An intimate look into the inner lives of our most prominent cultural figures-- pulled from the celebrated Proust Questionnaire page in Vanity Fair magazine. The probing set of questions originated as a 19th-century parlor game popularized by contemporaries of Marcel Proust, the French essayist and novelist, who believed that an individual's answers reveal his true nature. Illustrated by Risko, Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire Edited by Graydon Carter and Illustrated by Risko, brings together the responses of 101 of the most vibrant personalities of our time, from Bette Midler and Lauren Baca... View More...
The New York Times-bestselling author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name returns to the essay form with his collection of thoughts on time, the creative mind, and great lives and works Irrealis moods are a category of verbal moods that indicate that certain events have not happened, may never happen, or should or must or are indeed desired to happen, but for which there is no indication that they will ever happen. Irrealis moods are also known as counterfactual moods and include the conditional, the subjunctive, the optative, and the imperative--all best expressed in this book as the might-be... View More...
The tempestuous email correspondence between Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark, shimmering with insight, gossip, sex, and cultural commentary."Why am I telling you all this? Partly 'cause the whole queerness/identity thing for me stretches through everything, absolutely everything. Slipping between straight/gay is child's play compared to slipping between writer/teacher/influence-peddler whatever. I forget who I am. You reminded me of who I prefer to be." M.W.]"It's two in the morning... I know what you mean about slipping roles: I love it, going high low, power helpless even captive, male female... View More...
Agamben charts a journey that ranges from poems of chivalry to philosophy, from Yvain to Hegel, from Beatrice to Heidegger.An ancient legend identifies Demon, Chance, Love, and Necessity as the four gods who preside over the birth of every human being. We must all pay tribute to these deities and should not try to elude or dupe them. To accept them, Giorgio Agamben suggests, is to live one's life as an adventure--not in the trivial sense of the term, with lightness and disenchantment, but with the understanding that adventure, as a specific way of being, is the most profound experience in our ... View More...
A truth-riot of a book --Shonda Rhimes New York Times Bestseller#1 Washington Post BestsellerRedbook "20 Books By Women You Must Read this Fall" GoodHousekeeping.com "17 New Best New Books to Read This Fall"BookRiot "100 Must-Read Hilarious Books"Goodreads Choice Awards FinalistNow in development with Shondaland and ABC Signature Studios as cable television series Comedian, activist, and hugely popular culture blogger at AwesomelyLuvvie.com, Luvvie Ajayi, serves up necessary advice for the masses in this hilarious book of essays With over 500,000 readers a month at her enormously popular blog,... View More...
Jonathan Ames has drawn comparisons across the literary spectrum, from David Sedaris to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Woody Allen to P.G. Wodehouse, and his books, as well as his abilities as a performer, have made him a favorite on the Late Show with David Letterman. Whether he's chasing deranged cockroaches around his apartment, kissing a beautiful actress on the set of an avant-garde film, finding himself stuck perilously on top of a fence in Memphis in the middle of the night, or provoking fights with huge German men, Jonathan Ames has an uncanny knack for getting himself into outlandish situatio... View More...
A collection of the year's best essays selected by Robert Atwan and guest editor Rebecca Solnit. "Essays are restless literature, trying to find out how things fit together, how we can think about two things at once, how the personal and the public can inform each other, how two overtly dissimilar things share a secret kinship," contends Rebecca Solnit in her introduction. From lost languages and extinct species to life-affirming cosmologies and literary myths that offer cold comfort, the personal and the public collide in The Best American Essays 2019. This searching, necessary collection gr... View More...
This brilliant selection of essays--funny, erudite, endlessly curious, uncannily prescient--seeks answers to Burning Questions such as: - Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories? - How much of yourself can you give away without evaporating? - How can we live on our planet? - Is it true? And is it fair? - What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism? In over fifty pieces Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humor at the world, and reports back to us on what she finds. The roller-coaster period covered in the collection brought an end to the end of history, a fin... View More...
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale In this wise and irresistibly quotable book, one of the most intelligent writers now working in English addresses the riddle of her art: why people pursue it, how they view their calling, and what bargains they make with their audiences, both real and imagined. To these fascinating issues Margaret Atwood brings a candid appraisal of her own experience as well as a breadth of reading that encompasses everything from Dante to Elmore Leonard. An ambitious artistic inquiry conducted with unpretentious charm, Negotiating with the ... View More...
Collected here, the Massey Lectures from legendary novelist Margaret Atwood investigate the highly topical subject of debt. She doesn t talk about high finance or managing money; instead, she goes far deeper to explore debt as an ancient and central motif in religion, literature, and the structure of human societies. By looking at how debt has informed our thinking from preliterate times to the present day, from the stories we tell of revenge and sin to the way we order social relationships, Atwood argues that the idea of what we owe may well be built into the human imagination as one of its m... View More...
Through a series of extraordinary, incisive, often-humorous essays, Emmy Award-winning actor Vanessa Baden Kelly examines what the idea of "home" means to a Black millennial woman. How important is race to the idea of community? What are the consequences of gentrification on the life of a young Black woman? What aspects of a community help--or hurt--a family with a young child? In these profound, intimate essays, Baden has found a space where she can work out thoughts and feelings she feels unsafe saying out loud. As she processes the initial ideas more fully, her essays evolve from personal s... View More...
In this elegant triptych of history, fiction, and memoir, Julian Barnes has written about ballooning and photography, love and grief; about putting two things, and two people, together, and tearing them apart; and enduring after the incomprehensible loss of a loved one. Powerfully rendered, exquisitely crafted in Barnes's erudite style, this searing work confirms the author as an unparalleled magus of the heart.
Two years after the best-selling Arthur & George, Julian Barnes gives us an essay on mortality that touches on faith and science and family as well as a rich array of exemplary figures who over the centuries have confronted the same questions he now poses about the most basic fact of life: its inevitable extinction. If the fear of death is the most rational thing in the world, how does one contend with it? An atheist at twenty, an agnostic at sixty, Barnes looks into the various arguments for and against and with God, and at the bloodline whose archivist, following his parents' death, he has b... View More...
Eighteen witty and brilliant essays on France from Julian Barnes; Julian Barnes's long and passionate relationship with France began more than forty years ago. As sceptical observer on family motoring holidays, assistant in a school in Brittany, student of the language and literature, author of Flaubert's Parrot and Cross Channel, he has criss-crossed the country and its culture The essays collected here, written over a twenty-year period, attest to his cleareyed appreciation of the Land Without Brussels Sprouts. He ranges widely, from landscape to literature, food to Flaubert, film and song t... View More...
"So each night begins. One of us picks up the other and we drive into the Mississippi darkness, headed for a place where everything is different." This first nonfiction book by Frederick Barthelme, author of BOB THE GAMBLER, and his brother and colleague Steven is both a story of family feeling and a testimony to the risky allure of casinos. Within a year and a half, the authors had lost both of their parents, less than a decade after their brother Donald died. Their exacting father had been a prominent modernist architect in Houston; their mother, the architect of this family of seven, which ... View More...
Always Apprentices collects five years of intimate, wide-ranging conversations with many of today's most prominent writers, taken from the pages of the Believer. The participants don't limit themselves to issues of writing and craft, but instead offer unfettered exchanges on a wide range of topics--from what it means to be a consumer to whether or not to kill a deer, from how we get to know each other to walking while inebriated. The interviews feature the serious-yet-casual Believer approach to the often staid interview format. For example, Sheila Heti asks Mary Gaitskill, "If you go into a r... View More...
