This 1872 installment in Holmes's popular Breakfast Table series is a fluent, gossipy exchange among the poet of the title and his breakfast companions-with the lion's share of conversation belonging to the poet, who delivers his somewhat eccentric and fitfully amusing opinions of books, people, and habits of thought. Written fifteen years after the start of the series, The Poet takes a comparatively calm and nostalgic tone.

"The first collection from a Whiting Writers' Award winner whose work has become a fixture of The Paris Review and n+1. Can civilization save us from ourselves? That is the question J.D. Daniels asks in his first book, a series of six letters written during dark nights of the soul. Working from his own highly varied experience--as a janitor, a night watchman, an adjunct professor, a drunk, an exterminator, a dutiful son--he considers how far books...

"An affecting and hope-filled posthumous collection of essays and stories from the talented young Yale graduate whose title essay captured the world's attention in 2012 and turned her into an icon for her generation. Marina Keegan's star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at The New Yorker. Tragically, five days after...

"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...

""Toward what goal do I aspire, ever, but collision? Always accident, concussion, bodies butting together . . . By collision I also mean metaphor and metonymy: operations of slide and slip and transfuse." In his new nonfiction collection, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. A subway passenger's leather bracelet prompts musings on the German word for stranger;...

"Renowned internationally for her lyrically unsettling novels, PEN/Faulkner Award winner Chloe Aridjis now offers readers her first collection of shorter works, with an introduction by Tom McCarthy. Chloe Aridjis's stories and essays are known to transport readers into liminal, often dreamlike, realms. In this collection of works, we meet a woman guided only by a plastic bag drifting through the streets of Berlin who discovers a nonsense-named bar...

"For acclaimed writer and environmental activist Rick Bass, it can be wearying to dwell relentlessly upon the broken, the fragmented, the dead and dying and doomed to extinction. Activism is a necessary part of the environmental movement, but so is the time-honored celebration of the beauty that inspires us. Spanning his storied career, these new and selected essays attempt to take a brief step to the side, away from lamentation and prescription,...

A satirical look at modern culture.

A blazingly intelligent first book of essays from the award-winning author of Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
Time • The Guardian • Harper's Bazaar • San Francisco Chronicle • The Atlantic • Financial Times • Kirkus

Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and...

In 1572, Montaigne — nobleman, humanist, and thoroughly Renaissance man — retired to the seclusion of his estate in the Dordogne and started to write. From his pen poured a stream of 'essays' — attempts to capture the observations that came to him on an idiosyncratic range of subjects, from ancient customs, cannibals and books to thumbs, war-horses and the wearing of clothes. He made the study of himself the starting point for investigations...