"Beloved writer Samantha Irby has returned to the printed page for her much-anticipated, sidesplitting fourth book following her 2020 breakout, Wow, no thank you, a Vintage Books Original. The success of Irby's career has taken her to new heights. She fields calls with job offers from Hollywood and walks the red carpet with the iconic ladies of Sex and the City. Finally, she has made it. But, behind all that new-found glam, Irby is just trying to...

"What is the internet doing to us? What is college for? What are the myths and metaphors we live by? These are the questions that William Deresiewicz has been pursuing over the course of his award-winning career. The End of Solitude brings together more than forty of his finest essays, including four that are published here for the first time. Ranging widely across the culture, they take up subjects as diverse as Mad Men and Harold Bloom, the significance...

"The beloved bestselling author of Here for It presents a collection of heartening, thoughtful, and laugh-out-loud funny essays about the lifelong search for community and returning home. After going viral "reading" the chaotic political news, having one-too-many awkward social encounters, and coming to terms with his intersecting identities, R. Eric Thomas is ready to live his best life. Or, if not, at least his best-ish life. Now, in this collection...

In these deeply researched essays, a Paris Review contributor blends science, history, and memoir to explore human obsession with gorgeous things, exposing the fraught histories of makeup, silk, jewels, perfume, and other objects, helping readers to ethically partake in the beauty of the world around them. Kelleher has spent much of her life chasing beauty. She can to see that whenever you find something unbearably beautiful, if you look closer,...

A literary legend's engaging review of his career, stressing the work he never completed, and why. Over seven decades, John McPhee has set a standard for literary nonfiction. Assaying mountain ranges, bark canoes, experimental aircraft, the Swiss Army, geophysical hot spots, ocean shipping, shad fishing, dissident art in the Soviet Union, and an even wider variety of other subjects, he has consistently written narrative pieces of immaculate design....

"Manuel Betancourt has long lustfully coveted masculinity -- in part because he so lacked it. As a child in Bogotá, Colombia, he grew up with the social pressure to appear strong, manly, and, ultimately, straight. And yet in the films and television he avidly watched, Betancourt saw glimmers of different possibilities. From the stars of telenovelas and the princes of Disney films to pop sensation Ricky Martin and teen heartthrobs in shows like Saved...

"In this essay collection, David Quammen journeys to places where civilization meets raw nature"-- For more than two decades, Quammen has traveled to Earth's most far-flung and fragile destinations, sending back field notes from places caught in the tension between humans and the wild. The essays, originally published in National Geographic magazine and updated for today, tell colorful and impassioned stories from some of the planet's wildest locales....

"From beloved and bestselling author Roxane Gay comes an exhilarating collection of her essays on culture, politics, and everything in between. Since the publication of the groundbreaking "Bad Feminist and Hunger," Roxane Gay has continued to tackle big issues embroiling society -- state-sponsored violence and mass shootings, womens rights post-Dobbs, online disinformation, and the limits of empathy -- alongside more individually personalized matters:...

"Binyavanga Wainaina was a pioneering voice in African literature, an award-winning memoirist and essayist, and a gatherer of literary communities. Before his tragic death in 2019 at the age of forty-seven, he won the Caine Prize for African Writing and was named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People. His wildly popular essay "How to Write About Africa," an incisive and unapologetic piece that exposed the harmfully racist ways Western media depicts...

After the events of the 2020 presidential election, a Cuban teacher in Miami identifies signs of the type of society he left behind. Concerned about the conversion of the United States into a totalitarian country, he begins sending email alerts to known people. The mails have become analyses of the evolving situation and a chronicle of the occupation of each field by the radical left. Education becomes indoctrination, news becomes harmful propaganda,...