Essays

A Vertical Art gathers the expansive and spirited public lectures delivered by Simon Armitage during his acclaimed four-year tenure as Oxford Univ...

Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and made her name as one of the most incisive thinkers of our time. Sontag was...

Reality versus fiction is at the heart of the current literary debate. We live in a world of docu-drama, the ‘real life’ story. Works of art, novel...

Five decades after her debut poetry collection, Firstborn, Louise Glück is a towering figure in American letters. Written with the same probing, an...

Vivian Gornick’s writing has always explored the hard truths of existence: the nature of human loneliness, and the struggle to love, work, and conn...

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was a matchless writer, debater and humanist. Throughout his life he shone the light of reason and truth into the ...

This new selection of essays by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) demonstrate the varied aspects of his genius. The selection shows the surprise and contradi...

Split into five sections--Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering--Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material b...

Arthur Miller was not only one of America's most important twentieth-century playwrights, but he was also one of its most influential literary, cul...

In this spellbinding blend of memoir and insight, bestselling author Chuck Palahniuk shares stories and generous advice on what makes writing power...

“The role of the critic,” Daniel Mendelsohn writes, “is to mediate intelligently and stylishly between a work and its audience; to educate and edif...

The essays in this collection are, of course, not merely concerned with the self. Woolf does also discuss the rights of women, the revolutions of m...

No subject is too fringe or too mainstream for the unstoppable Zadie Smith. From social media to the environment, from Jay-Z to Karl Ove Knausgaard...

Who better to serve as a guide to great books and their authors than Virginia Woolf? In the early years of its existence, the Times Literary Supple...

A delightful selection of articles by the ever-popular A.A. Milne, many of which haven’t been in print for decades. Milne had a talent for regularl...

Since its first publication in 1992, David Rattray's How I Became One of the Invisible has functioned as a kind of secret history and guidebook to ...

In these marvelously wide-ranging essays, Margaret Atwood explores her lifelong relationship to science fiction, as a reader and as a writer. At a ...

For Adam Phillips - as for Freud and many of his followers - poetry and poets have always held an essential place, as both precursors and unofficia...

Salman Rushdie is celebrated as a storyteller of the highest order, illuminating deep truths about our society and culture through his gorgeous, of...

A vibrant collection of sharp and essential modern pieces on Vladimir Nabokov’s perennially provocative book—with original contributions from a ste...

Charles Bukowski was one of our most iconoclastic, raw and riveting writers, one whose stories, poems and novels have left an enduring mark on our ...

In this fascinating memoir and manifesto the author and publisher Roberto Calasso meditates on the art of book publishing. With his signature erudi...

You could describe D.H. Lawrence as the great multi-instrumentalist among the great writers of the twentieth century. He was a brilliant, endlessly...

'This story, like so many stories, begins with a gift. The gift, like so many gifts, was a book...' So begins the essay by Robert Macfarlane that i...

translated by Tess Lewis A new translation of philosopher Walter Benjamin's work as it pertains to his famous essay, "The Storyteller," this collec...

In the nearly fifty essays collected in The Wild Children of William Blake, John Yau explores the careers of a wide range of poets and artists who ...

Translated by David Bellos Georges Perec was a leading exponent of French literary experimentalism who found humour – and pathos – in the human nee...

Over the past decade and a half, Daniel Mendelsohn’s reviews for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review h...