"From a National Book Award finalist and a powerful literary mind, an incisive new work examining capitalism's toxic creep into the land, our bodies, and our thinking. When she receives a dermatological diagnosis of extreme sensitivity -- thin skin -- Jenn Shapland considers just how thin the barrier is between herself and the world, and how deeply vulnerable we all are to our surroundings. As she becomes aware of the impacts her tiniest choices have...

The third volume of essays from Axios Press following the much acclaimed Essays in Biography, 2012 and A Literary Education and Other Essays, 2014. It contains 142 short essays, literary sprints rather than marathons. Subjects range from domestic life to current social trends to an appraisal of contemporary nuttiness.

A career-spanning anthology of essays on politics and culture by the best-selling author of The Flamethrowers includes entries discussing a Palestinian refugee camp, an illegal Baja Peninsula motorcycle race, and the 1970s Fiat factory wildcat strikes. In this collection of essays, Kushner gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years. They address the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our...

Essayist Christopher Hitchens ruminates on why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men, the haunting science fiction of J.G. Ballard, the enduring legacies of Thomas Jefferson and George Orwell, the persistent agonies of anti-Semitism and jihad, the enduring relevance of Karl Marx, and how politics justifies itself by culture -- and how the latter prompts the former.

A career-spanning anthology of writings incorporates several new essays and includes numerous celebrity portraits as well as the author's musings on topics ranging from sex in cinema and drugs to cyberculture and graffiti.

"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,...

"An entirely original portrait of a young writer shutting out the din in order to find her own voice"-- Provided by publisher. "On April 11, 1931, Virginia Woolf ended her entry in A Writer's Diary with the words "too much and not the mood." She was describing how tired she was of correcting her own writing, of the "cramming in and the cutting out" to please other readers, wondering if she had anything at all that was truly worth saying. The character...

"Combining personal reflection and social observation, Bret Easton Ellis's first work of nonfiction is an incendiary polemic about this young century's failings, e-driven and otherwise, and at once an example, definition, and defense of what 'freedom of speech' truly means. Bret Easton Ellis has wrestled with the double-edged sword of fame and notoriety for more than thirty years now, since Less Than Zero catapulted him into the limelight in 1985,...

In the first half of Kate Zambreno's astoundingly original collection, the narrator regales us with incisive and witty swatches from a life lived inside a brilliant mind, meditating on aging and vanity, fame and failure, writing and writers, along with portraits of everyone from Susan Sontag to Amal Clooney, Maurice Blanchot to Louise Brooks. The series of essays that follow, on figures central to Zambreno's thinking, including Kathy Acker, David...