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 Y...

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...

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...

In Burning Questions Atwood aims her constant curiosity and impish humour at our world and reports back to us on what she finds.In it she seeks ans...

'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...

A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURYWINNER OF THE PRIX FEMINA ETRANGER 2020Following on from the critically acclaimed Things I Don't Want to Kn...

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...

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

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...

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 ...

FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING CRITIC AND ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF NEGROLAND Shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2022 Shortlisted for the Rathbones F...

'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 discer...

'Dazzling ... in her kaleidoscopic essays, memoir has been shattered into sliding and overlapping pieces ... mind-expanding' The New York Times Boo...

A fascinating collection of essays on literary subjects ranging from Daniel Defoe to Samuel Beckett by a Nobel and Booker Prize-winning writerLate ...

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER PICKED BY THE SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN, INDEPENDENT, IRISH TIMES, SPECTATOR, TLS, NEW STATESMAN, MAIL ON SUNDAY, I PAP...

An essay with the reach and momentum of a novel, Kate Briggss This Little Art is a genre-bending song for the practice of literary translation, off...

The bestselling author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name returns to the essay form with this collection of thoughts on time, the creative mind, a...

A powerful meditation on ageing and familial love, I Remain in Darkness recounts Annie Ernaux's attempts to help her mother recover from Alzheimer'...

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR CRITICISM 2019From the MAN BOOKER PRIZE- and WOMEN'S PRIZE-SHORTLISTED author of Changing My M...