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Essays

How To Read and Why

How To Read and Why

Bloom, Harold
$16.00
Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?" is the crucial question with which renowned literary critic Harold Bloom begins this impassioned book on the pleasures and benefits of reading well. For more than forty years, Bloom has transformed college students into lifelong readers with his unrivaled love for literature. Now, at a time when faster and easier electronic media threatens to eclipse the practice of reading, Bloom draws on his experience as critic, teacher, and prolific reader to plumb the great books for their sustaining wisdom.
Shedding all polemic, Bloom addresses the solitary reader, who, he urges, should read for the purest of all reasons: to discover and augment the self. His ultimate faith in the restorative power of literature resonates on every page of this infinitely rewarding and important book.
Citizen Poet

Citizen Poet

Boland, Eavan
$24.99

Eavan Boland was a trailblazing poet, critic, teacher, and essayist. Carving a path for the next generation, she broke open the male-dominated canon of Irish literature and mapped her poetic journey through the contours of life as a mother, daughter, and citizen. This generous and wise volume contains essays selected from Object Lessons (1995) and A Journey with Two Maps (2011); later writings addressing the changing nature of poetry; and a draft of a reflective memoir called "Daughter," on which Boland was working at the time of her death.

A compelling blend of memoir, analysis, and argument, Citizen Poet traces the arc of Boland's pioneering view of nationhood through the lens of womanhood.

Where I Come From

Where I Come From

Bragg, Rick
$26.95
From the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All Over but the Shoutin' and The Best Cook in the World, a collection of irresistible columns from Southern Living and Garden & Gun

Celebrated author and newspaper columnist Rick Bragg brings us an ode to the stories and history of the Deep South, filled with "eclectic nuggets about places and people he knows well" (USA Today) and written with honesty, wit, and deep affection.

A collection of wide-ranging and endearingly personal columns--from Bragg's love of Tupperware (his mother preferred margarine tubs and thought Tupperware was "just showing off") to the decline of country music, from the legacy of Harper Lee to the metamorphosis of the pickup truck to the best way to kill fire ants--Where I Come From is a book that will be treasured by fans old and new.

First Love

First Love

Dancyger, Lilly
$28.00
A bold, poignant essay collection that treats women's friendships as the love stories they truly are, from the critically acclaimed author of Negative Space

"Fiercely felt and finely etched."--Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams

Lilly Dancyger always thought of her closest friendships as great loves, complex and profound as any romance. When her beloved cousin was murdered just as both girls were entering adulthood, Dancyger's devotion to the women in her life took on a new urgency--a desire to hold her friends close while she still could. In First Love, this urgency runs through a striking exploration of the bonds between women, from the intensity of adolescent best friendship and fluid sexuality to mothering and chosen family.

Each essay in this incisive collection is grounded in a close female friendship in Dancyger's life, reaching outward to dissect cultural assumptions about identity and desire, and the many ways women create space for each other in a world that wants us small. Seamlessly weaving personal experience with literature and pop culture--ranging from fairy tales to true crime, from Anaïs Nin and Sylvia Plath to Heavenly Creatures and the "sad girls" of Tumblr--Dancyger's essays form a kaleidoscopic story of a life told through friendships, and an expansive interrogation of what it means to love each other.

Though friendship will never be enough to keep us safe from the dangers of the world, Dancyger reminds us that love is always worth the risk, and that when tragedy strikes, it's our friends who will help us survive. In First Love, these essential bonds get their due.

Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness

Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness

Delgado, Anjanette
$26.95

Independent Publisher Book Awards, Silver Medal
for Anthology

National Indie
Excellence Awards, Finalist in the Anthology Category

International Latino Book Awards, Gold Medal for Best Fiction (Multi-Author)

International Latino Book Awards, Honorable Mention, Best Nonfiction (Multi-Author)


A powerful collection of contemporary voices


Showcasing a variety of voices shaped in and by a place that has been for them a crossroads and a land of contradictions, Home in Florida presents a selection of the best literature of displacement and uprootedness by some of the most talented contemporary Latinx writers who have called Florida home.



Featuring fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by Richard Blanco, Jaquira Díaz, Patricia Engel, Jennine Capó Crucet, Reinaldo Arenas, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and many others, this collection of renowned and award-winning contributors includes several who are celebrated in their countries of origin but have not yet been discovered by readers in the United States. The writers in this volume--first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants to Florida from Cuba, Mexico, Honduras, Perú, Argentina, Chile, and other countries--reflect the diversity of Latinx experiences across the state.



Editor Anjanette Delgado characterizes the work in this collection as literature of uprootedness, literatura del desarraigo, a Spanish literary tradition and a term used by Reinaldo Arenas. With the heart-changing, here-and-there perspective of attempting life in environments not their own, these writers portray many different responses to displacement, each occupying their own unique place on what Delgado calls a spectrum of belonging.



Together, these writers explore what exactly makes Florida home for those struggling between memory and presence. In these works, as it is for many people seeking to make a new life in the United States, Florida is the place where the uprooted stop to catch their breath long enough to wonder, "What if I stayed? What if here could one day be my home?"


Contributors: Daniel
Reschinga Ana Menéndez Frances Negrón Muntaner Hernán Vera Álvarez Liz
Balmaseda Ariel Francisco Andreina Fernandez Amina Lolita Gautier PhD Jennine
Capó-Crucet Dainerys Machado Vento Carlos Harrison Legna Rodríguez
Iglesias Judith Ortiz Cofer Chantel Acevedo Guillermo Rosales Achy
Obejas Alex Segura Patricia Engel Anjanette Delgado Mia Leonin Carlos
Pintado Nilsa Ada Rivera Natalie Scenters-Zapico Pedro Medina León Caridad
Moro-Gronlier Aracelis González Asendorf Michael García-Juelle Jaquira
Díaz José Ignacio Chascas-Valenzuela Raúl Dopico Javier Lentino Yaddyra
Peralta

Let Me Tell You What I Mean

Let Me Tell You What I Mean

Didion, Joan
$23.00
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR - NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - From one of our most iconic and influential writers, the award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking a timeless collection of mostly early pieces that reveal what would become Joan Didion's subjects, including the press, politics, California robber barons, women, and her own self-doubt.

With a forward by Hilton Als, these twelve pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure. They showcase Joan Didion's incisive reporting, her empathetic gaze, and her role as an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time (The New York Times Book Review).

Here, Didion touches on topics ranging from newspapers (the problem is not so much whether one trusts the news as to whether one finds it), to the fantasy of San Simeon, to not getting into Stanford. In Why I Write, Didion ponders the act of writing: I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. From her admiration for Hemingway's sentences to her acknowledgment that Martha Stewart's story is one that has historically encouraged women in this country, even as it has threatened men, these essays are acutely and brilliantly observed. Each piece is classic Didion: incisive, bemused, and stunningly prescient.

Both Doug and Elsie loved this book. Doug says: Classic Didion, as if the essays  were held in casks and distilled to single-malt maturity. The flavors are ginger-rich like a potion in the hands of a  shaman. Do not miss these previously  uncollected essays from 1968-2000. 

Slouching Towards Bethlehem : Essays

Didion, Joan
$18.00

Wallflower at the Orgy

Ephron, Nora
$17.00
In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing

In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing

Ferrante, Elena
$20.00

Four new and revelatory essays by the author of My Brilliant Friend and The Lost Daughter.

In 2020, Claire Luchette in O, The Oprah Magazine described the beloved Italian novelist Elena Ferrante as "an oracle among authors." Here, in these four crisp essays, Ferrante offers a rare look at the origins of her literary powers. She writes about her influences, her struggles, and her formation as both a reader and a writer; she describes the perils of "bad language" and suggests ways in which it has long excluded women's truth; she proposes a choral fusion of feminine talent as she brilliantly discourses on the work of Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Ingeborg Bachmann, and many others.

Here is a subtle yet candid book by "one of the great novelists of our time" about adventures in literature, both in and out of the margins.

"Everyone should read everything with Elena Ferrante's name on it."--The Boston Globe

Book of (More) Delights

Book of (More) Delights

Gay, Ross
$19.99
From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us.

The author of the New York Times bestselling The Book of Delights is back with a new record of small wonders--and it is exactly the book we need right now.

In this second intimate collection of short, lyrical, genre-defying essays, again written daily over a year, one of America's most original and observant voices celebrates the ordinary, helping us see our extraordinary world anew. Among Ross Gay's funny, poetic, philosophical delights: bonding with a pipsqueak of a puppy, observing how his mother bakes eighteen kinds of cookies before her grandchildren arrive, noticing the tenderness he feels when he sees an adult wearing braces, and the recognition that for him the preamble is often more delightful than the thing itself: "Putting on your socks and tying up your shoes, and, if you're the type, filling up your water bottle and doing some light stretching, but skipping the walk entirely."

For Gay, practicing delight is an act of defiance in an often unjust world, as necessary as breathing. Even as he acknowledges racism, consumerism, ecological devastation, and our individual sorrows--he shows us that the un-delights make the delights even more so. As always, Gay revels in natural world--a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, the garlic that grows abundantly in his garden (along with collards and kale leaves and purple osaka mustards, pineapple sage, sweet potatoes, etc.), a field of sunflowers turning toward the sun, the shared bounty from a neighbor's fig tree--and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us.