Pat's bookshelf: essays en-US Wed, 05 Feb 2025 08:00:32 -0800 60 Pat's bookshelf: essays 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Love of the World 11486942 426 John McGahern 0571245129 Pat 0 4.45 2009 Love of the World
author: John McGahern
name: Pat
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read, essays, ireland, paperback, i-have
review:

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<![CDATA[Reaching Inside: 50 Acclaimed Authors on 100 Unforgettable Short Stories]]> 122135662
“A writer,� Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow once said, “is a reader who is moved to emulation.� New York Times bestselling novelist and memoirist Andre Dubus III took that idea and invited acclaimed authors to write about short stories that altered their view of life and their place in it—short stories that, ultimately, made them want to write something substantial themselves.

Here is Richard Russo on Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,� Joyce Carol Oates on John Updike’s “A&P,� Tobias Wolff on Hawthorne’s “Wakefield,� Michael Cunningham on James Joyce’s “The Dead.� Readers will gain new insight into these masterfully written stories but also on the contributors� own lives and work.

The fifty contributors are T.C. Boyle, Russell Banks, Richard Bausch, Robert Boswell, Charles Baxter, Ann Beattie, Madison Smartt Bell, Ron Carlson, Lan Samantha Chang, Michael Cunningham, Junot Diaz, Anthony Doerr, Emma Donoghue, Stuart Dybek, Dagoberto Gilb, Julia Glass, Mary Gordon, Lauren Groff, Jennifer Haigh, Jane Hamilton, Ron Hansen, Paul Harding, Ann Hood, Pam Houston, Gish Jen, Charles Johnson, Phil Klay, Dennis Lehane, Lois Lowry, Colum McCann, Sue Miller, Rick Moody, Antonya Nelson, Bich Nguyen, Joyce Carol Oates, Stewart O’Nan, Peter Orner, ZZ Packer, Ann Patchett, Edith Pearlman, Jayne Ann Phillips, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Anna Quindlen, Ron Rash, Richard Russo, Dani Shapiro, Mona Simpson, Jess Walter, Tobias Wolff, and Meg Wolitzer.

Reaching Inside will remind you why you fell in love with reading.]]>
320 Andre Dubus III 1567927696 Pat 4 essays 3.88 Reaching Inside: 50 Acclaimed Authors on 100 Unforgettable Short Stories
author: Andre Dubus III
name: Pat
average rating: 3.88
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/27
date added: 2024/02/28
shelves: essays
review:

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<![CDATA[The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press]]> 154462975
“A literary treasure.”� The Washington Times

I’ve been writing about the press almost as long as I’ve been in the game. At some point, it occurred to me that disparate pieces from various places in various styles amounted to a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like over the years since I became a practitioner and an observer.

Calvin Trillin has reported serious pieces across America for The New Yorker , covered the civil rights movement in the South for Time , and written comic verse for The Nation . But one of his favorite subjects over the years—a superb fit for his unique combination of reportage and humor—has been his own professional the American press.

In The Lede , Trillin gathers his incisive, often hilarious writing on reporting, reporters, and the media world that is their orbit. He writes about a legendary crime reporter in Miami and about a swashbuckling New York Times reporter and about an erudite film critic in Dallas who once a week transformed himself from an appreciator of the French nouvelle vague into a crude connoisseur of movies like Mother Riley Meets the Vampire . There are pieces on the House of Lords aspirations of a North American press baron, the paucity of gossip columns in Russia, the embroilment of a weekly newspaper in a missing person case, and the founding of a publication called Beautiful A Magazine of Parking.

Uniting all of this is Trillin’s signature combination of empathy, humor, and graceful prose. The Lede is an invaluable portrait of one our fundamental American institutions from a master journalist.]]>
336 Calvin Trillin 0593596447 Pat 0 3.75 2024 The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press
author: Calvin Trillin
name: Pat
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/28
shelves: to-read, essays, a-list-nonfiction
review:

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<![CDATA[The Devil & Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness & Obsession]]> 8389095 New Yorker writer and author of the breakout debut bestseller The Lost City of Z, David Grann offers a collection of spellbinding narrative journalism.

Whether he's reporting on the infiltration of the murderous Aryan Brotherhood into the U.S. prison system, tracking down a chameleon con artist in Europe, or riding in a cyclone-tossed skiff with a scientist hunting the elusive giant squid, David Grann revels in telling stories that explore the nature of obsession and that piece together true and unforgettable mysteries.

Each of the dozen stories in this collection reveals a hidden and often dangerous world and, like Into Thin Air and The Orchid Thief, pivots around the gravitational pull of obsession and the captivating personalities of those caught in its grip. There is the world's foremost expert on Sherlock Holmes who is found dead in mysterious circumstances; an arson sleuth trying to prove that a man about to be executed is innocent, and sandhogs racing to complete the brutally dangerous job of building New York City's water tunnels before the old system collapses. Throughout, Grann's hypnotic accounts display the power-and often the willful perversity-of the human spirit.

Compulsively readable, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant mosaic of ambition, madness, passion, and folly.]]>
399 David Grann 0307275906 Pat 0 to-read, essays, paperback 3.85 2010 The Devil & Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness & Obsession
author: David Grann
name: Pat
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/04
shelves: to-read, essays, paperback
review:

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<![CDATA[Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People's Business]]> 123195171 Bad Feminist and Hunger, Roxane Gay has continued to tackle big issues embroiling society—state-sponsored violence and mass shootings, women’s rights post-Dobbs, online disinformation, and the limits of empathy—alongside more individual topics: Can I tell my co-worker her perfume makes me sneeze? Is it acceptable to schedule a daily 8 am meeting?

In her role as a New York Times opinion section contributor and the publication’s “Work Friend� columnist, Gay reaches millions of readers with her wise voice and sharp insights. Opinions is a collection of her best nonfiction pieces from the past ten years. Covering a wide range of topics—politics, feminism, the culture wars, civil rights, and much more—with an all-new introduction in which she reflects on the past decade in America, this sharp, thought-provoking anthology will delight Roxane Gay’s devotees and draw new readers to this inimitable talent.]]>
320 Roxane Gay 0063341468 Pat 0 to-read, essays 4.00 2023 Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People's Business
author: Roxane Gay
name: Pat
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/15
shelves: to-read, essays
review:

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<![CDATA[Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life]]> 30211990 What a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance?

Startlingly original and shining with quiet wisdom, this is a luminous account of a life lived with books. Written over two years while the author battled suicidal depression, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life is a painful and yet richly affirming examination of what makes life worth living.

Yiyun Li grew up in China and has spent her adult life as an immigrant in a country not her own. She has been a scientist, an author, a mother, a daughter and through it all she has been sustained by a profound connection with the writers and books she loves. From William Trevor and Katherine Mansfield to Soren Kierkegaard and Philip Larkin, Dear Friend is a journey through the deepest themes that bind these writers together.

Interweaving personal experiences with a wide-ranging homage to her most cherished literary influences, Yiyun Li confronts the two most essential questions of her identity: Why write? And why live?]]>
224 Yiyun Li 0399589090 Pat 0 to-read, essays 3.72 2017 Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
author: Yiyun Li
name: Pat
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/24
shelves: to-read, essays
review:

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<![CDATA[The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head: A Psychiatrist’s Stories of His Most Bizarre Cases]]> 9481479 The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head by Gary Small, M.D., and Gigi Vorgan—co-authors of The Memory Bible—offers a fascinating and highly entertaining look into the peculiarities of the human mind. In the vein of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, and the other bestselling works of Oliver Sacks, The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head surprises, enthralls, and illuminates as it focuses on medical mysteries that would stump and amaze the brilliant brains on House, M.D.
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267 Gary Small Pat 4 4.01 2010 The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head: A Psychiatrist’s Stories of His Most Bizarre Cases
author: Gary Small
name: Pat
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/09/23
shelves: nonfiction, essays, kindle, soc-health-mental-health
review:

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<![CDATA[The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life]]> 29662443
From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels.

Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire or the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth, visiting Rwanda's museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide, celebrating New Year's Eve 1982 with Yasser Arafat and his high command, interviewing a German woman terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev, listening to the wisdoms of the great physicist, dissident, and Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, meeting with two former heads of the KGB, watching Alec Guinness prepare for his role as George Smiley in the legendary BBC TV adaptations, or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in The Constant Gardener, le Carré endows each happening with vividness and humor, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood.

Best of all, le Carré gives us a glimpse of a writer's journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional characters.]]>
310 John Le Carré 0241976871 Pat 4 nonfiction, essays 4.03 2016 The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life
author: John Le Carré
name: Pat
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2022/09/13
date added: 2023/09/23
shelves: nonfiction, essays
review:

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<![CDATA[A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life]]> 53487237 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 works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.

In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?� He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.]]>
403 George Saunders 1984856049 Pat 5 nonfiction, essays, kindle 4.55 2021 A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
author: George Saunders
name: Pat
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2021/01/23
date added: 2023/09/23
shelves: nonfiction, essays, kindle
review:

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Men Explain Things to Me 18528190
She ends on a serious note� because the ultimate problem is the silencing of women who have something to say, including those saying things like, “He’s trying to kill me!�

This book features that now-classic essay with six perfect complements, including an examination of the writer Virginia Woolf ’s embrace of mystery, of not knowing, of doubt and ambiguity, a highly original inquiry into marriage equality, and a terrifying survey of the scope of contemporary violence against women.]]>
130 Rebecca Solnit 1608463869 Pat 2 essays, kindle 3.84 2014 Men Explain Things to Me
author: Rebecca Solnit
name: Pat
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at: 2023/02/23
date added: 2023/09/23
shelves: essays, kindle
review:

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<![CDATA[The Scandal of the Century: And Other Writings]]> 41880622 From one of the titans of twentieth-century literature, collected here for the first time: a selection of his journalism from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s–work that he considered even more important to his legacy than his universally acclaimed works of fiction.

“I don’t want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude or for the Nobel Prize but rather for my journalism,� Gabriel García Márquez said in the final years of his life. And while some of his journalistic writings have been made available over the years, this is the first volume to gather a representative selection from across the first four decades of his career–years during which he worked as a full-time, often muckraking, and controversial journalist, even as he penned the fiction that would bring him the Nobel Prize in 1982. Here are the first pieces he wrote while working for newspapers in the coastal Colombian cities of Cartagena and Barranquilla . . . his longer, more fictionlike reportage from Paris and Rome . . . his monthly columns for Spain’s El País. And while all the work points in style, wit, depth, and passion to his fiction, these fifty pieces are, more than anything, a revelation of the writer working at the profession he believed to be “the best in the world.”]]>
336 Gabriel García Márquez 0525656421 Pat 4 nonfiction, essays, kindle 4.18 2018 The Scandal of the Century: And Other Writings
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Pat
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2020/12/16
date added: 2023/09/23
shelves: nonfiction, essays, kindle
review:

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<![CDATA[What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction]]> 58786037 A collection of essays, lectures, and observations on the art of writing fiction from Alice McDermott, winner of the National Book Award and unmatched "virtuoso of language and image" (Rebecca Steinitz, The Boston Globe)

What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction gathers the bestselling novelist Alice McDermott’s pithiest wisdom about her chosen art, acquired over a lifetime as an acclaimed writer and teacher of writing.

From technical advice (“check that your verbs aren’t burdened by unnecessary hads and woulds�) to setting the bar (“I expect the fiction I read to carry with it the conviction that it is written with no other incentive than that it must be written�), from the demands of readers (“they’d been given a story with a baby in it, and they damn well wanted that baby accounted for�) to the foibles of public life (“I’ve never subscribed to the notion that a film adaptation is the final imprimatur for a work of fiction, despite how often I’ve been told by encouraging friends and strangers, ‘Maybe they’ll make a movie of your novel,� as if I’d been aiming for a screenplay all along but somehow missed the mark and wrote a novel by mistake�), McDermott muses trenchantly and delightfully about the craft of fiction.

She also serves throughout as the artful conductor of a literary chorus, quoting generously from the work of other great writers (including Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Nabokov, Morrison, and Woolf ), beautifully joining her voice with theirs. These stories of lessons learned and books read, and of the terrors and the joys of what she calls “this mad pursuit,� form a rich and valuable sourcebook for readers and writers a deeply charming meditation on the unique gift that is literature.]]>
233 Alice McDermott 0374722447 Pat 5 4.27 2021 What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction
author: Alice McDermott
name: Pat
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2021/12/19
date added: 2023/09/23
shelves: books-words-writing, essays, kindle
review:

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<![CDATA[Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature]]> 58772727
Charles Baxter’s new collection of essays, Wonderlands , joins his other works of nonfiction, Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext . In the mold of those books, Baxter shares years of wisdom and reflection on what makes fiction work, including essays that were first given as craft talks at the Bread Loaf Writers� Conference.

The essays here range from brilliant thinking on the nature of wonderlands in the fiction of Haruki Murakami and other fabulist writers, to how request moments function in a story. Baxter is equally at home tackling a thorny matter such as charisma (which intersects with political figures like the disastrous forty-fifth US president) as he is bringing new interest to subjects such as list-making in fiction.

Amid these craft essays, an interlude of two personal essays―the story of a horrifying car crash and an introspective “letter to a young poet”―add to the intimate nature of the book. The final essay reflects on a lifetime of writing, and closes with a memorable image of Baxter as a boy, waiting at the window for a parent who never arrives and filling that absence with stories. Wonderlands will stand alongside his prior work as an insightful and lasting work of criticism.]]>
252 Charles Baxter 1644450917 Pat 3 essays, books-words-writing 4.28 2022 Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature
author: Charles Baxter
name: Pat
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/09
date added: 2023/09/09
shelves: essays, books-words-writing
review:

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A Field Guide to Getting Lost 76479 Wanderlust), or using the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge as a lens to discuss the transformations of space and time in late nineteenth-century America (River of Shadows), Rebecca Solnit has emerged as an inventive and original writer whose mind is daring in the connections it makes. A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit's own life to explore the issues of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown. The result is a distinctive, stimulating, and poignant voyage of discovery.]]> 209 Rebecca Solnit 0143037242 Pat 0 to-read, paperback, essays 3.97 2005 A Field Guide to Getting Lost
author: Rebecca Solnit
name: Pat
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/02
shelves: to-read, paperback, essays
review:

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<![CDATA[Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America]]> 361877
Whether she is following the historic papal visit to Havana or staying awake for a pre-dawn interview with an insomniac Subcomandante Marcos, Guillermoprieto displays both the passion and knowledge of an insider and the perspective of a seasoned analyst. Looking for History is journalism in the finest traditions of Joan Didion, V. S. Naipaul, and Ryszard observant, empathetic, and beautifully written.]]>
320 Alma Guillermoprieto 0375725822 Pat 0 to-read, essays 3.90 2001 Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America
author: Alma Guillermoprieto
name: Pat
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/02
shelves: to-read, essays
review:

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<![CDATA[Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks]]> 59148726 From the prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, twelve enthralling stories of skulduggery and intrigue by one of the most decorated journalists of our time.

Patrick Radden Keefe has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award to the Orwell Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award for his meticulously reported, hypnotically engaging work on the many ways people behave badly. Rogues brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from The New Yorker. As Keefe says in his preface, "They reflect on some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial."

Keefe brilliantly explores the intricacies of forging $150,000 vintage wines, examines whether a whistleblower who dared to expose money laundering at a Swiss bank is a hero or a fabulist, spends time in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain, chronicles the quest to bring down a cheerful international black market arms merchant, and profiles a passionate death penalty attorney who represents the "worst of the worst," among other bravura works of literary journalism.

The appearance of his byline in The New Yorker is always an event, and collected here for the first time readers can see his work forms an always enthralling but deeply human portrait of criminals and rascals, as well as those who stand up against them.]]>
368 Patrick Radden Keefe 0385548516 Pat 0 to-read, essays 4.00 2022 Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks
author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Pat
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/06/04
shelves: to-read, essays
review:

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A Guest at the Feast: Essays 61354037
From one of the most engaging and brilliant writers of our time comes a “not to be missed� ( LitHub ) collection of eleven essays about growing up in Ireland during radical change; about cancer, priests, popes, homosexuality, and literature.

� IT ALL STARTED WITH MY BALLS .� So begins Colm Tóibín’s fabulously compelling essay, laced with humor, about his diagnosis and treatment for cancer. Tóibín survives, but he has entered, as he says, “the age of one ball.� The second essay in this seductive collection is a memoir about growing up in the 1950s and �60s in the small town of Enniscorthy in County Wexford, the setting for many of Tóibín’s novels and stories, including Brooklyn, The Blackwater Lightship , and Nora Webster . Tóibín describes his education by priests, several of whom were condemned years later for abuse. He writes about Irish history and literature, and about the long, tragic journey toward legal and social acceptance of homosexuality.

In Part Two, Tóibín profiles three complex and vexing popes—John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis. And in Part Three, he writes about a trio of authors who reckon with religion in their fiction. The final essay, “Alone in Venice,� is a gorgeous account of Tóibín’s journey, at the height of the pandemic, to the beloved city where he has set some of his most dazzling scenes. The streets, canals, churches, and museums were empty. He had them to himself, an experience both haunting and exhilarating.

“A tantalizing glimpse into Tóibín’s full fictional powers,� ( The Sunday Times , London) A Guest at the Feast is both an intimate encounter with a supremely creative artist and a glorious celebration of writing.]]>
336 Colm Tóibín 1476785201 Pat 0 to-read, essays 3.65 2022 A Guest at the Feast: Essays
author: Colm Tóibín
name: Pat
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/19
shelves: to-read, essays
review:

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<![CDATA[A Life of One's Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again]]> 61982340 272 Joanna Biggs 0063073102 Pat 0 to-read, essays 4.01 2023 A Life of One's Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again
author: Joanna Biggs
name: Pat
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/02
shelves: to-read, essays
review:

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<![CDATA[This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage]]> 17349222 State of Wonder, Run,ԻBel Canto, examines her deepest commitments � to writing, family, friends, dogs, books, and her husband � creating a resonant portrait of a life in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage.

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage takes us into the very real world of Ann Patchett’s life. Stretching from her childhood to the present day, from a disastrous early marriage to a later happy one, it covers a multitude of topics, including relationships with family and friends, and charts the hard work and joy of writing, and the unexpected thrill of opening a bookstore.

As she shares stories of the people, places, ideals, and art to which she has remained indelibly committed, Ann Patchett brings into focus the large experiences and small moments that have shaped her as a daughter, wife, and writer.]]>
308 Ann Patchett 0062236679 Pat 3 essays, memoir-biography 4.00 2013 This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
author: Ann Patchett
name: Pat
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2023/04/01
shelves: essays, memoir-biography
review:
Ann Patchett is one of my favorite authors, but this collection of essay/memoirs is definitely not at the top of my favorite books.
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<![CDATA[A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020)]]> 57561962 Picking up where his previous volume of diaries, Theft by Finding, left off, David Sedaris chronicles the years 2003�2020.
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577 David Sedaris 0316256463 Pat 3 4.42 2021 A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020)
author: David Sedaris
name: Pat
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2022/12/08
date added: 2023/04/01
shelves: kindle, essays, memoir-biography
review:

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<![CDATA[Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books]]> 53976288 335 Hilary Mantel 0008429979 Pat 4 essays 3.91 2020 Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books
author: Hilary Mantel
name: Pat
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2022/07/11
date added: 2023/04/01
shelves: essays
review:

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<![CDATA[Magical Thinking: True Stories]]> 79790 304 Augusten Burroughs 0312315953 Pat 4 essays, memoir-biography 3.96 2004 Magical Thinking: True Stories
author: Augusten Burroughs
name: Pat
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/04/01
shelves: essays, memoir-biography
review:

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<![CDATA[Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader]]> 46890 Fanny Hill, whose husband buys her 19 pounds of dusty books for her birthday, and who once found herself poring over her roommate's 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only written material in the apartment that she had not read at least twice.

This witty collection of essays recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language. For Fadiman, as for many passionate readers, the books she loves have become chapters in her own life story. Writing with remarkable grace, she revives the tradition of the well-crafted personal essay, moving easily from anecdotes about Coleridge and Orwell to tales of her own pathologically literary family. As someone who played at blocks with her father's 22-volume set of Trollope ("My Ancestral Castles") and who only really considered herself married when she and her husband had merged collections ("Marrying Libraries"), she is exquisitely well equipped to expand upon the art of inscriptions, the perverse pleasures of compulsive proof-reading, the allure of long words, and the satisfactions of reading out loud. There is even a foray into pure literary gluttony: Charles Lamb liked buttered muffin crumbs between the leaves, and Fadiman knows of more than one reader who literally consumes page corners. Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, Ex Libris establishes Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists.]]>
162 Anne Fadiman 0374527229 Pat 5 4.11 1998 Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
author: Anne Fadiman
name: Pat
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at: 2016/11/10
date added: 2023/04/01
shelves: nonfiction, books-words-writing, essays
review:
A common reader Anne Fadiman is not, and even less of a common writer. This is the most enjoyable, often hilarious and beautifully written book about books, reading and the joy of language. My daughter gave it to me - I recommend that you, too, give it to someone you love.
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<![CDATA[At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays]]> 108743 At Large and At Small, Anne Fadiman returns to one of her favorite genres, the familiar essay—a beloved and hallowed literary tradition recognized for both its intellectual breadth and its miniaturist focus on everyday experiences. With the combination of humor and erudition that has distinguished her as one of our finest essayists, Fadiman draws us into twelve of her personal obsessions: from her slightly sinister childhood enthusiasm for catching butterflies to her monumental crush on Charles Lamb, from her wistfulness for the days of letter-writing to the challenges and rewards of moving from the city to the country.

Many of these essays were composed “under the influence� of the subject at hand. Fadiman ingests a shocking amount of ice cream and divulges her passion for Häagen-Dazs Chocolate Chocolate Chip and her brother’s homemade Liquid Nitrogen Kahlúa Coffee (recipe included); she sustains a terrific caffeine buzz while recounting Balzac’s coffee addiction; and she stays up till dawn to write about being a night owl, examining the rhythms of our circadian clocks and sharing such insomnia cures as her father’s nocturnal word games and Lewis Carroll’s mathematical puzzles. At Large and At Small is a brilliant and delightful collection of essays that harkens a revival of a long-cherished genre.

Collecting nature --
Unfuzzy lamb --
Ice cream --
Night owl --
Procrustes and the culture wars --
Coleridge the runaway --
Mail --
Moving --
Piece of cotton --
Arctic hedonist --
Coffee --
Under water]]>
240 Anne Fadiman 0374106622 Pat 4 nonfiction, essays 4.10 2007 At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays
author: Anne Fadiman
name: Pat
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2017/01/09
date added: 2023/04/01
shelves: nonfiction, essays
review:

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Vesper Flights 48637750 Animals don't exist in order to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves.

Helen Macdonald's bestselling debut H is for Hawk brought the astonishing story of her relationship with goshawk Mabel to global critical acclaim and announced Macdonald as one of this century's most important and insightful nature writers. H is for Hawk won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction and the Costa Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, launching poet and falconer Macdonald as our preeminent nature essayist, with a semi-regular column in the New York Times Magazine.

In Vesper Flights Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along 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 through the Tribute of Light, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk's poplar forests. She writes with heart-tugging clarity about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds' nests, and the unexpected guidance and comfort we find when watching wildlife. By one of this century's most important and insightful nature writers, Vesper Flights is a captivating and foundational book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make sense of the world around us.]]>
304 Helen Macdonald 0802128815 Pat 4 nonfiction, essays 4.09 2020 Vesper Flights
author: Helen Macdonald
name: Pat
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2021/06/18
date added: 2023/04/01
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<![CDATA[Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales]]> 41089239 Gratitude andOn the Move, a final volume of essays that showcases Sacks's broad range of interests--from his passions for ferns, swimming, and horsetails, to his final case histories exploring schizophrenia, dementia, and Alzheimer's.

Oliver Sacks, renowned scientist and storyteller, is adored by readers for his neurological case histories, his fascination and familiarity with human behaviour at its most unexpected and unfamiliar. Everything in Its Place is a celebration of Sacks's myriad interests, all told with his characteristic compassion, erudition, and luminous prose. From the celebrated case history of Spalding Gray that appeared in The New Yorker four months before his death to reflections on mental asylums; from piercing accounts of Schizophrenia to a reminiscence of Robin Williams; from the riveting tale of a medical colleague falling victim to Alzheimer's to the cinematography of Michael Powell, this volume celebrates and reflects the wondrous curiosity of Oliver Sacks.]]>
288 Oliver Sacks 0345811380 Pat 3 nonfiction, essays
He was an amazing man!]]>
4.15 2019 Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales
author: Oliver Sacks
name: Pat
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2019/06/03
date added: 2023/04/01
shelves: nonfiction, essays
review:
Oliver Sacks is truly a Renaissance man! From ferns to gingkos to pickled herring, and of course neurology - the man knows it all and writes about it in a way that is totally relatable. That said, I wish I had enjoyed this book more. The clinical tales were slight and not half as interesting as the ones which fill his other books, and some of the other topics just didn't hold my interest.

He was an amazing man!
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Interpreter of Maladies 5439 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant.]]>
198 Jhumpa Lahiri 0618101365 Pat 5 essays 4.18 1999 Interpreter of Maladies
author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: Pat
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2020/08/05
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shelves: essays
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Essays Two 50403450 A collection of essays on translation, foreign languages, Proust, and one French city, from the master short-fiction writer and acclaimed translator Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis, who has been called "a magician of self-consciousness" by Jonathan Franzen and "the best prose stylist in America" by Rick Moody, gathered a selection of her essays for the first time in 2019 with Essays One. Now, Davis continues her non-fiction project with Essays Two.

This edition will, for the first time, collect Lydia Davis's essays and talks on the art of translation, the experience of translating Proust, Flaubert and Michel Leiris, learning a foreign language through reading, and an extended immersion in the city of Arles.

Davis, winner of the Man Booker International Prize for her fiction and finalist for the National Book Award, showcases her sharp literary mind and invaluable insight in this new collection of her nonfiction works.]]>
592 Lydia Davis 0374148864 Pat 4 books-words-writing, essays 4.21 2021 Essays Two
author: Lydia Davis
name: Pat
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2021
rating: 4
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<![CDATA[The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion]]> 55836545
Movement is a constant here. In the title piece, "The Window Seat," she reveals the unexpected enchantments of commercial air travel. In "Obama and the Renaissance Generation," she documents how, despite the narrative of Obama's exceptionalism, his father, like her own, was one of a generation of gifted young Africans who came to the United Kingdom and the United States for education and were expected to build their home countries anew after colonialism. In "The Last Vet," time spent shadowing Dr. Jalloh, the only veterinarian in Sierra Leone, as he works with the street dogs of Freetown, becomes a meditation on what a society's treatment of animals tells us about its principles. In "Crossroads," she examines race in America from an African perspective, and in "Power Walking" she describes what it means to walk in the world in a Black woman's body and in "The Watch" she explores the raptures of sleep and sleeplessness the world over.

Deeply meditative and written with a wry humor, The Window Seat confirms that Forna is a vital voice in international letters.]]>
272 Aminatta Forna 0802158587 Pat 5 4.18 2021 The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion
author: Aminatta Forna
name: Pat
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/11/26
date added: 2023/04/01
shelves: paperback, memoir-biography, essays
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These Precious Days: Essays 56922687 The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays.  

“Any story that starts will also end.� As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. 

At the center of These Precious Days is the title essay, a suprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that explores “what it means to be seen, to find someone with whom you can be your best and most complete self.� When Patchett chose an early galley of actor and producer Tom Hanks� short story collection to read one night before bed, she had no idea that this single choice would be life changing. It would introduce her to a remarkable woman—Tom’s brilliant assistant Sooki—with whom she would form a profound bond that held monumental consequences for them both. 

A literary alchemist, Patchett plumbs the depths of her experiences to create gold: engaging and moving pieces that are both self-portrait and landscape, each vibrant with emotion and rich in insight. Turning her writer’s eye on her own experiences, she transforms the private into the universal, providing us all a way to look at our own worlds anew, and reminds how fleeting and enigmatic life can be. 

From the enchantments of Kate DiCamillo’s children’s books to youthful memories of Paris; the cherished life gifts given by her three fathers to the unexpected influence of Charles Schultz’s Snoopy; the expansive vision of Eudora Welty to the importance of knitting, Patchett connects life and art as she illuminates what matters most. Infused with the author’s grace, wit, and warmth, the pieces in These Precious Days resonate deep in the soul, leaving an indelible mark—and demonstrate why Ann Patchett is one of the most celebrated writers of our time.]]>
320 Ann Patchett 0063092786 Pat 5 essays 4.40 2021 These Precious Days: Essays
author: Ann Patchett
name: Pat
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2021/12/22
date added: 2023/04/01
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Browsings 28943751 256 Michael Dirda 1681772582 Pat 0 3.76 2015 Browsings
author: Michael Dirda
name: Pat
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life]]> 247620 "As warm and stimulating as a library to which one returns again and again."
Chicago Tribune (Editor's Choice)

While books contain insights into our selves and the world, it takes a conversation—between the author and the reader, or between two readers—to bring them fully to life. Drawing on sources as diverse as Dr. Seuss and Simone Weil, P. G. Wodehouse and Isaiah Berlin, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Michael Dirda shows how the wit, wisdom, and enchantment of the written word informs and enriches nearly every aspect of life, from education and work to love and death.

Organized by significant life events and abounding with quotations from great writers and thinkers, Book by Book showcases Dirda's capacious love for and understanding of books. Favoring showing as much as telling, Dirda draws us deeper into the classics, as well as lesser-known works of literature, history, and philosophy, always with an eye to how we might better understand our lives.]]>
170 Michael Dirda 0805083383 Pat 0 3.80 2006 Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life
author: Michael Dirda
name: Pat
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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Let Me Tell You What I Mean 58735027
Here are six pieces written in 1968 from the "Points West" Saturday Evening Post column Joan Didion shared from 1964 to 1969 with her husband, John Gregory Dunne about: American newspapers; a session with Gamblers Anonymous; a visit to San Simeon; being rejected by Stanford; dropping in on Nancy Reagan, wife of the then-governor of California, while a TV crew filmed her at home; and an evening at the annual reunion of WWII veterans from the 101st Airborne Association at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas. Here too is a 1976 piece from the New York Times magazine on "Why I Write"; a piece about short stories from New West in 1978; and from The New Yorker, a piece on Hemingway from 1998, and on Martha Stewart from 2000. Each one is classic Didion: incisive, bemused, and stunningly prescient.]]>
192 Joan Didion 0593312198 Pat 0 to-read, essays 3.93 2021 Let Me Tell You What I Mean
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name: Pat
average rating: 3.93
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<![CDATA[The Written World And The Unwritten World: Essays]]> 22749722 384 Italo Calvino 0544146999 Pat 0 to-read, essays 3.83 2002 The Written World And The Unwritten World: Essays
author: Italo Calvino
name: Pat
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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My Own Words 29868604
My Own Words offers Justice Ginsburg on wide-ranging topics, including gender equality, the workways of the Supreme Court, being Jewish, law and lawyers in opera, and the value of looking beyond US shores when interpreting the US Constitution. Throughout her life Justice Ginsburg has been (and continues to be) a prolific writer and public speaker. This book’s sampling is selected by Justice Ginsburg and her authorized biographers Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams. Justice Ginsburg has written an introduction to the book, and Hartnett and Williams introduce each chapter, giving biographical context and quotes gleaned from hundreds of interviews they have conducted. This is a fascinating glimpse into the life of one of America’s most influential women.]]>
400 Ruth Bader Ginsburg 150114524X Pat 0 to-read, essays 4.02 2016 My Own Words
author: Ruth Bader Ginsburg
name: Pat
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2016
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<![CDATA[Ten Years in the Tub: A Decade Soaking in Great Books]]> 17707873 The Believer was rising from the primordial ooze, Nick Hornby turned in the inaugural installment of a monthly column that immediately became a reader favorite. For the next ten years, Hornby’s incandescently funny "Stuff I’ve Been Reading� chronicled a singular reading life � one that is measured not just in "books bought� and "books read,� as each column begins, but in the way our feelings toward Celine Dion say a lot about who we are, the way Body Shop Vanilla Shower Gel can add excitement to our days, and the way John Updike might ruin our sex lives. Hornby’s column is both an impeccable, wide-ranging reading list and an indispensable reminder of why we read.]]> 464 Nick Hornby 1938073738 Pat 0 4.05 2013 Ten Years in the Tub: A Decade Soaking in Great Books
author: Nick Hornby
name: Pat
average rating: 4.05
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<![CDATA[You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays]]> 58722884
Introduction by New York Times bestselling author Henry Louis Gates Jr. 

Spanning more than 35 years of work, the first comprehensive collection of essays, criticism, and articles by the legendary author of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston, showcasing the evolution of her distinctive style as an archivist and author.

“One of the greatest writers of our time.”—Toni Morrison

You Don’t Know Us Negroes is the quintessential gathering of provocative essays from one of the world’s most celebrated writers, Zora Neale Hurston. Spanning more than three decades and penned during the backdrop of the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, Montgomery bus boycott, desegregation of the military, and school integration, Hurston’s writing articulates the beauty and authenticity of Black life as only she could. Collectively, these essays showcase the roles enslavement and Jim Crow have played in intensifying Black people’s inner lives and culture rather than destroying it. She argues that in the process of surviving, Black people re-interpreted every aspect of American culture�"modif[ying] the language, mode of food preparation, practice of medicine, and most certainly religion.� White supremacy prevents the world from seeing or completely recognizing Black people in their full humanity and Hurston made it her job to lift the veil and reveal the heart and soul of the race. These pages reflect Hurston as the controversial figure she was—someone who stated that feminism is a mirage and that the integration of schools did not necessarily improve the education of Black students. Also covered is the sensational trial of Ruby McCollum, a wealthy Black woman convicted in 1952 for killing her lover, a white doctor.

Demonstrating the breadth of this revered and influential writer’s work, You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays is an invaluable chronicle of a writer’s development and a window into her world and mind.]]>
412 Zora Neale Hurston 0063043874 Pat 0 to-read, essays 4.20 2022 You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays
author: Zora Neale Hurston
name: Pat
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2022
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<![CDATA[Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021]]> 58210662
� Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories?
� How much of yourself can you give away without evaporating?
� How can we live on our planet?
� Is it true? And is it fair?
� What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism?

In over fifty pieces Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humor at the world, and reports back to us on what she finds. The roller-coaster period covered in the collection brought an end to the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump and a pandemic. From debt to tech, the climate crisis to freedom, from when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) and how to define granola, we have no better guide than Atwood to the many and varied mysteries of our universe.]]>
496 Margaret Atwood 038554748X Pat 0 to-read, essays 4.08 2022 Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Pat
average rating: 4.08
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<![CDATA[The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon]]> 56644207 As the Amazon burns, Fábio Zuker shares stories of resistance, self-determination, and kinship with the land.

In 2007, a seven-ton minke whale was found stranded on the banks of the Tapajós River, hundreds of miles into the Amazon rainforest. For days, environmentalists, journalists, and locals followed the lost whale, hoping to guide her back to the ocean, but ultimately proved unable to save her. Ten years later, journalist Fábio Zuker travels to the state of Pará, to the town known as "the place where the whale appeared," which developers are now eyeing for mining, timber, and soybean cultivation.

In these essays, Zuker shares intimate stories of life in the rainforest and its surrounding cities during an age of raging wildfires, mass migration, populist politics, and increasing deforestation. A group of Venezuelan migrants wait at a bus station in Manaus, looking for someplace more stable than home. In Alenquer, a father mourns the death of his son, poisoned by pesticides from a nearby açai plantation. An elder in Alter do Chão becomes the first Indigenous person in Brazil to die from COVID-19, after years of fighting for the rights and recognition of the Borari people.
The subjects Zuker interviews are often torn between ties with their ancestral territories and the push toward capitalist gains; The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon captures the friction between their worlds and the resilience of movements for autonomy, self-definition, and respect for the land that nourishes us.]]>
240 Fábio Zuker 1571311815 Pat 0 3.85 2022 The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon
author: Fábio Zuker
name: Pat
average rating: 3.85
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<![CDATA[Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism]]> 269332 New Yorker, and the reviews of the last eight years make up the bulk of this volume. Authors include Edmund Wilson, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Muriel Spark, Anne Tyler, Italo Calvino, Henry Green, Robert Pinget, L.E. Sissman, R.K. Narayan and Roland Barthes. He also writes of actresses Louise Brooks and Doris Day and golfers Sam Snead and Arnold Palmer.]]> John Updike 0140175199 Pat 0 4.14 1983 Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism
author: John Updike
name: Pat
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1983
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020]]> 55271512 Newly collected, revised, and expanded nonfiction--including many texts never previously in print--from the first two decades of the twenty-first century by the Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author

Salman Rushdie is celebrated as a storyteller of the highest order, illuminating truths about our society and culture through his gorgeous, often searing prose. Now, in his latest collection of nonfiction, he brings together insightful and inspiring essays, criticism, and speeches that focus on his relationship with the written word and solidify his place as one of the most original thinkers of our time.

Gathering pieces written between 2003 and 2020, Languages of Truth chronicles Rushdie's intellectual engagement with a period of momentous cultural shifts. Immersing the reader in a wide variety of subjects, he delves into the nature of storytelling as a human need, and what emerges is, in myriad ways, a love letter to literature itself. Rushdie explores what the work of authors from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Samuel Beckett, Eudora Welty, and Toni Morrison mean to him, whether on the page or in person. He delves deep into the nature of "truth," revels in the vibrant malleability of language and the creative lines that can join art and life, and looks anew at migration, multiculturalism, and censorship.

Enlivened on every page by Rushdie's signature wit and dazzling voice, Languages of Truth offers the author's most piercingly analytical views yet on the evolution of literature and culture even as he takes us on an exhilarating tour of his own exuberant and fearless imagination.]]>
368 Salman Rushdie 059313317X Pat 0 to-read, paperback, essays 4.12 2021 Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020
author: Salman Rushdie
name: Pat
average rating: 4.12
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The Book of Delights: Essays 38746152 The Book of Delights is a genre-defying book of essays—some as short as a paragraph; some as long as five pages—that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives. His is a meditation on delight that takes a clear-eyed view of the complexities, even the terrors, in his life, including living in America as a black man; the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture; the loss of those he loves. Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: the way Botan Rice Candy wrappers melt in your mouth, the volunteer crossing guard with a pronounced tremor whom he imagines as a kind of boat-woman escorting pedestrians across the River Styx, a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, pickup basketball games, the silent nod of acknowledgment between black people. And more than any other subject, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world—his garden, the flowers in the sidewalk, the birds, the bees, the mushrooms, the trees.

This is not a book of how-to or inspiration, though it could be read that way. Fans of Roxane Gay, Maggie Nelson, and Kiese Laymon will revel in Gay’s voice, and his insights. The Book of Delights is about our connection to the world, to each other, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. Gay’s pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight. 

Preface
1. My Birthday, Kinda
2. Inefficiency
3. Flower in the Curb
4. Blowing It Off
5. Hole in the Head
6. Remission Still
7. Praying Mantis
8. The Negreeting
9. The High-Five from Strangers, Etc
10. Writing by Hand
11. Transplanting
12. Nicknames
13. But, Maybe ..
14. "Joy Is Such a Human Madness
15. House Party
16. Hummingbird
17. Just a Dream
18. "That's Some Bambi Shit" ..
19. The Irrepressible: The Gratitudes
20. Tap Tap
21. Coffee without the Saucer
22. Lily on the Pants
23. Sharing a Bag 24. Umbrella in the Café
25. Beast Mode
26. Airplane Rituals
27. Weirdly Untitled
28. Pecans
29. The Do-Over
30. Infinity
31. Ghost
32. Nota Bene
33. "Love Me in a Special Way"
34. "Stay," by Lisa Loeb
35. Stacking Delights
36. Donny Hathaway on Pandora
37. "To Spread the Sweetness of Love"
38. Baby, Baby, Baby
39. "REPENT OR BURN"
40. Giving My Body to the Cause
41. Among the Rewards of My Sloth . .
42. Not Grumpy Cat
43. Some Stupid Shit
44. Not Only . .
45. Microgentrification: WE BUY GOLD
46. Reading Palms
47. The Sanctity of Trains
48. Bird Feeding
49. Kombucha in a Mid-century Glass
50. Hickories
51. Annoyed No More
52. Toto
53. Church Poets
54. Public Lying Down
55. Babies. Seriously
56. "My Life, My Life, My Life, My Life in the Sunshine
57. Incorporation
58. Botan Rice Candy
59. Understory
60. "Joy Is Such a Human Madness": The Duff Between Us
61. "It's Just the Day I'm Having" ..
62. The Purple Cornets of Spring
63. The Volunteer
64. Fishing an Eyelash: Two or Three Cents on the Virtues of the Poetry Reading
65. Found Things
66. Found Things (2)
67. Cuplicking
68. Bobblehead
69. The Jenky 70. The Crow's Ablutions
71. Flowers in the Hands of Statues
72. An Abundance of Public Toilets
73. The Wave of Unfamiliars
74. Not for Nothing
75. Bindweed ... Delight?
76. Dickhead
77. Ambiguous Signage Sometimes
78. Heart to Heart
79. Caution: Bees on Bridge
80. Tomato on Board
81. Purple-Handed
82. Name: Kayte Young; Phone Number: 555-867-5309
83. Still Processing
84. Fireflies
85. My Scythe Jack
86. Pawpaw Grove
87. Loitering
88. Touched
89. Scat
90. Get Thee to the Nutrient Cycle!
91. Pulling Carrots
92. Filling the Frame
93. Reckless Air Quotes 94. Judith Irene Gay, Aged Seventy-six Today!
95. Rothko Backboard
96. The Marfa Lights
97. The Carport
98. My Garden (Book):
99. Black Bumblebees!
100. Grown
101. Coco-baby
102. My Birthday]]>
274 Ross Gay 1616207922 Pat 0 to-read, essays 4.15 2019 The Book of Delights: Essays
author: Ross Gay
name: Pat
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2019
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The Faraway Nearby 16158561 A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit explores the ways we make our lives out of stories, and how we are connected by empathy, by narrative, by imagination. In the course of unpacking some of her own stories—of her mother and her decline from memory loss, of a trip to Iceland, of an illness—Solnit revisits fairytales and entertains other stories: about arctic explorers, Che Guevara among the leper colonies, and Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, about warmth and coldness, pain and kindness, decay and transformation, making art and making self. Woven together, these stories create a map which charts the boundaries and territories of storytelling, reframing who each of us is and how we might tell our story.]]> 259 Rebecca Solnit 0670025968 Pat 0 to-read, kindle, essays 4.20 2013 The Faraway Nearby
author: Rebecca Solnit
name: Pat
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2013
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<![CDATA[Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls: Essays, Etc.]]> 15790837
From here the story could take many turns. When this guy is David Sedaris, the possibilities are endless, but the result is always the same: he will both delight you with twists of humor and intelligence and leave you deeply moved.

Sedaris remembers his father's dinnertime attire (shirtsleeves and underpants), his first colonoscopy (remarkably pleasant), and the time he considered buying the skeleton of a murdered Pygmy.

With Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, David Sedaris shows once again why his work has been called "hilarious, elegant, and surprisingly moving" (Washington Post).

Machine generated contents note: Dentists Without Borders
Attaboy
Think Differenter
Memory Laps
A Friend in the Ghetto
Loggerheads
If I Ruled the World
Easy, Tiger
Laugh, Kookaburra
Standing Still
Just a Quick E-mail
A Guy Walks into a Bar Car
Author, Author
Obama!!!!!
Standing By
I Break for Traditional Marriage
Understanding Understanding Owls
#2 to Go
Health-Care Freedoms and Why I Want My Country Back
Now Hiring Friendly People
Rubbish
Day In, Day Out
Mind the Gap
A Cold Case
The Happy Place]]>
275 David Sedaris 0316154695 Pat 3 essays, kindle 3.84 2013 Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls: Essays, Etc.
author: David Sedaris
name: Pat
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2013
rating: 3
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date added: 2015/01/02
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