Nonfiction Essays

A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by award-winning writer Alexander Chee. Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year. These...

This definitive and magnificent 10-volume unabridged translation is one of the rare English translations in full of the epic. Bibek Debroy makes the Mahabharata marvellously accessible to contemporary readers. Dispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war...

This definitive and magnificent 10-volume unabridged translation is one of the rare English translations in full of the epic. Bibek Debroy makes the Mahabharata marvellously accessible to contemporary readers. Dispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war...

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives.

This definitive and magnificent 10-volume unabridged translation is one of the rare English translations in full of the epic. Bibek Debroy makes the Mahabharata marvellously accessible to contemporary readers. Dispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war...

Brought to you by Penguin. Collected Essays contains nearly eighty essays, reviews and occasional pieces composed between novels, plays and travel books over four prolific decades. From Henry James and Somerset Maugham to Ho Chi Minh and Kim Philby, the range of subjects is eclectic and...

A daring, genre-defying work of non-fiction from one of our greatest poets Alice Oswald goes in search of poetry in its original, wildest form – before it was written down, before it belonged to a single voice – and finds it still speaking all around us. What begins as an attempt to...

Tonight I'm Someone Else is a highly anticipated audiobook collection, from the writer Maggie Nelson has called, “bracingly good…refreshing and welcome,” that explores the myriad ways in which desire and commodification intersect. From graffiti gangs and Grand Theft Auto to sugar daddies...

“Roxane Gay is so great at weaving the intimate and personal with what is most bewildering and upsetting at this moment in culture. She is always looking, always thinking, always passionate, always careful, always right there.” — Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be? A New York...

Brought to you by Penguin. Politicians have failed us. But democracy doesn’t have to. Bought by special interests, detached from real life, obsessed with re-election. Politicians make big promises, deliver little to nothing, and keep the game rigged in their favour. But what can we do? With...

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A New York Times Bestseller A New York Magazine Best Book of the Year An Economist Best Book of the Year Pulitzer Prize–Winning Author of Gilead Marilynne Robinson has built a sterling reputation as a writer of sharp, subtly moving prose, not only...

“So often people ask me if there’s a book on story I can recommend. This is the one. I can’t recommend it highly enough.”––Alexa Junge, writer/producer, Friends, Sex and the City, The West Wing A master class of 27 lessons, drawn from 27 diverse narratives, for novelists...

*A New Statesman Best Summer Read* 'A book to underline endlessly, to carry around until battered, and then to tell all your friends to buy because you're too reluctant to give up your own copy. A wonder’ Polly Barton 'Brings a welcome freshness of vision and a dashing style … provocative...

Encompassing themes of race, education, fame, law, and America’s past and future, these essays are James Alan McPherson at his most prescient and invaluable. Born in segregated 1940s Georgia, McPherson graduated from Harvard Law School only to give up law and become a writer. In 1978, he became the first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But all the while, McPherson was also writing and publishing nonfiction that stand beside contemporaries such as James Baldwin and Joan Didion, as this collection amply proves.

In this sharp and darkly funny new essay collection from the New York Times bestselling author, Cazzie David explores the irony and existential crises of leaving youth behind. This program is read by the author. “A laugh-out-loud collection for romantics and pop culturalists who lean more...

This inspiring audiobook contains six revolutionary essays exploring the relationship between spiritual experience and ordinary life—and the need for them to coexist within each of us. With essays on “cosmic consciousness” (including Alan Watts’ account of his own ventures into this...

A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Wesley Morris and series editor Kim Dana Kupperman. “Imparting some piece of yourself—any part—is arduous and warrants some kind of commendation,” writes guest editor Wesley Morris in his introduction...

"Dilbert books should be (and often are) read aloud while importantoffice work is being put off, and luckily, the best reader of all, Adamshimself, has put his interpretive skills on tape." --Worth MagazineStep aside, Nostradamus. Here comes the real soothsayer, and he'sturning his eagle eye on...

Microdoses of the straight dope, stories so true they had to be wrapped in fiction for our own protection, from the best-selling author of But What if We're Wrong? A man flying first class discovers a puma in the lavatory. A new coach of a small-town Oklahoma high school football team installs...

New York Times Bestseller Featured in the critically acclaimed documentary RBG ""It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the 'Notorious RBG."" — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 2019 She was a fierce dissenter with a serious collar game. A legendary, self-described “flaming...