From graffiti gangs and Grand Theft Auto to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing. Starting with Hodson’s own work experience, which ranges from the mundane to the bizarre―including...

Offers a selection of literary essays from the previous year which were originally published in American periodicals.

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...

"This collection of essays brings together some of the finest pieces Hitchens published over the last two decades for the first time in one book, addressing with characteristic wit and erudition the subjects he is best known for, including: the case against God, faith and religious observance; the case for intervention in Iraq; indictments of towering political figures like Bill and Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, and Henry Kissinger; and celebrations...

Jenny Diski was a fearless writer, for whom no subject was too difficult, even her own diagnosis with cancer. Her columns in the London Review of Books -- selected here by her editor and friend Mary-Kay Wilmers, ranged from subjects as various as happiness, social psychology, self-absorption and cats -- have been described as 'virtuoso performances', and 'small masterpieces'.

Elena Ferrante is the best-selling author of My Brilliant Friend, now an HBO original series. Collected here for the first time are the seeds of future novels, the timely reflections of this internationally beloved storyteller, the abiding preoccupations of a writer who has been called "one of the great novelists of our time" (New York Times)

"A monumental, canon-defining anthology of four centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith. Many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves--sometimes critically--to American values, but even in those that don't, one can detect a subtext about being American. The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable...

A collection of both previously unpublished works and classic essays includes discussions of recent cultural and political events, social networking, libraries, and the failure to address global warming.

Collects short essays from the author that reflect on the changing modern world, touching on such topics as popular culture, politics, being seen, conspiracies, the old and the young, new technologies, mass media, racism, and good manners.

"A collection of first-person essays and humor pieces about one woman's attempt to make sense of the baffling, humiliating, and extremely annoying world around her"-- Provided by publisher.