Showing titles in Essays

Selma Lagerlöf hade hunnit bli 33 år när hon debuterade med ”Gösta Berlings Saga”, och efter det levde hon sitt liv som en mycket produktiv författare som skrev flertalet välkända romaner och noveller. Idag räknas Lagerlöf som en av Sveriges främsta författare någonsin. Men vem var hon egentligen? Och vilka uppoffringar tvingades hon att göra för att tillslut bli den första kvinnliga ledamoten i Svenska Akademien? Litteraturvetaren och författaren Vivi Edström skildrar en av våra mest berömda och inflytelserika författares liv genom tiderna.

In I Wear the Black Hat, Klosterman questions the very nature of how modern people understand the concept of villainy. What was so Machiavellian about Machiavelli? Why don't we see Batman the same way we see Bernhard Goetz? Who's more worthy of our vitriol - Bill Clinton or Don Henley? What was O.J. Simpson's second-worst decision? Masterfully blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and limitless imagination, I Wear the Black Hat delivers perceptive observations on the complexity of the anti-hero.

Kurt Vonnegut presents in Fates Worse than Death a veritable cornucopia of his thoughts on what could perhaps best be summed up as "anti-theology", a manifesto for atheism that details Vonnegut's drift from conventional religion, even a tract evidencing belief in the divine held within each individual self--the deity within each individual person present in a universe that otherwise lacks any real order.

Michel de Montaigne embodies the humanist ideal—curious, measured, contemplative yet not unworldly, witty, free of prejudice, and urbane. But what does this French Renaissance philosopher have to tell us about how to think and live today? In forty short, erudite, and lively chapters written over a single summer, Antoine Compagnon seeks answers to that question. In A Summer with Montaigne, Compagnon invites his listeners to join him as he strolls through Montaigne’s key contributions to our understanding of what is good and worthwhile in life.

Throughout her life, Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, "starter witch kits" of sage, rose quartz, and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic. Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning.

Los textos agrupados en este libro cubren tópicos diversos. El primero repasa maneras de entender el amor carnal. El segundo —que amplía una conferencia reciente— reflexiona sobre alegría y tristeza, en el marco de las relaciones entre ética y medicina. El tercero abunda en esas relaciones, desde una microinvestigación sobre el vicio de apostar. El cuarto aborda la ebriedad como experiencia del mundo. El quinto versa sobre la eutanasia como bien o derecho universal.

Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

Editor Eleanor Brown presents a collection of personal essays from 18 different authors about their experiences in the City of Light.

Ein kleines Buch über Kummer, das erstaunlich gute Laune macht. "Alle wirken innerlich blitzblank, nur in unserem Inneren sieht es aus wie bei Hempels unterm Sofa", denkt sich Kioskbesitzer Armin, als er vergeblich versucht, erfolgreich zu meditieren. Und auch im Inneren der anderen Figuren dieser literarischen Kolumnen herrscht Unordnung: Frau Wiese kann nicht mehr schlafen, Herr Pohl ist nachhaltig verzagt, Lisa hat ihren ersten Liebeskummer, Vadims Hände zittern, Frau Schwerter muss ganz dringend entspannen, ein trauriger Patient hat seine Herde verloren, und Psychoanalytiker Ulrich legt sich mit der Vergänglichkeit an.

Everybody Loves a Good Drought is the established classic on rural poverty in India. Twenty years after publication, it remains unsurpassed in the scope and depth of reportage, providing an intimate view of the daily struggles of the poor and the efforts, often ludicrous, made to uplift them. An illuminating introduction accompanying this 20-anniversary edition reveals, alarmingly, how a large section of India continues to suffer in the name of development so that a small percentage may prosper.

Listeners will find here not only the country’s leading conservative thinker offering a pas­sionate defense of limited government, but also a highly independent mind whose views - on feminism, evolution and the death penalty, for example - defy ideological convention. Things That Matter also features several of Krautham­mer’s major path-breaking essays - on bioeth­ics, on Jewish destiny and on America’s role as the world’s superpower - that have pro­foundly influenced the nation’s thoughts and policies.

G. K. Chesterton was a journalist, playwright, poet, biographer, novelist, essayist, literary commentator, editor, orator, artist, and theologian. Orthodoxy is his great apologia for the Christian faith, which was prompted by a serious attack in 1903 against Christianity by well-known newspaper editor Robert Blatchford.

Carlos Manuel Álvarez es un joven escritor cubano de inmenso talento, y este libro es la prueba viva de ello. La tribu es un recorrido íntimo entre los cubanos durante un periodo de cambio dramático, empezando con el restablecimiento de relaciones con los Estados Unidos, y terminando con la muerte del líder histórico de la revolución, Fidel Castro. Ningún guía mejor que Carlos Manuel Álvarez para contarnos las historias de algunos de los que han vivido —y sobrevivido— la gran epopeya revolucionaria que ahora se termina.

From celebrated New York Times best-selling author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize Rick Bragg comes a poignant and wryly funny collection of essays on life in the South. Keenly observed and written with his insightful and deadpan sense of humor, Bragg explores enduring Southern truths about home, place, spirit, table, and the regions' varied geographies, including his native Alabama, Cajun country, and the Gulf Coast.

"Howard Phillips Lovecraft constitue un exemple pour tous ceux qui souhaitent apprendre à rater leur vie et, éventuellement, à réussir leur oeuvre. Encore que, sur ce dernier point le résultat ne soit pas garanti." Auteur de "L'appel de Cthulhu", de "Dagon" et des "Montagnes hallucinées", H. P. Lovecraft, maître incontesté de l'horreur et du fantastique, reste l'objet d'une fascination toute particulière chez nos contemporains, notamment chez Michel Houellebecq, qui le découvrit à l'âge de seize ans pour ne plus cesser de le lire.

Written as a series of vignettes, this rewarding book recounts the life and adventures of respected writer Mary Fisher. Decades of travel through America and Europe supply the fodder for these tales, with wonderful details of the people, places, foods, and thoughts that have flavored her journey.

The second volume in his autobiographical quartet based on the seasons, Winter is an achingly beautiful collection of daily meditations and letters addressed directly to Knaugsaard's unborn daughter.

In letters addressed to their friends, to members of their family - both biological and chosen - and to fellow storytellers, Akwaeke describes the shape of a life lived in overlapping realities. Through heartbreak, chronic pain, intimacy with death, becoming a beast, this is embodiment as a nonhuman: outside the boundaries imposed by expectations and legibility. This book is an account of the gruelling work of realignment and remaking necessary to carve out a future for oneself. The result is a black spirit memoir: a powerful, raw unfolding of identity.

From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty Italian street, to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, Constantine Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, Éric Rohmer, Marcel Proust and Fernando Pessoa, and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg, Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection of the imagination's power to shape our memories under time's seemingly intractable hold.

The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. The writer is Joan Didion, who delivers an anatomy of that country's particular brand of terror - its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy. As ash travels from battlefields to body dumps, interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb "to disappear," Didion gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.