which he is famous, Orwell discusses with vigor such diverse subjects as his boyhood schooling, the Spanish Civil War, Henry Miller, British imperialism, and the profession of writing.

The acclaimed author "e;assembles a stellar collection of twenty stories that create their own worlds in twenty pages or less"e; (USA Today).

The Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana is one of the last great wild places in the United States, a land of black bears and grizzlies, wolves and coyotes, bald and golden eagles, wolverine, lynx, marten, fisher, elk, and even a handful of humans.

"e;It is only when we forget our learning that we begin to know,"e; Thoreau wrote.

The Pulitzer-Prize winning and Guggenheim-honored Hilton Als curates the best essays from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites, bringing "e;the fierce style of street reading and the formal tradition of critical inquiry, reads culture, race, and gender"e; (New York Times) to the task.

In a small but comfortable conference room, in a publishing house in San Francisco, a group of high school students met weekly over the past year to read literary magazines, chapbooks, graphic novels, and countless articles.

Selections by Bryan Stevenson, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Daniel Alarcon, Rebecca Curtis, Claudia Rankine, Paul Tough, Wells Tower, and more!

"e;Like the remarkable city to which they pay tribute, the pieces assembled in this book are diverse, engrossing, illuminating, emotional, funny — and glorious.

"e;Lively, eclectic and surprising.

Dave Eggers and his students at the 826 Valencia and 826 Michigan writing labs compile fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and comics, as well as category-defying gems that have become one of the hallmarks of this lively collection.