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81) This is water: some thoughts, delivered on a significant occasion, about living a compassionate life
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In this rare peak into the personal life of the author of numerous bestselling novels, gain an understanding of David Foster Wallace and how he became the man that he was.
Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in This is Water. How does one keep from going through their comfortable,...
Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in This is Water. How does one keep from going through their comfortable,...
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Award winning author Annie Dillard examines the meaning of life through nature's mysteries and human history. From birth-defects in both animals and humans to the age-old conflict between religion and science, this exploration into the unknown will both intrigue and enlighten.
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Celebrated as one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, André Aciman has written a luminous series of linked essays about time, place, identity, and art that show him at his very finest. From beautiful and moving pieces about the memory evoked by the scent of lavender; to meditations on cities like Barcelona, Rome, Paris, and New York; to his sheer ability to unearth life secrets from an ordinary street corner, Alibis reminds the reader...
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Past compunction, expressly unbeholden, these twenty-four single-subject essays train focus on a startling miscellany of topics -Foot Washing, Dossiers, Br'er Rabbit, Housesitting, Man Roulette, the Locus Amoenus-that begin to unpack the essayist himself and his life's rotating concerns: sex and sexuality, poetry and poetics, subject positions in American labor (not excluding academia), and his upbringing in working-class, Primitive Baptist, central-piedmont...
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In the first half of Kate Zambreno's astoundingly original collection, the narrator regales us with incisive and witty swatches from a life lived inside a brilliant mind, meditating on aging and vanity, fame and failure, writing and writers, along with portraits of everyone from Susan Sontag to Amal Clooney, Maurice Blanchot to Louise Brooks. The series of essays that follow, on figures central to Zambreno's thinking, including Kathy Acker, David...
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Wayne Koestenbaum returns with a zesty and hyper-literate collection of personal and critical essays on the 1980s, including essays on major cultural figures such as Andy Warhol and Brigitte Bardot.
Wayne Koestenbaum has been described as "an impossible lovechild from a late-night, drunken three-way between Joan Didion, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag" (Bidoun). In My 1980s and Other Essays, a collection of extravagant range and style, he rises...
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Appears on these lists
2023 Summer Reading - Love the Earth
Green Hills All Staff Favorites
Green Hills Staff Favorites Adult Books
OBD National Poetry Month - ADULT (April)
Green Hills All Staff Favorites
Green Hills Staff Favorites Adult Books
OBD National Poetry Month - ADULT (April)
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"'In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.' So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature....
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"When Brian Doyle passed away at the age of sixty after a bout with brain cancer, he left behind a cult-like following of devoted readers who regard his writing as one of the best-kept secrets of the twenty-first century. Doyle writes with a delightful sense of wonder about the sanctity of everyday things, and about love and connection in all their forms: spiritual love, brotherly love, romantic love, and even the love of a nine-foot sturgeon. At...
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"Keenly observed and written with his insightful and deadpan sense of humor, [Rick Bragg] explores enduring Southern truths about home, place, spirit, table, and the regions' varied geographies, including his native Alabama, Cajun country, and the Gulf Coast. Everything is explored, from regional obsessions from college football and fishing, to mayonnaise and spoon bread, to the simple beauty of a fish on the hook. Collected from over a decade of...
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"In Farewell Transmission, Will McGrath guides us on a rambling quest into the enlightenment of other lives. Funny and heartbreaking, intimate and galvanizing, these essays venture from Yemen to Lesotho to the Bronx and beyond. We find Caravaggio at an Arizona homeless shelter and meet Elvis in rural Canada. We encounter diamond miners and professional wrestlers, night watchmen and righteous ex-cons--those wilderness prophets too frequently cropped...
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"Synthesizing Gravity gathers for the first time a thirty-year selection of Kay Ryan's probings into aesthetics, poetics, and the mind in pursuit of art. A bracing collection of critical prose, book reviews, and her private, previously unpublished soundings of poems and poets-including Robert Frost, Stevie Smith, Marianne Moore, William Bronk, and Emily Dickinson-Synthesizing Gravity bristles with Ryan's crisp wit, her keen off-kilter insights, and...
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The Devil is alive and well and living in America, Andrei Codrescu tells us, and with good reason. Nowhere else in the world--not even in Codrescu's native Transylvania--is he taken quite as seriously. When Codrescu gently derided the fundamentalist Christian belief in Rapture ("a pre-apocalyptic event during which all true believers would be suctioned off to heaven in a single woosh") in one of his commentaries on National Public, NPR received forty...
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Beyond Measure is a fascinating exploration of the rituals, routines, metrics and expectations through which we attempt to quantify and ascribe value to our lives. With mordant humor and penetrating intellect, Arndt casts her gaze beyond event-driven narratives to the machinery underlying them: judo competitions measured in weigh-ins and wait times; the significance of the elliptical's stationary churn; the rote scripts of dating apps; the stupefying...
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"In this candid and bluntly humorous collection of essays on a wide range of topics, Lurie begins with a portrait of her life at Radcliffe during World War II when the smartest women in the country were treated like second-class citizens, the most scholarly among them expected to work in factories to support the war effort. She moves on to her unheralded, clumsy attempts and near failure to be a writer and, finally having reached a level of recognition,...
97) Calamities
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A collection of linked essays concerned with the life and mind of the writer by one of the most original voices in contemporary literature. Each essay takes a day as its point of inquiry, observing the body as it moves through time, architecture, and space, gradually demanding a new logic and level of consciousness from the narrator and reader.
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"Sallie Tisdale is the author of seven books on such varied subjects as medical technology, her pioneer ancestors and Buddhist women teachers. Her many essays have appeared in Harper's, Conjunctions, The New Yorker, Antioch Review, Threepenny Review and many other journals. This first collection of work spans thirty years, and includes an introduction and brief epilogues to each essay. Tisdale's questing curiosity pursues subjects from the biology...
99) Beautifully unique sparkleponies: on myths, morons, free speech, football, and assorted absurdities
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A collection of personal essays from the NFL punter, best known for a searing letter in defense of marriage equality written to a Maryland politician, discusses religion, guns, the Pope, in-helmet cameras, and his children.
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"PEN/Bellwether Prize-winning writer Gayle Brandeis' essays explore both the writing life and the embodied life, along with potent intersection between the two. From the title essay investigating the connection between writing and breath to the final essay, which delves into Brandeis' experience with long-haul Covid and its impact on her creative voice, this collection is infused with the urgency of mortality, thrumming with grief, authenticity, and...
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