Literary Essays

*THE TOP 10 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER*'This book might just change your life' Sunday Times'Wise, wonderful, moving and brilliant... will leave your h...

A personal and powerful essay from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun. ...

'To create today is to create dangerously'Camus argues passionately that the artist has a responsibility to challenge, provoke and speak up for tho...

The best poet in America Jean Genet He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels Leonard Cohen The definitive collection...

Get comfortable, sink under the covers and dip into the hilarious Under the Duvet: Deluxe Edition for a behind-the-scenes glimpse into bestselling ...

A devastating essay on loss and the people we love from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun. ...

Joan Didions hugely influential collection of essays which defines, for many, the America which rose from the ashes of the Sixties. ...

From the best-selling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists comes a powerful new statement about feminism today written as a letter ...

An entire race was born when J.R.R. Tolkien scrawled on a leaf, 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' From the invention of that single w...

'The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful.'These two classic essays were the first works of criticism to break down the boundaries...

Henry David Thoreau is considered one of the leading figures in early American literature, and Walden is without doubt his most influential book. P...

One of the most influential and compelling books in American literature, Walden is a vivid account of the years that Henry D. Thoreau spent alone i...

Celebrating Fifty Years of Picador BooksIf a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self himself...

The Road to Wigan Pier is a book in two parts: the first half is Orwells description of working-class life in industrial communities of the north o...

Atwood aims her constant curiosity and impish humour at our world and reports back to us on what she finds, in this frank, generous gift of a book....

'But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction - what has that got to do with a room of one's own?'A Room of One's Own grew out o...

The first in Deborah Levy's essential three-part 'Living Autobiography' on writing and womanhood. 'Unmissable. Like chancing upon an oasis, you wan...

Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466-1536) is one of the greatest figures of the Renaissance humanist movement, which abandoned medieval pieties in favour...

Based on lectures given at Cambridge colleges and first published by the Hogarth Press in 1929, A Room of Ones Own is an extended essay about the p...

Discover the final book from one of Europe's cultural giants.In this entertaining collection of essays about the modern world the celebrated author...

Acerbic, wisecracking and hilarious, this is the definitive essay collection from New York legend and satirist, Fran Lebowitz, star of Martin Scors...

Shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay Named a Best Book of 2018 by TIME, Washington Post, Entertainment We...

Advice for graduates and reflections on staying true to yourself from the beloved Gilmore Girls actress and New York Times bestselling author of th...

In these seventeen essays (and one short story) the 2011 Man Booker Prize winner examines British, French and American writers who have meant most ...

Farnsworth beautifully integrates his own observations with scores of quotations from Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne and others. Thi...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Dear Prince, I must leave you, but I will never...

On a crowded bus at midday, Raymond Queneau observes one man accusing another of jostling him deliberately. When a seat is vacated, the first man a...

In this extraordinary essay, Virginia Woolf examines the limitations of womanhood in the early twentieth century. With the startling prose and poet...

From the bestselling author of UNDERLAND, THE OLD WAYS and THE LOST WORDS - an essay on the joy of reading, for anyone who has ever loved a bookEve...

Joan Didions savage masterpiece, which, since first publication in 1968, has been acknowledged as an unparalleled report on the state ...

For the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, an anthology chronicling the tumultuous fight for LGBTQ rights in the 1960s and the activis...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of ...

Vintage Feminism: classic feminist texts in short formWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JEANETTE WINTERSONWhat conditions are necessary for the creation of w...

With an Introduction by Professor Stuart Sim.John Bunyan was variously a tinker, soldier, Baptist minister, prisoner and writer of outstanding narr...

A truly original book in every sense of the word, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows poetically defines emotions that we all feel but dont have the ...

The spellbinding world of Middle-earth is full of beasts and battles, heroes and heroines, and the struggle between good and evil.In this dictionar...

'The story of the negro in America is the story of America ... it is not a very pretty story'James Baldwin's breakthrough essay collection made him...

With the natural world increasingly under threat, Our Place in Nature explores one of the most topical issues of our day; our appreciation of natur...

Art Essays is a passionate collection of the best essays on the visual arts written by contemporary novelists. This vibrant and diverse selection i...

Encountering an eccentric cast of characters along the way, Sebald confronts the frailty of human existence as he voyages along the Suffolk coast o...

These two works on life's fleeting pleasures are by Buddhist monks from medieval Japan, but each shows a different world-view. In the short memoir ...

'Good b.o means good box office. You can smell it from a mile away'The legendary sixties New York pop artist Andy Warhol's hilarious and insightful...

From one of the most important chroniclers of our time, come two extended excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooks writings that...

Both Flesh and Not combines David Foster Wallace's best-loved essays with work never before published in the UK.Beloved for his brilliantly discern...