Helen Plum Library

"Like dispatches from another world, the twenty one essays in David Searcy's blazingly original Shame and Wonder are unfamiliar, profound, and haunting. Formerly a writer of literary horror, Searcy had essentially given up writing before he found himself drawn back--this time, to nonfiction--in his late sixties. Writing on a 1953 Olivetti typewriter in the spare Dallas studio he shares with his girlfriend, Searcy began writing, teasing out the Big...

"In six wide-ranging essays, Kathleen Hale traces some of the most treacherous fault lines in modern America--from sexual assault to Internet trolling, from environmental illness to our own animal nature. In these thought-provoking stories of predators and prey, Hale proves herself to be an exhilarating new voice whose writing is both fearless and profound. In "First I Got Pregnant. Then I Decided to Kill the Mountain Lion," Hale recounts the month...

"One hundred incisive, idiosyncratic essays on life and theater from a major American playwright "Don't send your characters to reform school!" pleads Sarah Ruhl in one of her essays. With titles as varied as "On Lice" to "On Sleeping in Theaters" and "Motherhood and Stools (The Furniture Kind)," these essays are artful meditations on life in the arts and joyous jumbles of observations on everything in between. The pieces combine admonition, celebration,...

The author presents his 1996 work, "The Harper's Essay," offering additional writings that consider a central theme of the erosion of civic life and private dignity and the increasing persistence of loneliness in postmodern American

Michelle Orange uses the lens of pop culture to decode the defining characteristics of our media-drenched times. In This Is Running for Your Life, Michelle Orange takes us from Beirut to Hawaii to her grandmother's retirement home in Canada in her quest to understand how people behave in a world increasingly mediated-for better and for worse-by images and interactivity. Orange's essays range from the critical to the journalistic to the deeply personal;...

"Daniel Mallory Ortberg is known for blending genres, forms, and sources to develop fascinating new hybrids--from lyric rants to horror recipes to pornographic scripture. In his most personal work to date, he turns his attention to the essay, offering vigorous and laugh-out-loud funny accounts of both popular and highbrow culture while mixing in meditations on gender transition, family dynamics, and the many meanings of faith. From a thoughtful analysis...

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

Essays by the author of 1984. George Orwell was first and foremost an essayist, producing throughout his life an extraordinary array of short nonfiction that reflected-and illuminated-the fraught times in which he lived. Facing Unpleasant Facts charts Orwell's development as a master of the narrative-essay form and unites such classics as "Shooting an Elephant" with lesser-known journalism and passages from his wartime diary. Whether detailing the...

"A new collection of Susan Sontag's essays about women, edited by David Rieff and introduced by Merve Emre"-- Susan Sontag was one of the most formidable, original, and influential thinkers of the last century. "The most interesting ideas are heresies," she remarked, and indeed, her writing rejects the familiar and refuses party lines. On Women presents seven essays and exchanges, spanning a range of subjects: the challenges and humiliations women...

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