Literary Essays

Culture has always relied on art, just as artists have been dependent on culture as a problem field to draw inspiration from and as a store of soci...

A new edition of Britain's Changing Towns (1967), introduced, edited and updated by Owen Hatherley: These essays show him writing about cities and ...

This poignant collection of oral histories tells the stories of nine Laotians, four Cambodians and nine Vietnamese: what their lives were like b...

For much of the mid-twentieth century, Roberto Gerhard found himself an outsider. He was airbrushed from much writing on contemporary music in Spai...

In this dispassionate analysis of the act of murder, De Quinceys innovative, idio­syncratic artistic vision found space for gruesome reportage, sat...

What is the nature, essence and definition of a fart? What are the consequences and disadvantages of suppressing one? Why is farting considered to ...

A spoof encyclopedia of contemporary accepted wisdom and commonplaces, the Dictionary of Received Ideas sees Flaubert at his witty and satirical be...

The three plays presented in this volume and their various adjoining texts, ranging from the lengthy ''Notes'' on Le Triumvirat to prefaces, aver...

Reality versus fiction is at the heart of the current literary debate. We live in a world of docu-drama, the 'real life' story. Works of art, novel...

During its three-thousand-year history Rome has been an imperial metropolis, the capital of a nation and the spiritual core of a great world re...

Rate your pain on a scale of one to ten. What about on a scale of spicy to citrus? Is it more like a lava lamp or a mosaic? Pain, though a universa...

Romance: The History of a Genre is a collection of essays devoted to the highly popular and no less controversial genre of romance. A genre often d...

In this collection of eight witty and sharply written essays, Orwell looks at, among others, the joys of spring (even in London), the picture of ...

Introduction by Dairmid Gunn Neil M Gunn (1892 - 1973), one of Scotland's most distinguished and highly regarded novelists of the 20th century, wa...

In this richly diverse collection of essays, Joseph Brodsky casts a reflective eye on his experiences of early life in Russia and exile in America....

De Profundis and Other Prison Writings is a new selection of Oscar Wilde's prison letters and poetry in Penguin Classics, edited and introduced by ...

Shaped over a period of twenty years, this is an elegantly written, scholarly but highly accessible, collection of essays that are essentially a ma...

Pamela and the Memoires pour servir a la vie de Monsieur de Voltaire are accounts of the author''s own life, concentrating particularly on his r...

Virginia Woolf began writing reviews for the Guardian 'to make a few pence' from her father's death in 1904, and continued until the last decade of...

Censorship and book burning are still present in our lives. Lawrence Hill shares his experiences of how ignorance and the fear of ideas led a group...

This new selection of essays by Oscar Wilde show-cases the varied aspects of his genius. For Pearson, the biographer, the essays and dialogues illu...

A collection of previously unpublished letters from America's cult icon on the art of writing.Charles Bukowski was one of our most iconoclastic, ra...

Every morning for the last thirty years, C. K. Stead has written fiction and poetry. Shelf Life collects the best of his afternoon work: reviews an...

Written by noted Catholic philosopher Michael Novak, the selections in The Myth of Romantic Love and Other Essays highlight the arc of his intellec...

Dead Weight chronicles the improbable turnaround of a drug smuggler who, after being sentenced to eight years in state prison, returned to society ...

Walter Benjamin is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic intellectual figures of this century. Not only was he a thinker who made an enormous i...