Related news.
Anyone can add books to this list.
Friends votes, how to vote.
To vote on existing books from the list, beside each book there is a link vote for this book clicking it will add that book to your votes.
To vote on books not in the list or books you couldn't find in the list, you can click on the tab add books to this list and then choose from your books, or simply search.
Welcome back. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account.
The best books to improve your essay writing skills.
Are you looking to enhance your essay writing abilities? Whether you are a student, professional writer, or simply striving to improve your writing skills, investing in the best books on essay writing can make a significant difference.
Discover expert tips, strategies, and techniques to craft compelling and impactful essays in various genres and styles. From mastering the art of brainstorming to refining your thesis statements, these recommended books will inspire and guide you on your writing journey.
Unlock your full potential as a writer with the help of these invaluable resources.
Ready to take your essay writing skills to the next level? Dive into our curated selection of the best books for essay writing. These invaluable resources cover a wide range of topics and techniques to help you become a masterful essay writer.
Explore these essential books to enhance your essay writing abilities and stand out as a confident and articulate writer. Happy reading and happy writing!
Looking to be inspired by some of the best writers in the world? Our collection of top writers includes renowned authors like J.K. Rowling, George Orwell, Jane Austen, and more. Dive into their works to explore different writing styles, techniques, and storytelling methods.
Find your favorite authors and study their essays to learn how they captivate readers with their words. Whether you’re a novice writer or seasoned professional, exploring the works of top writers can help enhance your own writing skills and ignite your creativity.
Discover the magic of storytelling through the eyes of these esteemed writers and unlock the secrets to crafting compelling essays. With the guidance of top writers, you’ll be able to elevate your writing to new heights and create essays that leave a lasting impact on your readers.
Are you looking to take your essay writing skills to the next level? Our selection of the best books for essay writing will help you enhance your writing techniques and improve your overall writing proficiency. Whether you are a student looking to boost your academic performance or a professional seeking to refine your communication skills, these books offer valuable insights and practical tips to help you become a more effective writer.
Develop Your Style: Discover how to develop a unique writing style that reflects your personality and engages your readers. Learn how to effectively use language, tone, and structure to make your writing stand out.
Master Essay Structures: Explore different essay structures and formats to enhance the organization and clarity of your writing. From persuasive essays to analytical pieces, these books provide guidelines to help you structure your arguments effectively.
Refine Your Research Skills: Improve your research skills and learn how to gather, analyze, and incorporate evidence into your essays. Enhance the credibility and depth of your writing by conducting thorough research and citing reputable sources.
Invest in your writing skills today with the best books for essay writing and see a significant improvement in your writing proficiency!
Enhance your essay writing skills with the best books curated just for you. Learn how to craft compelling introductions, develop strong arguments, and conclude with impact. These books will provide you with the tools and techniques you need to take your writing to the next level. |
Explore different styles and approaches to essay writing, from analytical to persuasive, and discover how to adapt your voice to different audiences. With practical tips and exercises, these books will help you refine your writing process and express your ideas with clarity and confidence. |
Whether you are a student looking to improve your academic writing or a professional seeking to enhance your communication skills, these recommended books will guide you on your journey to mastering the art of essay writing. Purchase your copy today and embark on a transformative learning experience! |
Essay writing is an essential skill that can greatly enhance your academic and professional success. By mastering the art of essay writing, you can effectively communicate your ideas, opinions, and arguments in a clear and concise manner.
Here are some key tips to help you excel in essay writing:
Start by brainstorming ideas, creating an outline, and organizing your thoughts before you begin writing. This will help you stay focused and ensure that your essay flows logically. | |
Your thesis statement should clearly express the main point or argument of your essay. It sets the tone for the rest of your writing and guides your reader on what to expect. | |
Support your ideas with evidence from credible sources. This will strengthen your arguments and make your essay more convincing. | |
Ensure that your essay is well-organized and easy to follow. Use clear and concise language, logical transitions, and proper paragraph structure. | |
Review your essay for errors in grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Make sure your ideas are well-developed and coherent. Consider seeking feedback from peers or instructors for further improvement. |
By implementing these strategies and practicing regularly, you can enhance your essay writing skills and become a more effective communicator. Explore the best books for essay writing to further refine your techniques and unlock your full potential.
Unleash your imagination and expand your creative horizons with the best books for essay writing. Dive into a world of inspiration and learn how to express your thoughts and ideas in new and innovative ways.
Discover the power of storytelling and the art of persuasion as you explore the depths of your creativity. With the guidance of expert writers and teachers, you will develop your unique voice and style that will set you apart from the rest.
Whether you are a student looking to improve your academic writing or a professional seeking to enhance your communication skills, these books will help you unlock your creativity and become a more confident and persuasive writer.
How to master the art of writing expository essays and captivate your audience, convenient and reliable source to purchase college essays online, step-by-step guide to crafting a powerful literary analysis essay, unlock success with a comprehensive business research paper example guide, unlock your writing potential with writers college – transform your passion into profession, “unlocking the secrets of academic success – navigating the world of research papers in college”, master the art of sociological expression – elevate your writing skills in sociology.
We've researched and ranked the best essays books in the world, based on recommendations from world experts, sales data, and millions of reader ratings. Learn more
Rebecca Solnit | 5.00
Chelsea Handler Goes deep with statistics, personal stories, and others’ accounts of how brutal this world can be for women, the history of how we've been treated, and what it will take to change the conversation: MEN. We need them to be as outraged as we are and join our fight. (Source)
See more recommendations for this book...
David Sedaris | 4.96
Ta-Nehisi Coates | 4.94
Barack Obama The president also released a list of his summer favorites back in 2015: All That Is, James Salter The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates Washington: A Life, Ron Chernow All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr (Source)
Jack Dorsey Q: What are the books that had a major influence on you? Or simply the ones you like the most. : Tao te Ching, score takes care of itself, between the world and me, the four agreements, the old man and the sea...I love reading! (Source)
Doug McMillon Here are some of my favorite reads from 2017. Lots of friends and colleagues send me book suggestions and it's impossible to squeeze them all in. I continue to be super curious about how digital and tech are enabling people to transform our lives but I try to read a good mix of books that apply to a variety of areas and stretch my thinking more broadly. (Source)
Joan Didion | 4.94
Peter Hessler I like Didion for her writing style and her control over her material, but also for the way in which she captures a historical moment. (Source)
Liz Lambert I love [this book] so much. (Source)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | 4.92
Roxane Gay | 4.88
Irina Nica It’s hard to pick an all-time favorite because, as time goes by and I grow older, my reading list becomes more “mature” and I find myself interested in new things. I probably have a personal favorite book for each stage of my life. Right now I’m absolutely blown away by everything Roxane Gay wrote, especially Bad Feminist. (Source)
Reflections on Self-Delusion
Jia Tolentino | 4.86
Lydia Polgreen This book is amazing and you should read it. https://t.co/pcbmYUR4QP (Source)
Maryanne Hobbs @jiatolentino hello Jia :) finding your perspectives in the new book fascinating and so resonant.. thank you 🌹 m/a..x https://t.co/BoNzB1BuDf (Source)
Yashar Ali . @jiatolentino’s fabulous book is one of President Obama’s favorite books of 2019 https://t.co/QHzZsHl2rF (Source)
And Other Essays
David Foster Wallace | 4.85
Virginia Woolf | 4.75
David Sedaris | 4.73
Adam Kay @penceyprepmemes How about David Sedaris, for starters - "Dress your family in corduroy and denim" is an amazing book. (Source)
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
James Baldwin | 4.69
Barack Obama Fact or fiction, the president knows that reading keeps the mind sharp. He also delved into these non-fiction reads: Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Evan Osnos Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman Moral Man And Immoral Society, Reinhold Niebuhr A Kind And Just Parent, William Ayers The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria Lessons in Disaster, Gordon Goldstein Sapiens: A Brief History of... (Source)
David Sedaris | 4.67
David Sedaris | 4.63
David Blaine It’s hilarious. (Source)
Joan Didion | 4.62
Dan Richards I feel Joan Didion is the patron saint of a maelstrom of culture and environment of a particular time. She is the great American road-trip writer, to my mind. She has that great widescreen filmic quality to her work. (Source)
Steven Amsterdam With her gaze on California of the late 60s and early 70s, Didion gives us the Black Panthers, Janis Joplin, Nancy Reagan, and the Manson follower Linda Kasabian. (Source)
Essays and Arguments
David Foster Wallace | 4.61
Tressie McMillan Cottom | 4.60
Melissa Moore The best book I read this year was Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom. I read it twice and both times found it challenging and revelatory. (Source)
David Sedaris and Hachette Audi | 4.60
Essays and Speeches
Audre Lorde, Cheryl Clarke | 4.60
Bianca Belair For #BHM I will be sharing some of my favorite books by Black Authors 26th Book: Sister Outsider By: Audre Lorde My first time reading anything by Audre Lorde. I am now really looking forward to reading more of her poems/writings. What she writes is important & timeless. https://t.co/dUDMcaAAbx (Source)
David Sedaris | 4.58
Austin Kleon I read this one, then I read his collected diaries, Theft By Finding, and then I read the visual compendium, which might have even been the most interesting of the three books, but I’m listing this one because it’s hilarious, although with the interstitial fiction bits, it’s sort of like one of those classic 90s hip-hop albums where you skip the “skit” tracks. (Source)
Notes from a Loud Woman
Lindy West | 4.56
Matt Mcgorry "Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman" by Lindy West @TheLindyWest # Lovvvvveeedddd, loved, loved, loved this book!!! West is a truly remarkable writer and her stories are beautifully poignant while dosed with her… https://t.co/nzJtXtOGTn (Source)
Shannon Coulter @JennLHaglund @tomi_adeyemi I love that feeling! Just finished the audiobook version of Shrill by Lindy West after _years_ of meaning to read it and that's the exact feeling it gave me. Give me your book recommendations! (Source)
Esmé Weijun Wang | 4.52
Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Cheryl Strayed | 4.49
Ryan Holiday It was wonderful to read these two provocative books of essays by two incredibly wise and compassionate women. Cheryl Strayed, also the author of Wild, was the anonymous columnist behind the online column, Dear Sugar and boy, are we better off for it. This is not a random smattering of advice. This book contains some of the most cogent insights on life, pain, loss, love, success, youth that I... (Source)
James Altucher Cheryl had an advice column called “Dear Sugar”. I was reading the column long before Oprah recommended “Wild” by Cheryl and then Wild became a movie and “Tiny Beautiful Things” (the collection of her advice column) became a book. She is so wise and compassionate. A modern saint. I used to do Q&A sessions on Twitter. I’d read her book beforehand to get inspiration about what true advice is. (Source)
An American Tragedy
Ta-Nehisi Coates | 4.47
Albert Camu | 4.47
David Heinemeier Hansson Camus’ philosophical exposition of absurdity, suicide in the face of meaninglessness, and other cherry topics that continue on from his fictional work in novels like The Stranger. It’s surprisingly readable, unlike many other mid 20th century philosophers, yet no less deep or pointy. It’s a great follow-up, as an original text, to that book The Age of Absurdity, I recommended last year. Still... (Source)
Kenan Malik The Myth of Sisyphus is a small work, but Camus’s meditation on faith and fate has personally been hugely important in developing my ideas. Writing in the embers of World War II, Camus confronts in The Myth of Sisyphus both the tragedy of recent history and what he sees as the absurdity of the human condition. There is, he observes, a chasm between the human need for meaning and what he calls... (Source)
George Orwell, Bernard Crick | 4.46
Peter Kellner George Orwell was not only an extraordinary writer but he also hated any form of cant. Some of his most widely read works such as 1984 and Animal Farm are an assault on the nastier, narrow-minded, dictatorial tendencies of the left, although Orwell was himself on the left. (Source)
Essays and Stories
Marina Keegan, Anne Fadiman | 4.46
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | 4.45
How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Malcolm Gladwell | 4.45
Kevin Rose Bunch of really good information in here on how to make ideas go viral. This could be good to apply to any kind of products or ideas you may have. Definitely, check out The Tipping Point, which is one of my favorites. (Source)
Seth Godin Malcolm Gladwell's breakthrough insight was to focus on the micro-relationships between individuals, which helped organizations realize that it's not about the big ads and the huge charity balls... it's about setting the stage for the buzz to start. (Source)
Andy Stern I think that when we talk about making change, it is much more about macro change, like in policy. This book reminds you that at times when you're building big movements, or trying to elect significant decision-makers in politics, sometimes it's the little things that make a difference. Ever since the book was written, we've become very used to the idea of things going viral unexpectedly and then... (Source)
Selected Essays
Mary Oliver | 4.44
Samantha Irby | 4.44
Complete Essays
Michel de Montaigne, Charles Cotton | 4.42
Ryan Holiday There is plenty to study and see simply by looking inwards — maybe even an alarming amount. (Source)
Alain de Botton I’ve given quite a lot of copies of [this book] to people down the years. (Source)
Mindy Kaling | 4.42
Angela Kinsey .@mindykaling I am rereading your book and cracking up. I appreciate your chapter on The Office so much more now. But all of it is fantastic. Thanks for starting my day with laughter. You know I loves ya. ❤️ https://t.co/EB99xnyt0p (Source)
Yashar Ali Reminds me of one of my favorite lines from @mindykaling's book (even though I'm an early riser): “There is no sunrise so beautiful that it is worth waking me up to see it.” https://t.co/pS56bmyYjS (Source)
Dispatches from Rape Culture
Roxane Gay, Brandon Taylor, et al | 4.40
Henry David Thoreau | 4.40
Laura Dassow Walls The book that we love as Walden began in the journal entries that he wrote starting with his first day at the pond. (Source)
Roman Krznaric In 1845 the American naturalist went out to live in the woods of Western Massachusetts. Thoreau was one of the great masters of the art of simple living. (Source)
John Kaag There’s this idea that philosophy can blend into memoir and that, ideally, philosophy, at its best, is to help us through the business of living with people, within communities. This is a point that Thoreau’s Walden gave to me, as a writer, and why I consider it so valuable for today. (Source)
Confessions of a Common Reader
Anne Fadiman | 4.40
And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
Nora Ephron | 4.39
David Sedaris | 4.37
An American Lyric
Claudia Rankine | 4.36
Cheryl Strayed A really important book for us to be reading right now. (Source)
Jeremy Noel-Tod Obviously, it’s been admired and acclaimed, but I do feel the general reception of it has underplayed its artfulness. Its technical subtlety and overall arrangement has been neglected, because it has been classified as a kind of documentary work. (Source)
Christopher Hitchens | 4.36
Le Grove @billysubway Hitchens book under your arm. I’m reading Arguably. When he’s at his best, he is a savage. Unbelievable prose. (Source)
James Baldwin | 4.35
Oliver Sacks | 4.34
Suzanne O'Sullivan I didn’t choose neurology because of it but the way Oliver Sacks writes about neurology is very compelling. (Source)
Tanya Byron This is a seminal book that anyone who wants to work in mental health should read. It is a charming and gentle and also an honest exposé of what can happen to us when our mental health is compromised for whatever reason. (Source)
Bradley Voytek I can’t imagine one day waking up and not knowing who my wife is, or seeing my wife and thinking that she was replaced by some sort of clone or robot. But that could happen to any of us. (Source)
Leslie Jamison | 4.33
Ann Patchett | 4.31
A Low Culture Manifesto
Chuck Klosterman | 4.30
Karen Pfaff Manganillo Never have I read a book that I said “this is so perfect, amazing, hilarious, he’s thinking what I’m thinking (in a much more thought out and cool way)”. (Source)
Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Anne Lamott | 4.29
Susan Cain I love [this book]. Such a good book. (Source)
Timothy Ferriss Bird by Bird is one of my absolute favorite books, and I gift it to everybody, which I should probably also give to startup founders, quite frankly. A lot of the lessons are the same. But you can get to your destination, even though you can only see 20 feet in front of you. (Source)
Ryan Holiday It was wonderful to read these two provocative books of essays by two incredibly wise and compassionate women. [...] Anne Lamott’s book is ostensibly about the art of writing, but really it too is about life and how to tackle the problems, temptations and opportunities life throws at us. Both will make you think and both made me a better person this year. (Source)
Zadie Smith | 4.29
Barack Obama As 2018 draws to a close, I’m continuing a favorite tradition of mine and sharing my year-end lists. It gives me a moment to pause and reflect on the year through the books I found most thought-provoking, inspiring, or just plain loved. It also gives me a chance to highlight talented authors – some who are household names and others who you may not have heard of before. Here’s my best of 2018... (Source)
Malcolm Gladwell | 4.28
Sam Freedman @mrianleslie (Also I agree What the Dog Saw is his best book). (Source)
Lindy West | 4.27
Susan Sontag | 4.25
Alexander Chee | 4.25
Eula Biss Alex Chee explores the realm of the real with extraordinarily beautiful essays. Being real here is an ambition, a haunting, an impossibility, and an illusion. What passes for real, his essays suggest, becomes real, just as life becomes art and art, pursued this fully, becomes a life. (Source)
Occasional Essays
Zadie Smith | 4.25
David Sedaris | 4.24
Chelsea Handler [The author] is fucking hilarious and there's nothing I prefer to do more than laugh. If this book doesn't make you laugh, I'll refund you the money. (Source)
A New Generation Speaks About Race
Jesmyn Ward | 4.24
Mindy Kaling | 4.24
Selected Nonfiction
Neil Gaiman | 4.24
Sloane Crosley | 4.24
The Classic Text on Value Investing
Benjamin Graham | 4.23
Warren Buffett To invest successfully over a lifetime does not require a stratospheric IQ, unusual business insights, or inside information. What's needed is a sound intellectual framework for making decisions and the ability to keep emotions from corroding that framework. This book precisely and clearly prescribes the proper framework. You must provide the emotional discipline. (Source)
Kevin Rose The foundation for investing. A lot of people have used this as their guide to getting into investment, basic strategies. Actually Warren Buffett cites this as the book that got him into investing and he says that principles he learned here helped him to become a great investor. Highly recommend this book. It’s a great way understand what’s going on and how to evaluate different companies out... (Source)
John Kay The idea is that you look at the underlying value of the company’s activities instead of relying on market gossip. (Source)
An Essay in Forty Questions
Valeria Luiselli | 4.23
Tina Fey | 4.22
Sheryl Sandberg I absolutely loved Tina Fey's "Bossypants" and didn't want it to end. It's hilarious as well as important. Not only was I laughing on every page, but I was nodding along, highlighting and dog-earing like crazy. [...] It is so, so good. As a young girl, I was labeled bossy, too, so as a former - O.K., current - bossypants, I am grateful to Tina for being outspoken, unapologetic and hysterically... (Source)
Hanif Abdurraqib, Dr. Eve L. Ewing | 4.22
Saadia Muzaffar Man, this is such an amazing book of essays. Meditations on music and musicians and their moments and meaning-making. @NifMuhammad's mindworks are a gift. Go find it. (thank you @asad_ch!) https://t.co/htSueYYBUT (Source)
Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
David Foster Wallace | 4.21
John Jeremiah Sullivan | 4.21
Greil Marcus This is a new book by a writer in his mid-thirties, about all kinds of things. A lot of it is about the South, some of it is autobiographical, there is a long and quite wonderful piece about going to a Christian music camp. (Source)
Rebecca Solnit | 4.20
Sarah Vowell, Katherine Streeter | 4.20
E. B. White | 4.19
Adam Gopnik White, for me, is the great maker of the New Yorker style. Though it seems self-serving for me to say it, I think that style was the next step in the creation of the essay tone. One of the things White does is use a lot of the habits of the American newspaper in his essays. He is a genuinely simple, spare, understated writer. In the presence of White, even writers as inspired as Woolf and... (Source)
Rebecca Solnit | 4.19
Kurt Vonnegut | 4.18
Thinking About What Matters
Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler | 4.17
Annie Dillard | 4.16
Laura Dassow Walls She’s enacting Thoreau, but in a 20th-century context: she takes on quantum physics, the latest research on DNA and the nature of life. (Source)
Sara Maitland This book, which won the Pulitzer literature prize when it was released, is the most beautiful book about the wild. (Source)
Maggie Nelson | 4.14
A Funny Book About Horrible Things
Jenny Lawson | 4.13
A Manifesto
Mary Beard | 4.13
Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Timothy Snyder | 4.12
George Saunders Please read this book. So smart, so timely. (Source)
Tom Holland "There isn’t a page of this magnificent book that does not contain some fascinating detail and the narrative is held together with a novelist’s eye for character and theme." #Dominion https://t.co/FESSNxVDLC (Source)
Maya Wiley Prof. Tim Snyder, author of “In Tyranny” reminded us in that important little book that we must protect our institutions. #DOJ is one of our most important in gov’t for the rule of law. This is our collective house & #Barr should be evicted. https://t.co/PPxM9IMQUm (Source)
Barbara Kingsolver | 4.11
Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
Toni Morrison | 4.11
Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened
Allie Brosh | 4.11
Bill Gates While she self-deprecatingly depicts herself in words and art as an odd outsider, we can all relate to her struggles. Rather than laughing at her, you laugh with her. It is no hyperbole to say I love her approach -- looking, listening, and describing with the observational skills of a scientist, the creativity of an artist, and the wit of a comedian. (Source)
Samantha Irby | 4.10
David Foster Wallace | 4.10
David Papineau People can learn to do amazing things with their bodies, and people start honing and developing these skills as an end in itself, a very natural thing for humans to do. (Source)
Personal Essays
Melissa Broder | 4.10
Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
Rebecca Solnit | 4.09
Prem Panicker @sanjayen This is from an essay Solnit wrote to introduce the updated version of her book Hope In The Dark. Anything Solnit is brilliant; at times like these, she is the North Star. (Source)
Jonathan Franzen | 4.08
Susan Sontag | 4.08
Lessons for Corporate America, Fifth Edition
Lawrence A. Cunningham and Warren E. Buffett | 4.08
Scaachi Koul | 4.07
Amy Poehler | 4.06
W.E.B. Du Bois | 4.05
Barack Obama According to the president’s Facebook page and a 2008 interview with the New York Times, these titles are among his most influential forever favorites: Moby Dick, Herman Melville Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson Song Of Solomon, Toni Morrison Parting The Waters, Taylor Branch Gilead, Marylinne Robinson Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton Souls of Black... (Source)
Jun'ichiro Tanizaki | 4.05
Kyle Chayka Tanizaki is mourning what has been paved over, which is the old Japanese aesthetic of darkness, of softness, of appreciating the imperfect—rather than the cold, glossy surfaces of industrialized modernity that the West had brought to Japan at that moment. For me, that’s really valuable, because it does preserve a different way of looking at the world. (Source)
John Berger | 4.04
Robert Jones He’s a Marxist and says that the role of publicity or branding is to make people marginally dissatisfied with their current way of life. (Source)
David McCammon Ways of Seeing goes beyond photography and will continue to develop your language around images. (Source)
John Harrison (Eton College) You have to understand the Marxist interpretation of art; it is absolutely fundamental to the way that art history departments now study the material. Then you have to critique it, because we’ve moved on from the 1970s and the collapse of Marxism in most of the world shows—amongst other things—that the model was flawed. But it’s still a very good book to read, for a teenager especially. (Source)
Efficient Preparation for the Texas Bar Exam
Catherine Martin Christopher | 4.04
Ross Gay | 4.04
C. S. Lewis | 4.04
Anoop Anthony "Mere Christianity" is first and foremost a rational book — it is in many ways the opposite of a traditional religious tome. Lewis, who was once an atheist, has been on both sides of the table, and he approaches the notion of God with accessible, clear thinking. The book reveals that experiencing God doesn't have to be a mystical exercise; God can be a concrete and logical conclusion. Lewis was... (Source)
and Other Reflections
Nora Ephron | 4.04
Susan Sontag | 4.03
Susan Bordo Sontag was the first to make the claim, which at the time was very controversial, that photography is misleading and seductive because it looks like reality but is in fact highly selective. (Source)
American Essays
Eula Biss | 4.03
Heaven and Hell (Thinking Classics)
Aldous Huxley, Robbie McCallum | 4.03
Michelle Rodriguez Aldous Huxley on Technodictators https://t.co/RDyX70lnZz via @YouTube ‘Doors of Perception’ is a great book entry level to hallucinogenics (Source)
Auston Bunsen I also really loved “The doors of perception” by Aldous Huxley. (Source)
Dr. Andrew Weil Came first [in terms of my interests]. (Source)
Kameron Hurley | 4.02
Samantha Irby | 4.01
Jonathan Swift | 4.01
Familiar Essays
Anne Fadiman | 4.00
Advertisement
Supported by
More from our inbox:.
To the Editor:
Re “ Our Bookshelves, Ourselves ,” by Margaret Renkl (Opinion guest essay, Aug. 29):
On Oct. 6 last year, my three children and I lost our home and our dog, Lulu, in a fire.
Of all the objects that were lost that day, the loss of our books has been the most difficult to absorb, and grief over their loss appears in odd, unpredictable ways. (For example, my youngest son has refused to even look at the replacement copy of “The Wild Robot” that I bought him within days of the blaze.)
The books that we were in the middle of reading. The books with jam smears and with water marks from splashy tub read-out-loud sessions. My duct-taped copy of “Women Who Run With the Wolves.” The underlines, the earmarks, the smell of used books that were previously owned by libraries.
This article made me cry with joy and relief. And it made all four of us feel somehow comforted knowing there are people who might understand that what was lost was irreplaceable.
Niki Leffingwell Missoula, Mont.
Like Margaret Renkl, I’m a bibliophile. I’ve been a member of the same book club for 33 years. My family writes books and writes in books, and I am incapable of walking past a Little Free Library without stopping.
Recently, I’ve grown to love audiobooks, too; my husband, Rob, and I listen during road trips. I loved the evocative narrations of “James,” “Circe,” “Hamnet” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” and William Hootkins’s interpretation of “Moby-Dick,” a masterpiece that neither Rob nor I had conquered on our own.
Yet I agree with Ms. Renkl: “I will always prefer a book I can hold in my hand.” I like underlining the good parts, scribbling in the margins and shelving a beloved novel among favorites from other chapters of my life. I even have two designated bookshelves for signed books: Tom Wolfe, Sue Grafton, Dr. Spock, Mario Vargas Llosa.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in .
Want all of The Times? Subscribe .
'i just keep talking' is a refreshing and wide-ranging essay collection.
Martha Anne Toll
Nell Irvin Painter — author, scholar, historian, artist, raconteur — rocked my world with her The History of White People and endeared me with her memoir Old in Art School . Painter’s latest book, I Just Keep Talking is an insightful addition to her canon.
Painter’s professional accomplishments are stratospheric: a chair in the American History Department at Princeton, bestselling author of eight books along with others she’s edited, too many other publications to count, and an entirely separate career as a visual artist. She calls her latest book “A Life in Essays,” which I found reductive. Although the first group of essays is entitled “Autobiography,” this volume reaches far beyond Nell Painter’s own story in the best possible way.
Author examines 'the history of white people'.
Painter’s The History of White People combines scholarship with readability to prove that “whiteness” is a relatively newly created sociological construct. Slavery has been around for millennia, as has war and conquering peoples, but whiteness, with its bizarre, insidious, and pervasive myths about racial superiority, dates from around the 15th century forward. The concept of whiteness is entangled with America’s mendacious justifications for its capture and trade in human beings, and the terrible, lasting consequences of chattel slavery.
Painter has been clear that she stands on the shoulders of others in naming whiteness as a construct. What makes The History of White People indispensable is that it collects the historical antecedents of whiteness in a compelling narrative, and calls out to readers, including myself, the need to unlearn whiteness as a norm, even — and especially — if it is an unconscious norm.
'old in art school': an mfa inspires a memoir of age.
As Painter wound down from a full academic load at Princeton, she obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees in fine art. In Old in Art School, as well as this current volume, she recounts the putdowns and hazing she suffered from fellow art students and her art professors, just as The History of White People was hitting the bestseller lists. Painter acknowledges that book’s commercial success but does not hide her bitterness that it did not win any major prizes.
Painter’s tour through her life and interests makes for a fascinating journey. To introduce her essay collection, Painter writes, “My Blackness isn’t broken… Mine is a Blackness of solidarity, a community, a connectedness….” She grew up in an intellectual family in the Bay Area amidst the burgeoning Black power movement. Her studies took her to Ghana and Paris, before completing her Ph.D. in U.S. history at Harvard.
Painter started making art at an early age. She threads that interest through the essays, wondering what would have happened if her professional life had started with art, instead of as a scholar.
Is beauty in the eyes of the colonizer.
Painter’s captivating mixed media illustrations in I Just Keep Talking speak to injustice. She combines words that blister — “same frustrations for 25 years” (a work from 2022), with blocks of color and figurative representations. I felt drawn in by these visual pieces with their trenchant messages. “This text + art is the way I work, the way I think,” she writes. In Painter’s hands, a picture can be worth a thousand words.
Painter’s essays pose critical questions. She will not accept received wisdom at face value, refuses the status quo, and freely offers her expert opinions. The pieces in this book address such wide topics as the meaning of history and historiography; America’s false, rose-colored-glasses-interpretation of slavery; the appalling absence of Black people from America’s story about itself; how and where feminism fits in; southern American history; the white gaze; and visual culture.
She takes a hard look at Thomas Jefferson’s hypocrisy concerning Black people and slavery, and compares his viewpoint to that of Charles Dickens, who toured the U.S. 15 years after Jefferson died. Audiences cooled to Dickens after he “excoriate[d] Americans for…tolerating the continued existence of enslavement by shrugging their shoulders, saying nothing can be done on account of ‘public opinion.’”
Painter was onto Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas well before Professor Hill delivered her explosive testimony at his confirmation hearing. In a chapter called “Hill, Thomas, and the Use of Racial Stereotype,” Painter delivers a withering takedown of Thomas’ manipulation of gender stereotypes to advantage himself.
Painter dates her essays and provides extensive endnotes, but I wanted more information about which essays had been previously published and which, if any, derived from unpublished journal entries. I wondered particularly about the shorter, less annotated pieces, which I could imagine her writing to develop analyses for longer efforts (though only speculation on my part).
The variety in length and scholarly sophistication is refreshing in this collection. Each entry deals with topics that are sadly as relevant today as they have been throughout America’s history.
Please keep talking Nell Painter, and we’ll keep listening.
Your purchase helps support NPR programming. How?
Martha Anne Toll is a D.C.-based writer and reviewer. Her debut novel, Three Muses , won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize. Her second novel, Duet for One , is due out May 2025.
The Essay on a New Logic or Theory of Thinking was Salomon Maimon’s hard-won success after a lifetime’s pursuit of philosophical wisdom, originally published in Berlin in 1794. Timothy Franz presents its first English translation, with the goal of allowing the New Logic to be an object of further study, accessible to the philosophical tradition. Maimon’s work is the product of philosophical genius, and at its heart it is a serene account of reflection on thought that determines the principles of logic, on the one hand, and the principles of scientific cognition of the world, on the other, culminating in a thought-provoking metaphysics and philosophy of religion. Maimon also intended the work to be the foundation of his ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics. However, as a Jewish philosopher from Lithuania, he had learned his subject as a wanderer, and he struggled to be understood by his fellow Jews, by Germans, and by the philosophical community. Consequently, there is considerable tension between Maimon’s philosophical vision and his persona and presentation. Franz translates the text of the New Logic , the Letters of Philalethes to Aenesidemus , in which Maimon defends his views against the thinkers closest to him, two hostile reviews he vigorously annotated, and the letter to Kant introducing his idea for a critical philosophy of logic. Franz prefaces the work with a brief history of Maimon’s philosophical development and an introduction that attempts to reconcile Maimon’s presentation with his argument and to understand both of them together.
Sign in with a library card.
Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:
Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.
Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic.
If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institution’s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.
Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.
Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:
Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see ‘Sign in through society site’ in the sign in pane within a journal:
If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.
Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.
A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.
Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.
Click the account icon in the top right to:
Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.
For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.
Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.
Month: | Total Views: |
---|---|
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 3 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
August 2024 | 1 |
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide
Sign In or Create an Account
This PDF is available to Subscribers Only
For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.
Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission.
This list is updated monthly with new “best of the year” worthy titles.
We’re only halfway through 2024, but we’re already having trouble keeping up with the pace of exciting new releases. It’s been a particularly strong year for sophomore novels, with several emerging writers using the buzz around their debuts to launch worthy follow-ups. We’ve read multiple collections of poetry that speak to our current moment, while the varied world of nonfiction has given us plenty to linger on, from essays about the climate crisis to a vibrant oral history of The Village Voice . And we’d be remiss not to mention a brilliant debut novel that deftly brings humanity and humor to existential dread. Here’s the best of what Vulture’s contributors have read.
Titles are listed by U.S. release date, with the newest books up top.
Fresh off a botched assignment for the U.S. government, a newly freelance spy makes her way to a small town in France to meet the charismatic figurehead of an anarchist commune. The group may have plans to disrupt a government project, and Sadie Smith has been hired by an unknown client to figure out its intentions — or, perhaps, to stir up trouble from within. Compared to scheming, keen-eyed Sadie, everyone she meets seems hopelessly naïve: the bickering anarchists, the comically resentful commune dropout, the man Sadie married to gain access to the group. Her only true equal seems to be Bruno Lacombe, a much older intellectual who has chosen to live an isolated life in a network of caves nearby. Kushner’s new novel, after 2018’s The Mars Room , is the kind of highly satisfying literary thriller that always seems in short supply. —Emma Alpern
Off the coast of Seattle exists an archipelago where Sam and her elder sister Elena have spent their entire lives. Their days on San Juan consist mainly of catering to wealthy tourists in order to make ends meet and caring for their terminally ill mother, and Sam copes by dreaming of the day she and Elena can finally leave the island and start anew. So passes the first two-thirds of Bear : an unhurried, intimate portrait of sisterhood, inherited trauma, and the monotony of poverty in a society emerging from a pandemic. But a glimpse of a new life (and a not-so-subtle representation of the threats that lie beyond the islands) arrives on San Juan in an unexpected form: a wild grizzly bear in transit. Elena, captivated, and Sam, terrified, must now contend with the new presence. A rapid escalation of events ensues as the sisters’ drastically different yet equally ill-advised approaches to the unexpected visitor lead to devastating consequences. Bear may be a slow burn, but by the final chapter, Sam’s whole world is engulfed in flames. — Anusha Praturu
In an interview with The New Yorker , Rachel Cusk said she believes character no longer exists. That a person — an author or their fictional creation — should be constrained by their name, their past, and their habits is an old conception that’s wearing away, and good riddance. This view governed her Outline trilogy, which shows its narrator in relief, standing apart from the people she talks with, both peers and strangers. In her latest novel, Parade , Cusk takes her belief in the death of character even further as a cast of voices, many of them named G, wax philosophical about their spouses, avant-garde painting, and a random act of violence. Formally frenetic and sharp line by line, Parade doesn’t mimic decades-old experimental modes. (Renata Adler’s Speedboat comes to mind at times, though.) Instead, Cusk has written something genuinely new — again. And whether Parade is a character-driven story in spite of itself is an open question as exciting as its mutable storyline. — Maddie Crum
➽ Read Andrea Long Chu’s review of Parade.
When Lauren Cook publishes a new book, it is like a minor holiday to me. Cook is a trans naturalist and writer who came up on the Tumblr-era internet; his previous book, I Love Shopping (2019), is sold out and impossible to find — if you have my copy, please give it back. His latest, Sex Goblin , is a collection of poetry and short prose that read like posts on a porn sub-Reddit until you realize your guts are on the floor. In a sparse, direct, half-naïve first-person idiom, there’s an emotional acuity that sneaks up on you, making the mundane (waiting in a drive-through at Starbucks) and the surreal (a witch who turns an offending man into underwear) feel unpredictable and immediate, like the rumbling before an earthquake, when the ground might crack open. — Erin Schwartz
After the success of her debut novel, It Is Wood, It Is Stone , Gabriella Burnham returns with an emotionally grounded political novel. When out dancing with friends, Elise learns from her younger sister that their mother has disappeared. Elise returns home to Nantucket Island, where she soon discovers that her mother was arrested and deported to São Paulo, after more than two decades away from Brazil. As Elise struggles to bring her mother back, she falls in with her wealthy best friend, who has recently inherited her grandfather’s mansion. No matter how close the two friends may have been, there remains an unbridgeable class divide. Burnham is a skilled observer of the hypocrisies coursing beneath our desire to do good and be good. This is especially clear when she writes about wealth. Wait is an empathetic and clear-eyed exploration of the everyday injustices that slowly erode friendships, families, and lives in America. — Isle McElroy
An artist of niche celebrity plans to celebrate her 45th birthday by driving alone across the country, from L.A., where she lives with her husband and child, to New York. But when it comes time to hit the road, she finds herself stopping in a nearby suburb, meeting a younger man who works for Hertz, and spending the entirety of her vacation in a motel, which she renovates to Paris-inspired perfection for the cool sum of $20,000. It’s not just that Miranda July’s latest novel is so propulsive you might have to cancel plans or set aside PTO just to scarf it down. It’s that her dazzlingly horny intelligence wrestles with marriage, queerness, and desire in ways sweet and hilarious, making even the smallest sizzle. — Jasmine Vojdani
➽ Read Christine Smallwood’s review of All Fours .
The 12 stories in ’Pemi Aguda’s mesmerizing and unsettling debut collection, Ghostroots , revolve around life in Lagos, the author’s home city. Aguda is a precise and exciting prose stylist, and her stories offer vivid insights into tradition, family, and trauma. Throughout the collection, the past invades the present, in the form of unwanted lineages and regretted decisions. A woman who cannot produce milk for her newborn blames herself for this ailment. The child was conceived the evening she forgave her husband for having an affair — she believes she’s being punished for being so forgiving. In “Manifest,” a young woman who resembles her grandmother — an evil woman, she is told — begins to adopt her grandmother’s most terrible traits, leading to an act of violence she cannot take back. The horror in Aguda’s stories are borne out of a sense of inevitability. Her characters, unable to change the past, are forced to confront futures they find terrifying and dangerous. This is a smart, playful, and compassionate collection worthy of repeated reads. — I.M.
Holly Gramazio’s debut novel has a killer hook: What if you had a magic attic supplying you with an endless cycle of husbands? It’s the best kind of high-concept question, one that opens up plenty of space for a writer to play in. And Gramazio (whose background is in game design), has lots of fun exploring every corner of her husband-filled world. The protagonist, Lauren — single and loving it, until she comes home to find a husband she doesn’t remember, who keeps turning into a different spouse whenever he goes into the attic — has the unique opportunity to examine the little ways we all soften at the edges to fit the people in our lives. Lauren, it turns out, learns a lot more about herself and what she values (or doesn’t!) than she does about any individual husband. — Emily Heller
A re-imagining of a classic work of art has become a time-honored — if sometimes spotty — pursuit, and with James Percival Everett creates an original masterpiece that both complements and rivals one of the most iconic American novels, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Written from the perspective of Huck’s loyal companion, the runaway slave Jim (James), the titular adventures of Mark Twain’s book are instead experienced here as the life-or-death trials James faces while he evades capture and strategizes a way to free his enslaved family. There are plenty of references to the earlier novel — and there’s still humor to be found despite the constant danger — but Everett grounds the narrative in James’s rich interior life and a larger historical context that brings a new depth to the familiar characters. This book will linger with you. — Tolly Wright
➽ Read James Yeh’s review of James.
In a shabby gym in Reno, Nevada, teenage girls face off in a youth boxing tournament under a shifting ray of daylight that “fills the whole space with a dull, dusty brightness” and surrounded by a sparse crowd of mostly uninterested coaches and parents. The novel enters deep into the girls’ minds as they assess one another’s weaknesses and coax themselves through the rounds, which are described in brutal, bloody detail. Each fighter has her own source of competitive energy, but they’re all realistically ambivalent, too — unsure about why, exactly, they’re drawn to a sport that gives them so little for their trouble. Rita Bullwinkel’s debut novel is as tense and disciplined as its characters, and she has a gift for capturing the way their minds wander far from the ring and back again: One girl counts off the digits of pi, while another obsesses over a death she witnessed as a lifeguard. There’s a mesmerizing sense of limitlessness to the narrative, which roams far into the future of these fighters even as they’re absorbing hits in the ring. — E.A.
Raboteau emerged on the scene some two decades ago as a writer of sharp, incisive fiction that mapped the contours of identity and race. In recent years, she has become a literary voice of consciousness about the ongoing climate crisis. Across a series of essays, book reviews, and conversations, Raboteau has charted the progression of the crisis, our shared culpability, and our responsibility to develop practical solutions. Lessons for Survival is, in many ways, a culmination and continuation of this work. Raboteau travels locally and abroad to capture stories about the impact of the environmental crisis, and the resilience of communities that find themselves on the front lines. She also writes authentically — her prose seamlessly melds slang and heightened language — about her own experiences as a Black mother, whose identity has shaped her understanding of these issues. This is scintillating work, an essential primer for our times. — Tope Folarin
The grand irony of this juncture in history is that at the very moment when the problems we’re facing — climate change, economic inequality, cross-border violence — require global solutions, our societies have become more atomized than ever. This is the case both within various societies, in which individual concerns increasingly trump collective interests, and between societies, whereby individual countries pursue their objectives at the expense of global cooperation. In their new book, Solidarity: The Past, Present and Future of a World-Changing Idea , Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor offer an essential antidote: a renewed commitment to solidarity. Their book is ambitious and comprehensive. It traces the evolving meaning of solidarity from ancient Rome through the Black Lives Matter movement and identifies different kinds of solidarity, how they arise, and how effective they are in forming and maintaining social bonds. They persuasively argue that in order to create a more “egalitarian world,” we must learn to cultivate and practice the kind of solidarity that “chang[es] the social order toward one that is both freer and more just.” — T.F.
Set at a big-box store in upstate New York, Help Wanted recalls Mike White’s Enlightened in its textured portrayal of how small humiliations and injustices at work inevitably boil over into righteous rage. It’s a novel that lingers in the imagination, by which I mean, after you read it you’ll think of it every time you shop at Target, forever. — Emily Gould
➽ Read Emily Gould’s interview with Help Wanted author Adelle Waldman on The Cut .
Emily Hunt’s second book of poems considers real intimacy mediated by apps. In “Company,” a long poem originally published as a chapbook, the speaker works for a flower delivery startup, gently pulling roots from soil, culling, clipping, and handing off arrangements. These moments are sensorily rich, slotted into 15-minute assembly-line shifts, and short lines. In “Emily,” Hunt uses messages from Tinder as her source material, not to mock (or not only to mock) the senders or the stilted situation of meeting online, but to construct a self in relief, as seen and spoken to by strangers. A funny and surprising interaction with dailiness, including our phones — the hardware and the relationships maintained through them — and whatever else is still tactile. — M.C.
Emmeline Clein’s Dead Weight seems destined to fundamentally reshape how we think and write about the subject of eating disorders. What separates Clein’s book from others on the topic is her commitment to treating the sufferers of eating disorders with the kind of dignity that clinicians tend to withhold. She writes as an insider, telling both her personal story and sharing the stories of her “sisters,” which range from Tumblr accounts to clinical studies co-authored by their subjects. Throughout, she refrains from including the graphic details that have historically plagued books about the subject. “Too many people I love have misread a memoir as a manual,” she writes. The book she writes instead confronts the complicated entanglement between eating disorders, race, capitalism, and the ongoing erosion of social safety nets. Stereotypes about eating disorders commonly portray the illness as one rooted in control. Dead Weight not only exposes how little control patients have had over their own narratives and bodies, it returns the narrative to those who have suffered from the disease. This is a moving, brilliant, and important book. — Isle McElroy
If you were reading The Village Voice in the 1990s, as I was, it wasn’t as good as it used to be. That was also true ten years later, and 20 years before, and frankly it was probably what people started saying upon reading issue No. 2 in 1955. What the Voice was, inarguably, was shaggy, sometimes under-edited, alternately vigorous and undisciplined and brilliant and exhausting and fun. The infighting in its pages and in its newsroom was relentless, amped up by the very aggressiveness that made its reporters and editors able to do what they did. You’ll encounter more than one office fistfight in The Freaks Came Out to Write , this oral history by Tricia Romano, who worked there at the very end of its life. She got a huge number of Voice survivors to talk, including almost every living person who played a major role in this beloved, irritating paper’s life, and good archival interviews fill in the gaps. If you read the Voice in its glory days (whenever those were!) you’ll miss it terribly by the end of this book; if you weren’t there, you will be amazed that such a thing not only existed but, for a while, flourished. — Christopher Bonanos
Orange’s Pulitzer-finalist debut, 2018’s There There , is a tightly constructed, polyphonic book that ends with a gunshot at a powwow. His follow-up, which shares the first one’s perspective-hopping structure (and several of its characters), is a different beast, an introspective novel about addiction and adolescence. The story begins in the 1860s, when a young Cheyenne man becomes an early subject in the U.S. government’s attempts to assimilate Native Americans. The consequences of this flurry of violence and imprisonment will reverberate through generations of his family, eventually landing in present-day Oakland, California, where three young brothers live with their grandmother and her sister. The oldest brother, Orvil, was shot at There There ’s powwow, and even though he survived, the heaviness of that day is weighing on him and his family. Prescribed opioids for the pain, he finds that — like several of his ancestors, though he has no way of knowing that — he likes the sense of removal they give him. Orange’s novel is unusually curious and gentle in its treatment of addiction; he lets his characters puzzle out why they’re drawn to intoxication, managing to balance a lack of judgment with an understanding of the danger they’re in. — E.A.
➽ Read Emma Alpern’s full review of Wandering Stars .
In Come and Get It , the second novel from the breakout author of Such a Fun Age , the University of Arkansas serves as the backdrop for Kylie Reid’s assessment of race, class, and social hierarchy on a college campus. Over the course of a semester that shifts between the perspectives of Millie, a meek yet dutiful R.A., Kennedy, a shy transfer student with a traumatic secret, and Agatha, a visiting professor out of her depths, the primary characters are forced to grapple with the heady concepts of desire, privilege, and the rules of social conduct in an environment where the the game is rigged and fairness is reserved for a select few. Light on plot and heavy on character development and social commentary, Come and Get It is the kind of book you put down and immediately want to discuss . But fair warning: If you ever lived in a college dorm in the U.S., this book might inflict a non-negligible amount of PTSD. — A.P.
In Poet Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, Cyrus Shams is a nexus of dissonant identities: He’s a 20-something Iranian-American, a straight-passing queer, a recovering addict, a depressive insomniac, and a writer who’s recently gotten some unflattering feedback. He’s also grieving his parents, who he considers to have died meaninglessly, his mother on a passenger flight out of Tehran that was accidentally shot down by the U.S. military (a real event that occurred in 1988), his father “anonymous[ly] after spending decades cleaning chicken shit on some corporate farm.” Martyr! traces Cyrus’s obsession with the idea of dying with a purpose, disrupting linear time and moving miraculously between worlds and perspectives. Sometimes, the dead speak for themselves; we hear from Cyrus’s mother and his uncle, who recounts his life as a soldier in the Iran-Iraq war. The book also shines with humor, including an imagined conversation between Cyrus’s mother and Lisa Simpson. Akbar’s prose courses with lyrical intelligence and offers an interrogation of whose pain matters — and what it means to live and die meaningfully — that is as politically urgent as it is deeply alive. — J.V.
In these chaotic times, Franz Fanon’s work is constantly and enthusiastically referenced. A new generation of activists — as many before them — has repurposed Fanon’s words to describe our current travails, and to propose how we might move forward. Fanon persists in the activist imagination as a kind of radical soothsayer, an intellectual who can speak authoritatively about our moment because of his identity as a Black man and colonial subject who personally experienced the barbarity of a colonizing power. In The Rebel’s Clinic , Adam Shatz complicates our understanding of Fanon’s life and work, and persuasively conjures the human being who wrote the words that have inspired so many. Among Shatz’s most important interventions is to highlight Fanon’s vocation as a doctor who “treated the torturers by day and the tortured at night.” Shatz’s book is a chronicle of a man who, because of his identity and gifts, was obliged to constantly reconcile opposing ideas and ways of being. — T.F.
Finally, a book about money that knows money is evil. TikTok’s favorite Marxist small-business owner wrote a book on financial literacy, and it delivers on its promise. Half memoir, half how-to, the book explores Pendleton’s journey to fiscal solvency while also including handy tutorials on things like buying a car and enduring financial stress. (Pendleton starts the book with the death by suicide of her partner, primarily motivated by looming bankruptcy, so that how-to hits especially hard.) Pendleton’s personal story brings pathos and relatability to her finance guidance. Every hardship someone of her generation could fall prey to, she does — predatory loans, for-profit college, go-nowhere internships, not realizing couch-surfing is the same as homelessness and therefore taking longer to embrace class solidarity. But for every setback, she notes a resource for resilience. Everything from the kindness of the punk scene to good grifts to pull on the phone company, this book gives you the tools to create a sustainable life in late capitalism. — Bethy Squires
What is your email.
This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.
Create your free account.
Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:
As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.
Nell Irvin Painter — author, scholar, historian, artist, raconteur — rocked my world with her The History of White People and endeared me with her memoir Old in Art School . Painter’s latest book, I Just Keep Talking is an insightful addition to her canon.
Painter’s professional accomplishments are stratospheric: a chair in the American History Department at Princeton, bestselling author of eight books along with others she’s edited, too many other publications to count, and an entirely separate career as a visual artist. She calls her latest book “A Life in Essays,” which I found reductive. Although the first group of essays is entitled “Autobiography,” this volume reaches far beyond Nell Painter’s own story in the best possible way.
Painter’s The History of White People combines scholarship with readability to prove that “whiteness” is a relatively newly created sociological construct. Slavery has been around for millennia, as has war and conquering peoples, but whiteness, with its bizarre, insidious, and pervasive myths about racial superiority, dates from around the 15th century forward. The concept of whiteness is entangled with America’s mendacious justifications for its capture and trade in human beings, and the terrible, lasting consequences of chattel slavery.
Painter has been clear that she stands on the shoulders of others in naming whiteness as a construct. What makes The History of White People indispensable is that it collects the historical antecedents of whiteness in a compelling narrative, and calls out to readers, including myself, the need to unlearn whiteness as a norm, even — and especially — if it is an unconscious norm.
As Painter wound down from a full academic load at Princeton, she obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees in fine art. In Old in Art School, as well as this current volume, she recounts the putdowns and hazing she suffered from fellow art students and her art professors, just as The History of White People was hitting the bestseller lists. Painter acknowledges that book’s commercial success but does not hide her bitterness that it did not win any major prizes.
Painter’s tour through her life and interests makes for a fascinating journey. To introduce her essay collection, Painter writes, “My Blackness isn’t broken… Mine is a Blackness of solidarity, a community, a connectedness….” She grew up in an intellectual family in the Bay Area amidst the burgeoning Black power movement. Her studies took her to Ghana and Paris, before completing her Ph.D. in U.S. history at Harvard.
Painter started making art at an early age. She threads that interest through the essays, wondering what would have happened if her professional life had started with art, instead of as a scholar.
Painter’s captivating mixed media illustrations in I Just Keep Talking speak to injustice. She combines words that blister — “same frustrations for 25 years” (a work from 2022), with blocks of color and figurative representations. I felt drawn in by these visual pieces with their trenchant messages. “This text + art is the way I work, the way I think,” she writes. In Painter’s hands, a picture can be worth a thousand words.
Painter’s essays pose critical questions. She will not accept received wisdom at face value, refuses the status quo, and freely offers her expert opinions. The pieces in this book address such wide topics as the meaning of history and historiography; America’s false, rose-colored-glasses-interpretation of slavery; the appalling absence of Black people from America’s story about itself; how and where feminism fits in; southern American history; the white gaze; and visual culture.
She takes a hard look at Thomas Jefferson’s hypocrisy concerning Black people and slavery, and compares his viewpoint to that of Charles Dickens, who toured the U.S. 15 years after Jefferson died. Audiences cooled to Dickens after he “excoriate[d] Americans for…tolerating the continued existence of enslavement by shrugging their shoulders, saying nothing can be done on account of ‘public opinion.’”
Painter was onto Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas well before Professor Hill delivered her explosive testimony at his confirmation hearing. In a chapter called “Hill, Thomas, and the Use of Racial Stereotype,” Painter delivers a withering takedown of Thomas’ manipulation of gender stereotypes to advantage himself.
Painter dates her essays and provides extensive endnotes, but I wanted more information about which essays had been previously published and which, if any, derived from unpublished journal entries. I wondered particularly about the shorter, less annotated pieces, which I could imagine her writing to develop analyses for longer efforts (though only speculation on my part).
The variety in length and scholarly sophistication is refreshing in this collection. Each entry deals with topics that are sadly as relevant today as they have been throughout America’s history.
Please keep talking Nell Painter, and we’ll keep listening.
Martha Anne Toll is a D.C.-based writer and reviewer. Her debut novel, Three Muses , won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize. Her second novel, Duet for One , is due out May 2025.
Copyright 2024 NPR
This essay provides a review of two important recent books on economic growth: How the World Became Rich by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin and Slouching Towards Utopia, by J. Bradford DeLong. Each book is noteworthy for its erudition and breadth. I explore strengths and weaknesses of these books and make some proposals on new ways to conceptualize and study long run socioeconomic development. My discussion emphasizes the importance of contingency in determining long run inequalities across countries as well the potential for ideas from complexity theory to augment standard growth modelling.
Financial support from the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation is appreciated. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
MARC RIS BibTeΧ
Download Citation Data
In addition to working papers , the NBER disseminates affiliates’ latest findings through a range of free periodicals — the NBER Reporter , the NBER Digest , the Bulletin on Retirement and Disability , the Bulletin on Health , and the Bulletin on Entrepreneurship — as well as online conference reports , video lectures , and interviews .
Labour unrest intensifies
CEC, all four election commissioners resign
Hasina must stay silent in India till Bangladesh seeks her extradition: Yunus
‘Pakistan weren’t poor, we were better’
Bangladeshi Literature in English: Critical Essays and Interviews , edited by Mohammad A. Quayum and Md. Mahmudul Hasan, focuses on critical essays on Bangladeshi literature in English —both from Bangladesh and its diasporas (US, UK, and Australia). Until recently, there was hardly any anthology or edited volume in English that one could access if one were to look for a collection of essays on Bangladeshi literature in English. Thus, Bangladeshi Literature in English as an edited collection with five chapters written by seasoned and young scholars fills that gap. It also has two interviews—one of Kaiser Haq and the other of Monica Ali. The writers of the chapters used an amalgamation of theorists, from Franz Fanon and Michel Foucault to Rob Nixon.
The introduction gives an overview of the history of literary evolutions in the South Asian continent, from the colonial period through and after the Partition of 1947 to the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. The editors use the phrase "thrice born" (ensuring readers do not confuse it with the twice-born concept in Hinduism) to discuss the Bangladeshi English literary journey in the Indian subcontinent. The introduction is succinct and helpful for new scholars. The editors also mention the challenges of English writing in Bangladesh. In addition, they contend that even if works are coming out, lack of publishers and the inability to cross the borders and grasp the readers are some of the reasons for these books not enjoying the popularity that they should (many of these issues are again highlighted by Kaiser Haq in his interview with Mohammad A. Quayum). However, the authors mention that diasporic writers receive the highlights.
While the first two chapters focus on the colonial period, chapter three, which Kathryn Hummel writes, brings the readers to the present time with the analysis of Kaiser Haq's poems. Haq is very popular in "dui Bangla", meaning both in West Bengal and Bangladesh and thus, scholars from both sides of the border have worked with and written about him.
Md. Mahmudul Hasan's first chapter is titled "Muslim Bengal writes back: Rokeya's encounter with the representation of Europe". In it he talks about the first Muslim feminist from South Asia, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, and her interpretative summary of Marie Corelli's novel, The Murder of Delicia (Kessinger Publishing, 1996). Hasan argues that she created a bridge between Muslim Bengal and England through her summary of Corelli's novel. The chapter provides a new direction where Hasan compares Corelli and Hossain to talk about gender norms both in India and England. The author's focus is on the commonalities between the two and the fact that both Indian women and British women faced the same kinds of subjugation as Britain brought its Victorian moral values to the Indian subcontinent. This chapter will complement those abroad who teach Hossain's Sultana's Dream (1905).
Hasan's second chapter, "Panchayat and colonialism in Humayun Kabir's Men and Rivers" , has several diverse aspects. Hasan not only does a comparative study to discuss the panchayat in Humanyun Kabir's Men and Rivers (1945) but also uses critics like Franz Fanon and Mary Luis Pratt to present the multiple "contact zones" in a small village during the colonial period. The author argues that Kabir critiques the colonial influence in destroying the lives of the peasants as they struggle to understand the strength of bribery and theft by middle managers. Kabir presents the non-volant nature of the peasants at a time when India saw peasant movements. The chapter does an elaborate analysis of the characters and their multiple relations with the different constituents of the village to talk about the socio-political lives of the villagers.
While the first two chapters focus on the colonial period, chapter three, which Kathryn Hummel writes, brings the readers to the present time with the analysis of Kaiser Haq's poems. Haq is very popular in "dui Bangla", meaning both in West Bengal and Bangladesh and thus, scholars from both sides of the border have worked with and written about him. Hummel argues that Haq is a transnational local who talks about home without going far away from home. Haq's resistance against colonial mimicry involves writing about the most mundane things you see in Bangladesh, such as lungi or stray dogs. The chapter brings about the multifaced nature of Haq's poetry.
"Toxic grace? Tahmima Anam's The Bones of Grace and the pollution trade" is written by Md. Alamgir Hossain. The importance of this chapter in this collection is noteworthy because Anam's Bones has not received the attention it should have in South Asia. Sometimes it is hard to get out of the India-centric Amitav Gosh environmental novels, and there are reasons for that—people are willing to talk about the issues Gosh writes about. Using Rob Nixon's work as a theoretical lens, Hossain weaves in the problems that we should be concerned about—the countries of the Global South as the dumping grounds for things that the Global North discards. Hossain's chapter opens a new venue to see a Bangladeshi diasporic writer writing about environmental disasters. This chapter would complement any syllabi that focus on the environmental issues of the Global South.
Zia Haider Rahman, the focus of chapter five, is another Bangladeshi writer in English whose work has been written about extensively. Like Haq, he crosses borders when it comes to analysing his works. In this chapter, "Beyond national(ist) binaries: The case of Zia Haider Rahman's In the Light of What we Know ", Md Rezaul Haque gives a background of the war of 1971. He also questions what role a nation-centred or nationalist discourse plays when presenting different groups of people in different narratives. For example, how do non-Bangalis appear in literature? A contested and controversial issue about the role of the non-Bangalis is a topic of many recent critical essays as more and more scholars are trying to voice the marginalisation of the different groups of people in the 1971 war narratives.
Mohammad A. Quayum's interview with Kaiser Haq brings out the problems of not having more anglophone literature in Bangladesh. Haq thinks that the fear of apasankriti drives writers away from writing in English. He talks about his background—growing up in an English-medium school and how that encouraged him to write in English. He mentions the teacher in his school who infused critical appreciation of a poem in the classroom and Haq's desire to see "the music in free verse". He refers to a plethora of English writers who have influenced him. In his response to Quayum's query about the sustainability of subcontinental English, Haq says that literature will exploit various forms of English. He writes that translating works into English "enhances our critical awareness of the complexities of our cultural inheritance".
Sadaf Saaz's interview with Monica Ali centres around their conversation on the book, Love Marriage (2022). Ali's conversation with Saaz revolves around British society and its outlook on class and race. Saaz also asks Ali questions about the differences between generations of immigrant communities. Ali's main character, Yasmin, deals with multiple aspects of her personal and public life as a doctor. Ali candidly tells Saaz that this novel is not only about marriage but also about sex, infidelity, and sexual violence. Ali reflects on not being a writer of a particular type—only writing about Bangladesh because she has a connection to it.
Umme Al-wazed is Professor of English and Dean of Humanities at Augustana College, Rock Island, IL, USA.
সবচেয়ে চ্যালেঞ্জিং যে বিষয়ে তিনি আমাদের সহায়তা চেয়েছেন, তা হলো—জাতিকে একতাবদ্ধ করা। তিনি অনুভব করেছেন এবং আমরাও তার সঙ্গে একমত যে, আমরা এখন বিপজ্জনকভাবে বিভাজিত এবং শিগগির এই পরিস্থিতির পরিবর্তন...
IMAGES
VIDEO
COMMENTS
Robin Yocum. Robin Yocum is the author of the award-winning, critically acclaimed novel, Favorite Sons (June 2012, Arcade Publishing). Favorite Sons was named the 2011 USA Book News Book of the Year for Mystery/Suspense, and is a Choose to Read Ohio selection for 2013-14. His latest novel, The Essay, was released in October 2012 by Arcade.
THE ESSAY is a book that young adults and veteran readers alike are going to love."--Howard Frank Mosher After reading The Essay, a tough but compassionate story about a poor teenager in southern Ohio who struggles to make good despite his harsh upbringing, I am convinced that Robin Yocum is one of the most talented and graceful writers working ...
500 Words Essay on Importance of Books. Books are an invaluable part of our lives. They are the inevitable tool for knowledge, and entertainment and have been proven to be stress relievers. Books can help us experience new worlds, explore deep insights into the world and help us form a wider perspective. Books have the power to inspire and ...
Art & Ardor — Cynthia Ozick. 5. The Art of the Personal Essay — anthology, edited by Phillip Lopate. 6. Bad Feminist — Roxane Gay. 7. The Best American Essays of the Century — anthology, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. 8. The Best American Essays series — published every year, series edited by Robert Atwan.
THE ESSAY is a book that young adults and veteran readers alike are going to love."--Howard Frank Mosher After reading The Essay, a tough but compassionate story about a poor teenager in southern Ohio who struggles to make good despite his harsh upbringing, I am convinced that Robin Yocum is one of the most talented and graceful writers working ...
Some teachers recommend writing an essay on your favorite books. Make a short outline that includes an introduction, the main part, and a conclusion. Recall what your book is about. Write out a couple of main thoughts that are memorable and seem close to your heart. Write a review of the book, the kind you'd like to write for your friend.
1 Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich. 2 Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick. 3 Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle. 4 Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé. 5 Maybe the People Would be the Times by Luc Sante.
Writing a book essay can be tricky, so here are the steps that will guide you: The first step is to read the book and take notes carefully. As you read, pay attention to the main points of the story. For instance, you can take note of things that are intriguing, surprising, or even confusing in writing.
Writing an essay on a book can be a challenging task, but with the right knowledge and preparation it can become much easier. Before you start writing your essay it is essential to understand the assignment prompt and key terms related to the topic. It is also important to have an understanding of why the topic is important and of the structure ...
THE ESSAY is a book that young adults and veteran readers alike are going to love."—Howard Frank Mosher "After reading The Essay, a tough but compassionate story about a poor teenager in southern Ohio who struggles to make good despite his harsh upbringing, I am convinced that Robin Yocum is one of the most talented and graceful writers ...
-Alex Witchel (The New York Times Book Review). 2. Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (Knopf) 14 Rave • 12 Positive • 6 Mixed Read an excerpt from Let Me Tell You What I Mean here "In five decades' worth of essays, reportage and criticism, Didion has documented the charade implicit in how things are, in a first-person, observational style that is not sacrosanct but common ...
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass, Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer's gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there's one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp.When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex ...
Table of contents. Step 1: Reading the text and identifying literary devices. Step 2: Coming up with a thesis. Step 3: Writing a title and introduction. Step 4: Writing the body of the essay. Step 5: Writing a conclusion. Other interesting articles.
500 Words Essay on Books. Books are referred to as a man's best friend. They are very beneficial for mankind and have helped it evolve. There is a powerhouse of information and knowledge. Books offer us so many things without asking for anything in return. Books leave a deep impact on us and are responsible for uplifting our mood.
An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition of an essay is vague, overlapping with those ...
4. Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos. "In her new book, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, memoirist Melissa Febos handily recuperates the art of writing the self from some of the most common biases against it: that the memoir is a lesser form than the novel.
Published: Mar 14, 2024. Markus Zusak's novel, The Book Thief, is a powerful and poignant story that captures the struggles of a young girl growing up in Nazi Germany. From the very first page, readers are drawn into the world of Liesel Meminger, a girl who finds solace and escape in the act of stealing books.
Essay on Books in 300 words. Books help mankind to evolve mentally. The thoughts of a person reflect his/her personality and the thoughts are developed based on your learning in life. As mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell, books are considered the powerhouse of knowledge and information.
The #1 resource for writing an amazing college essay to help get into your dream school! Unlock the key to college admission success with College Essay Essentials, a comprehensive and invaluable resource designed to empower students in their essay-writing journey.Packed with expert guidance and practical tips, this must-have book is tailored specifically for high school seniors, transfer ...
Best Book of Essays Here is the best book of essays, either by the same author, or compiled by someone else. flag All Votes Add Books To This List. 1: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by. David Foster Wallace. 4.19 avg rating — 50,634 ratings. score: 3,590, and 36 people ...
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott: Gain insights on the creative process and overcome writer's block. Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg: Unleash your creativity and develop a daily writing practice to refine your skills. Explore these essential books to enhance your essay writing abilities and stand ...
Reviews, essays, best sellers and children's books coverage from The New York Times Book Review.
A Room of One's Own. Virginia Woolf | 4.75. A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on the 24th of October, 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928.
To the Editor: Re "Our Bookshelves, Ourselves," by Margaret Renkl (Opinion guest essay, Aug. 29): On Oct. 6 last year, my three children and I lost our home and our dog, Lulu, in a fire. Of ...
She calls her latest book "A Life in Essays," which I found reductive. Although the first group of essays is entitled "Autobiography," this volume reaches far beyond Nell Painter's own ...
Abstract. The Essay on a New Logic or Theory of Thinking was Salomon Maimon's hard-won success after a lifetime's pursuit of philosophical wisdom, originally published in Berlin in 1794. Timothy Franz presents its first English translation, with the goal of allowing the New Logic to be an object of further study, accessible to the philosophical tradition.
The best books of 2024 — this year's new must-reads include Miranda July's 'All Fours,' Percival Everett's 'James,' and Rachel Kushner's 'Creation Lake.' ... from essays ...
Nell Irvin Painter — author, scholar, historian, artist, raconteur — rocked my world with her The History of White People and endeared me with her memoir Old in Art School. Painter's latest book, I Just Keep Talking is an insightful addition to her canon. Painter's professional accomplishments are stratospheric: a chair in the American History Department at Princeton, bestselling ...
This essay provides a review of two important recent books on economic growth: How the World Became Rich by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin and Slouching Towards Utopia, by J. Bradford DeLong. Each book is noteworthy for its erudition and breadth. I explore strengths and weaknesses of these books and make some proposals on new ways to conceptualize ...
Bangladeshi Literature in English: Critical Essays and Interviews, edited by Mohammad A. Quayum and Md. Mahmudul Hasan, focuses on critical essays on Bangladeshi literature in English—both from ...