This collection of Emerson's essays covers the contents of two volumes originally published in 1841 and 1844. Annotation. Our most eloquent champion of individualism, Emerson acknowledges at the same time the countervailing pressures of society in American life. Even as he extols what he called "the great and crescive self," he dramatizes and records its vicissitudes. Here is a collection of his classic essays, including the exhortation to "Self-Reliance"...

"'In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.' So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which beloved poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of...

In recognition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's long and lauded career as a master essayist, a landmark collection, including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work, rigorously curated by the author herself.

Gore Vidal—novelist, playwright, critic, screenwriter, memoirist, indefatigable political commentator, and controversialist—is America's premier man of letters. No other living writer brings more sparkling wit, vast learning, indelible personality, and provocative mirth to the job of writing an essay.This long-needed volume comprises some twenty-four of his best-loved pieces of criticism, political commentary, memoir, portraiture, and,...

A book of spiritual ruminations with a progressive political edge, from the Pulitzer Prize-winner who has devoted her life to befriending the earth. Walker has long been a force for sanity in a chaotic world. Here she draws on her deep spiritual grounding, her political conviction and experience, and her literary gifts to offer a series of meditations filled with wisdom, hope, encouragement, and, at times, serenity to a world in need of all these...

"Engaging, unusual essays written over the last two decades, on matters literary, social, cultural, and personal--from the explosive date rape debates of the '90s to the ubiquitous political adultery of the '00s, from Anton Chekhov to Celine Dion. Here is Mary Gaitskill the essayist: witty, direct, penetrating to the core of each issue, personality, or literary trope (On Updike: "It is as if [he] has entered a tiny window marked 'Rabbit,' and, by...

The Last Empire is a collection of provocative, witty, and eloquent essays by Gore Vidal about all things USA. In more than two dozen essays, Vidal brings his keen intellect, experience, and razor-edged wit to bear on an astonishing range of subjects, offering incisive observations about terrorism, civil liberties, the CIA, Al Gore, and the Clintons - interwoven with a rich tapestry of personal anecdote, critical insight, and historical detail. Erudite,...

"A collection of long-form essays on joy, in which the author turns his curious and poetic mind to everything from skateboarding and cover songs, basketball and race, dancing and academia, death and laughter, and, always, the garden and the natural world"--

"Susan Sontag has said that her earliest idea of what a writer should be was "some-one who is interested in everything." Thirty-five years after her first collection of essays, the now classic Against Interpretation, our most important essayist has chosen more than forty longer and shorter pieces from the last two decades that illustrate a deeply felt, kaleidoscopic array of interests, passions, observations, and ideas."--Jacket.