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Author
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Description
"It's no secret that millions of American teenagers, caught up in social media, television, movies, and games, don't read seriously-they associate sustained reading with duty or work, not with pleasure. This indifference has become a grievous loss to our standing as a great nation--and a personal loss, too, for millions of teenagers who may turn into adults with limited understanding of themselves and the world. Can teenagers be turned on to serious...
Author
Pub. Date
[2023]
Description
"Essays that show how Smiley draws inspiration from across literary history to invigorate her own writing. Among the authors she examines are Marguerite de Navarre, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Franz Kafka, Halldor Laxness, and Jessica Mitford"--
Author
Formats
Description
Before there were workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says author and teacher Prose. Prose invites you on a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. She reads the very best writers and discovers why their work has endured. She takes pleasure in the magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; she is moved...
Author
Edition
First edition.
Description
For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction...
Author
Description
"A passionate hymn to the power of fiction to change people's lives, by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran. Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified readers with her million-copy bestseller, Reading Lolita in Tehran, which told the story of how, against the backdrop of morality squads and executions, she taught The Great Gatsby and other classics to her eager students in Iran. In this exhilarating followup, Nafisi has...
8) 1984
Author
Description
In 1984, London is a grim city in the totalitarian state of Oceania where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved...
Author
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
"In Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing songbirds from the Empire State Building as they migrate...
11) Blue nights
Author
Description
Didion looks back on her life thus far, conjuring up snapshots of her daughter's childhood, while reflecting on and questioning her own role as a parent. She also talks of her personal struggle with her inability to acknowledge or accept that's she's in her late 70s.
13) M train
Author
Pub. Date
2015.
Appears on these lists
Description
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee presents reflections on her inner life from the unique perspectives of the cafes and cultural haunts she has visited and worked in around the world. --Publisher's description.
An unforgettable odyssey of a legendary artist. It begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Woven...
Author
Pub. Date
2021.
Edition
First Scribner hardcover edition.
Description
In nineteen razor-sharp essays, this book spans literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature. Kushner takes us on a journey through a Palestinian refugee camp, an illegal motorcycle race down the Baja Peninsula, 1970s wildcat strikes in Fiat factories, her love of classic cars, and her young life in the music scene of her hometown, San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom,...
Author
Description
"The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet - from the QWERTY keyboard and Staphylococcus aureus to the Taco Bell breakfast menu - on a five-star scale. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this...
Author
Appears on these lists
National Poetry Month 2024
Poetry Month
Women's History Month 2023-Celebrating Women Who Tell Our Stories
Poetry Month
Women's History Month 2023-Celebrating Women Who Tell Our Stories
Formats
Description
"Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV--everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come...
Author
Description
During her treatment for cancer, Mary Anne Schwalbe and her son Will spent many hours sitting in waiting rooms together. To pass the time, they would talk about the books they were reading. Once, by chance, they read the same book at the same time—and an informal book club of two was born. Through their wide-ranging reading, Will and Mary Anne—and we, their fellow readers—are reminded how books can be comforting, astonishing, and illuminating,...
Author
Formats
Description
In this uproarious exploration of the joys of reading, a long-time teacher, lifelong reader and The New Yorker contributor shares surprising stories from her life and the poignant ways in which books have impacted her students and shows us how literature can transform us for the better.
Author
Formats
Description
Rosamunde Pilcher's worldwide best-sellers, The Shell Seekers, September, and Coming Home, enchanted millions with their beguiling descriptions of the coasts of Cornwall, the Highlands of Scotland, and the society of London. Now, in this lavishly illustrated, full-color book, Rosamunde Pilcher invites people to share with her the breathtaking views and tranquil places that have inspired her writing.
Rosamunde Pilcher's journey begins in Cornwall...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Appears on these lists
Description
"These twelve telltale, connected, deeply personal essays explore, up close, the complexities and paradoxes, the haunting memories and ambushing realities, of growing up black in the South with a family name inherited from a white man, of getting a PhD from Yale, of marrying a white man from the North, of adopting two babies from Ethiopia, of teaching at a white college and living in New England today. The storytelling, and the mystery of Bernard's...
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