Essays

Universally acclaimed from the time it was first published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has been admired for decades as a stylistic masterpiece....

An irresistible collection of essays and memoir from the internationally best-selling, Women’s Prize-winning author of The Dutch House....

A deeply moving and insightful collection of personal essays from number-one best-selling author John Green, adapted from his critically acclaimed podcast....

With an introduction by Will Self. A classic work of psychology, this international best seller provides a groundbreaking insight into the human mind....

The collection of 10 absorbing tales by master psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom uncovers the mysteries, frustrations, pathos, and humor at the heart of the therapeutic encounter....

The inspirational wisdom of Oprah Winfrey, collected for the first time in a beautiful book....

A wide-ranging selection of George Orwell's essays, written in the clear-eyed, passionate and uncompromising style that has earned him a reputation as one of Britain's greatest writers....

Things I Don't Want to Know is the first in Deborah Levy's essential three-part 'Living Autobiography' on writing and womanhood....

Explore the questions, anxieties and agendas that consume our lives....

For over 40 years, Christopher Hitchens has proclaimed truth where others have spun falsehood and written, with passionate commitment, on matters that others fear to broach. This volume of essays encompasses Hitchens's writing over the past decade on politics, literature and religion....

In the powerful and daring essays in Constellations Sinéad Gleeson does that very thing. All of life is within this audiobook, from birth to first love, pregnancy to motherhood, terrifying sickness, old age and loss to death itself....

Following the international critical acclaim of The Cost of Living, this final volume of Deborah Levy's Living Autobiography is an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the spectres that haunt it.... 

This is the second edition of a uniquely empowering, international word-of-mouth best seller about wild landscapes, female mythology, and the challenges facing modern women....

A graphic and biting polemic that still holds a fierce political relevance and impact despite being written over half a century ago....

From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times best-selling author of Lincoln in the Bardo, a literary masterclass on how to become both a better writer and reader, on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about how to live....

Picking up where Things I Don't Want to Know left off, this short, exhilarating memoir shows a writer in radical flux, facing separation and bereavement and emerging renewed from the ashes of a former life....

On 10th June 2020, the scholar James Nwoye Adichie died suddenly in Nigeria. In this tender and powerful essay, expanded from the original New Yorker text, his daughter, a self-confessed daddy's girl, remembers her beloved father....

The revolutionary writings of Audre Lorde gave voice to those 'outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women'....

Honest, tender and written with piercing clarity, On Connection is a call to arms that speaks to a universal yet intimate truth.... 

Many think that Marian leads a glitzy life of limos, television, and showbiz parties - but she would argue that she spends the majority of her life writing alone, wearing her PJs....

David Sedaris' remarkable ability to uncover the hilarious absurdity teeming just below the surface of everyday life is elevated to wilder and more entertaining heights....

How can we create a better world for LGBTQ+ people? Thirty-five extraordinary voices share their stories and visions for the future....

Embodiment is not an easy business. From violence to illness, sexuality to racism, the fact of a body can be impossibly hard to inhabit. Olivia Laing draws on her own background in protest and alternative medicine to investigate the reasons why....

In this brutally honest and humorous debut, musician and artist George Watsky chronicles the small triumphs over humiliation that make life bearable and how he has come to accept defeat as necessary to personal progress....

What does it mean to feel truly alive? Aged 24, Matt Haig's world caved in. He could see no way to go on living....

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer edits a collection of Alain Locke's influential essays on the importance of the Black artist and the Black imagination.

Edgar Allan Poe was a writer, poet, editor and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre, and is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and of American literature. Poe was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story and considered to be the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction.

A wide-ranging selection of George Orwell's essays, written in the clear-eyed, passionate and uncompromising style that has earned him a reputation as one of Britain's greatest writers.  

During The Blitz of 1941, as Nazi bombers flew overhead, George Orwell penned this stirring analysis of England and its people. Whilst not shying away from the difficulties of the nation, and the fractuous nature of its divisions, Orwell places a premium on the country's ability to come together in a time of crisis and protect its democratic values, even in the most dire of circumstances.

Books v Cigarettes is a funny and irreverent essay comparing the costs of reading to other forms of recreation including smoking. Originating from the experience of an editor friend who was firewatching during the Second World War, who was told by factory workers that they had no interest in literature because they could not afford books, the essay first appeared in Tribune in 1946.

George Orwell's moving reflections on the English character and his passionate belief in the need for political change. 'The Lion and the Unicorn' was written in London during the worst period of the Blitz. It is vintage Orwell, a dynamic outline of his belief in socialism, patriotism and an English revolution. His fullest political statement, it has been described as 'one of the most moving and incisive portraits of the English character' and is as relevant now as it ever has been. 

'Decline of the English Murder' analyses the kinds of murders depicted in popular media during Orwell's life and why society of the time was obsessed with these grizzly crimes. Tribune published it on 15th February 1946, and Secker and Warburg republished it after his death in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays in 1952. 

The author of more than 25 plays, 10 nonfiction books, seven novels, five children's books, and four books of poetry, A. A. Milne was notable for more than just his creation of the Hundred Acre Wood. This collection illustrates just how Milne's mind worked and offers witty, creative, and entertaining insight into his everyday life. 

 Consisting of over 20 years of letters, essays, reflections, and interviews, Frantumaglia is a unique depiction of an author who embodies a consummate passion for writing. Ferrante answers many of her listeners’ questions. She addresses her choice to stand aside and let her books live autonomous lives.

Within this essay, Orwell criticises the 'ugly and inaccurate' written English of his time and examines the connection between political orthodoxies and the debasement of language. The essay focuses on political language, which, according to Orwell, 'is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind'. Bad English, he believed, was a vehicle for oppressive ideology.

Siri Hustvedt's relentlessly curious mind and expansive intellect are on full display in this stunning new collection of essays, whose subjects range from the nature of memory and time to what we inherit from our parents, the power of art during tragedy, misogyny, motherhood, neuroscience and the books we turn to during a pandemic. 

Whether investigating refugee parrots, indentured elephants, the pathetic fallacy, or the revolving absurdity of the human role in the "invasive species crisis", Personhood reveals how the unmistakable problem between humans and our nonhuman relatives is too often the derangement of our narratives and the resulting lack of situational awareness. Building on her previous collection, Bird Lovers, Backyard, Thalia Field's essayistic investigations invite us on a humorous, heartbroken journey into how people attempt to control the fragile complexities of a shared planet.

(Her)oics: Women’s Lived Experiences During the Coronavirus Pandemic draws together the stories of 52 women across the US during the Covid-19 pandemic. The collection encompasses the perspectives of women who are: frontline responders and recovering patients; going out to work, staying home to work, and losing their jobs; living with multiple generations and living in isolation; women grieving loved ones and celebrating new love; women preparing to give birth and supporting the dying. 

'Any story that starts will also end.' As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth as she explores family, friendship, marriage, failure, success and what it all means. Ranging from the personal to the sublime, each essay transforms the particular into the universal, letting us all see our own worlds anew.