Literary Collections : Essays

A Room of One´s Own is a curious essay. Presented originally as two speeches to the Arts Society at Newham in 1928, the work is remarkable for its distinctive tone, for Woolf´s witty and deceptively casual style, and for her decision to largely eschew abstract arguments in favor of narrative, anecdote and the guidance of a strong, abiding first person narrator. She also, refreshingly, avoids doctrine and bombast, instead infusing her arguments with subtlety, curiosity and open-minded speculation. more...

Price: $6.99

"David Sedaris's ability to transform the mortification of everyday life into wildly entertaining art," ( The Christian Science Monitor ) is elevated to wilder and more entertaining heights than ever in this remarkable new book. Trying to make coffee when the water is shut off, David considers using the water in a vase of flowers and his chain of associations takes him from the French countryside to a hilariously uncomfortable memory of buying drugs in a mobile home in rural North Carolina . In essay after essay, Sedaris proceeds from bizarre conundrums of daily life-having a lozenge fall from your mouth into the lap of a fellow passenger on a plane or armoring the windows with LP covers to protect the house from neurotic songbirds-to the most deeply resonant human truths. Culminating in a brilliant account of his venture to Tokyo in order to quit smoking, David Sedaris's sixth essay collection is a new masterpiece of comic writing from "a writer worth treasuring" ( Seattle Times ). Praise for When You Are Engulfed in Flames :. "Older, wiser, smarter and meaner, Sedaris...defies the odds once again by delivering an intelligent take on the banalities of an absurd life." -- Kirkus Reviews. This latest collection proves that not only does Sedaris still have it, but he's also getting better....Sedaris's best stuff will still--after all this time--move, surprise, and entertain." -- Booklist. Table of Contents:. It's Catching. Keeping Up. The Understudy. This Old House. Buddy, Can You Spare a Tie?. Road Trips. What I Learned. That's Amore. The Monster Mash. In the Waiting Room. Solutions to Saturday's Puzzle. Adult Figures Charging Toward a Concrete Toadstool. Memento Mori. All the Beauty You Will Ever Need. Town and Country. Aerial. The Man in the Hut. Of Mice and Men. April in Paris. Crybaby. Old Faithful. The Smoking Section. more...

Price: $15.99

Following the Equator is a non-fiction travelogue published by American author Mark Twain in 1897. Twain was practically bankrupt in 1894 due to a failed investment into a "revolutionary" typesetting machine. In an attempt to extricate himself from debt of $100,000 (equivalent of about $2 million in 2005) he undertook a tour of the British Empire in 1895, a route chosen to provide numerous opportunities for lectures in the English language. In Following the Equator, an account of that travel, the author unmasks and criticizes racism, imperialism and missionary zeal in observations woven into the narrative with classical Twain wit... more...

Price: $4.99

''There is no one quite like Barbara Kingsolver in contemporary literature,'' raves the Washington Post Book World, and it is right. She has been nominated three times for the ABBY award, and her critically acclaimed writings consistently enjoy spectacular commercial success as they entertain and touch her legions of loyal fans. In High Tide in Tucson, she returnsto her familiar themes of family, community, the common good and the natural world. The title essay considers Buster, a hermit crab that accidentally stows away on Kingsolver's return trip from the Bahamas to her desert home, and turns out to have manic-depressive tendencies. Buster is running around for all he's worth -- one can only presume it's high tide in Tucson. Kingsolver brings a moral vision and refreshing sense of humor to subjects ranging from modern motherhood to the history of private property to the suspended citizenship of human beings in the Animal Kingdom. Beautifully packaged, with original illustrations by well-known illustrator Paul Mirocha, these wise lessons on the urgent business of being alive make it a perfect gift for Kingsolver's many fans. more...

Price: $9.95

The House of the Seven Gables is a novel written in 1851 by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. The novel begins: Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm. The Pyncheon family actually existed and were ancestors of American novelist Thomas Pynchon. The House of the Seven Gables likely bears no relation to the novel, as its seven-gabled state was unknown to Hawthorne and he often stated that it was a work of complete fiction based on no particular house. This seven gabled house which has been suggested to be Hawthorne''s inspiration is a museum in Salem, Massachusetts that was founded to fund an accompanying settlement house. — Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Intuitive navigation. . Text annotation and mark-up. more...

Price: $3.99