With the virtuosic synthesis of memoir, criticism, and journalism for which she has become known, Jamison offers 14 new essays that are by turns ecstatic, searching, staggering, and wise. "With the virtuosic synthesis of memoir, criticism, and journalism for which Leslie Jamison has been so widely acclaimed, the fourteen essays in Make It Scream, Make It Burn explore the oceanic depths of longing and the reverberations of obsession. Among Jamison's...

Science in the Soul brings together three decades of Richard Dawkins' essays, polemics, and paeans illuminating the wonders of nature and attacking faulty logic. In a passionate introduction, Dawkins calls on us to insist that reason take center stage and that gut feelings -- even when they don't represent the stirred dark waters of xenophobia, misogyny, or other blind prejudice -- should stay out of the voting booth. In the essays themselves, newly...

"The essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like 'a fire-fighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them.' For the past twenty-five years, even as his novels have earned him worldwide acclaim, Franzen has led a second life as a risk-taking essayist. Now, at a moment when technology has inflamed tribal hatreds and the planet is beset by unnatural calamities, he is back with a new collection of essays...

"The Last Empire is Gore Vidal's ninth collection of essays. As in the previous volumes, Vidal displays unparalleled range and inimitable style as he deals with matters literary, historical, personal, and political."--Jacket.

"In these nine essays, [the author] provides insight into his life as a writer, teacher, friend, and reader"--Amazon.com.

"In his highly anticipated debut essay collection, Impossible Owls, Brian Phillips demonstrates why he's one of the most iconoclastic journalists of the digital age, beloved for his ambitious, off-kilter, meticulously reported essays that read like novels. The eight essays assembled here--five from Phillips's Grantland and MTV days, and three new pieces--go beyond simply chronicling some of the modern world's most uncanny, unbelievable, and spectacular...

"Christian Wiman, a thinker "at the very source of theology" (Marilynne Robinson), braids poetry, memoir, and criticism to create an inspired, career-defining work"-- Few contemporary writers ask the questions about faith, morality, and God that Christian Wiman does, and even fewer--perhaps none--do so with his urgency and eloquence. Wiman, an award-winning poet and the author of My Bright Abyss, lays the motion of his mind on the page in this genre-defying...

A timely synthesis of Shriver's expansive work, this collection of thirty-five works curated from her many columns, features, essays, and op-eds reveals a provocative, talented writer at her most assured.

Choose the pursuit of happiness if you really must, but there are better things to do with a life, unless freedom from difficulty is the only acceptable existence. Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own cancer diagnosis. Her columns in the London Review of Books - selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers - on subjects as various as death, motherhood, sexual politics and the joys of solitude,...

""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;...