The Education of a British-Protected Child
Essays
Written by Chinua Achebe

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: October 5, 2010
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-47367-7 (0-307-47367-8)

From the celebrated author of Things Fall Apart comes a new collection of autobiographical essays—his first new book in more than twenty years.

Chinua Achebe’s characteristically eloquent and nuanced voice is everywhere present in these seventeen beautifully written pieces. From a vivid portrait of growing up in colonial Nigeria to considerations on... Read more >

Deep Play

Written by Diane Ackerman

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: August 8, 2000
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-77135-7 (0-679-77135-2)

With A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman let her free-ranging intellect loose on the natural world.  Now in Deep Play she tackles the realm of creativity, by exploring one of the most essential aspects of our characters: the abitlity to play.

"Deep play" is that more intensified form of play that... Read more >

Moon By Whale Light
And Other Adventures Among Bats,Penguins, Crocodilians, and Whales
Written by Diane Ackerman

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 29, 1992
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-74226-5 (0-679-74226-3)

In a rare blend of scientific fact and poetic truth, the acclaimed author of A Natural History of the Senses explores the activities of whales, penguins, bats, and crocodilians, plunging headlong into nature and coming up with highly entertaining treasures. Read more >

A Natural History of the Senses

Written by Diane Ackerman

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 10, 1991
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-73566-3 (0-679-73566-6)

Diane Ackerman's lusciously written grand tour of the realm of the senses includes conversations with an iceberg in Antarctica and a professional nose in New York, along with dissertations on kisses and tattoos, sadistic cuisine and the music played by the planet Earth.

PRAISE FOR A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SENSES

"Delightful... Read more >

The Rarest of the Rare
Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds
Written by Diane Ackerman

Format: Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 14, 1997
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-77623-9 (0-679-77623-0)

Ackerman journeys in search of monarch butterflies and short-tailed albatrosses, monk seals, and golden lion tamarin monkeys: the world's rarest creatures and their vanishing habitats. She delivers a rapturous celebration of other species that is also a warning to our own. Traveling from the Amazon rain forest to a forbidding island... Read more >

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints
Essays
Written by Joan Acocella

Format: Trade Paperback, 560 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 12, 2008
Price: $18.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-27576-9 (0-307-27576-0)

Here is a dazzling collection from Joan Acocella, one of our most admired cultural critics: thirty-one essays that consider the life and work of some of the most influential artists of our time (and two saints: Joan of Arc and Mary Magdalene).

Acocella writes about Primo Levi, Holocaust survivor and chemist... Read more >

Cotton Tenants
Three Families
Written by James Agee
Edited by John Summers
Photographed by Walker Evans
Introduction by Adam Haslett

Format: Hardcover, 224 pages
Publisher: Melville House
On Sale: May 29, 2013
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 978-1-61219-212-3 (1-61219-212-2)

In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a four-hundred-page prose symphony about three tenant farming families in Hale County, Alabama at the height of the Great Depression. The book shattered journalistic and literary conventions. Critic Lionel Trilling called it the “most realistic and most... Read more >

Algren at Sea
Notes from a Sea Diary & Who Lost an American?#Travel Writings
Written by Nelson Algren

Format: Trade Paperback, 464 pages
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
On Sale: January 6, 2009
Price: $22.95
ISBN: 978-1-58322-841-8 (1-58322-841-1)

Nelson Algren’s two travel writing books describe his journeys through the seamier sides of great American cities and the international social and political landscapes of the mid-1960s. Algren at Sea brings them together in one volume.

Notes from a Sea Diary offers one of the most remarkable appraisals of Ernest Hemingway ever... Read more >

Nonconformity
Writing on Writing
Written by Nelson Algren
Afterword by Daniel Simon
Noted by C.S. O'Brien

Format: Trade Paperback, 144 pages
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
On Sale: November 4, 1997
Price: $9.95
ISBN: 978-1-888363-62-3 (1-888363-62-2)

The struggle to write with deep emotion is the subject of this extraordinary book, the previously unpublished credo of one of America's greatest 20th-century writers.

“You don’t write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich,” writes Nelson Algren... Read more >

Visiting Mrs. Nabokov
And Other Excursions
Written by Martin Amis

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 2, 1995
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-75793-1 (0-679-75793-7)

To this tantalizing nonfiction collection Martin Amis brings the same megawatt wit, wickedly acute perception, and ebullient wordplay that characterize his novels. He encompasses the full range of contemporary politics and culture (high and low) while also traveling to China for soccer with Elton John and to London's darts-crazy pubs in... Read more >

The War Against Cliche
Essays and Reviews 1971-2000
Written by Martin Amis

Format: Trade Paperback, 528 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: July 16, 2002
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-72716-0 (0-375-72716-7)

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism

In this virtuosic, career-spanning collection he takes on James Joyce and Elvis Presley, Nabokov and English football, Jane Austen and Penthouse Forum, William Burroughs and Hillary Clinton. But above all, Amis is concerned with literature, and with the deadly cliches–not only of... Read more >

In Other Worlds
SF and the Human Imagination
Written by Margaret Atwood

Format: Hardcover, 272 pages
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
On Sale: October 11, 2011
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-53396-6 (0-385-53396-9)

In Other Worlds: Science Fiction and the Human Imagination is Margaret Atwood’s account of her rela­tionship with the literary form we have come to know as science fiction. This relationship has been lifelong, stretch­ing from her days as a child reader in the 1940s through her time as a graduate student... Read more >

Negotiating with the Dead
A Writer on Writing
Written by Margaret Atwood

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: September 9, 2003
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3260-0 (1-4000-3260-1)

What do we mean when we say that someone is a writer? Is he or she an entertainer? A high priest of the god Art? An improver of readers’ minds and morals? And who, for that matter, are these mysterious readers? In this wise and irresistibly quotable book, one of the... Read more >

Forewords and Afterwords

Written by W. H. Auden

Format: Trade Paperback, 544 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 19, 1990
Price: $20.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-72485-8 (0-679-72485-0)

The essays in this collection were written as reviews, mainly for The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, on books by or about Alexander Pope, Vincent van Gogh, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, and A. E. Housman, or as introductions to editions of the classical Greek writers... Read more >

Great Books for High School Kids
A Teachers' Guide to Books That Can Change Teens' Lives
Edited by Rick Ayers and Amy Crawford

Format: Trade Paperback, 260 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: May 15, 2004
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-3255-8 (0-8070-3255-7)

Teachers Rick Ayers and Amy Crawford always wanted to find a guide to the vast world of great books for teenagers-one that didn’t talk down or moralize. When they couldn’t find one, they set out to create it.

An early prototype offered at Cody’s Bookstore in Berkeley, California, was an instant... Read more >

The Poetics of Space

Written by Gaston Bachelard

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: April 1, 1994
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-6473-3 (0-8070-6473-4)

“A magical book. . . . A prism through which all worlds from literary creation to housework to aesthetics to carpentry take on enhanced-and enchanted-significances. Every reader of it will never see ordinary spaces in ordinary ways. Instead the reader will see with the soul of the eye, the glint of... Read more >

Double Fold
Libraries and the Assault on Paper
Written by Nicholson Baker

Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: April 9, 2002
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-72621-7 (0-375-72621-7)

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

The ostensible purpose of a library is to preserve the printed word. But for fifty years our country’s libraries–including the Library of Congress–have been doing just the opposite, destroying hundreds of thousands of historic newspapers and replacing them with microfilm copies that are difficult... Read more >

The Cross of Redemption
Uncollected Writings
Written by James Baldwin
Edited by Randall Kenan

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 6, 2011
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-27596-7 (0-307-27596-5)

The Cross of Redemption is a revelation by an American literary master: a gathering of essays, articles, polemics, reviews, and interviews that have never before appeared in book form.

James Baldwin was one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century, renowned for his fierce engagement with issues... Read more >

The Cross of Redemption
Uncollected Writings
Written by James Baldwin
Introduction by Randall Kenan

Format: Hardcover, 336 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: August 24, 2010
Price: $26.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-37882-8 (0-307-37882-9)

A revelation of an American literary master: a gathering of essays, articles, polemics, reviews, and interviews that have never before appeared in book form.

James Baldwin was one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century, renowned for his fierce engagement with issues haunting our common history... Read more >

Notes of a Native Son

Written by James Baldwin
Foreword by Edward P. Jones

Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: November 20, 2012
Price: $27.95
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0611-5 (0-8070-0611-4)

A new edition published on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Baldwin’s death, including a new introduction by an important contemporary writer

Since its original publication in 1955, this first nonfiction collection of essays by James Baldwin remains an American classic. His impassioned essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and... Read more >

Notes of a Native Son

Written by James Baldwin
Illustrated by Edward P. Jones

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: July 9, 1984
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-6431-3 (0-8070-6431-9)

Originally published in 1955, James Baldwin’s first nonfiction book has become a much-studied classic. These searing essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and Americans abroad remain as powerful today as when they were written.

“He named for me the things you feel but couldn’t utter. . . ... Read more >

Notes of a Native Son

Written by James Baldwin
Foreword by Edward P. Jones

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: November 20, 2012
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0623-8 (0-8070-0623-8)

Since its original publication in 1955, this first nonfiction collection of essays by James Baldwin remains an American classic. His impassioned essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written. This new edition, published for the 25th... Read more >

Dreaming Up America

Written by Russell Banks

Format: Trade Paperback, 144 pages
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
On Sale: February 2, 2010
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-1-58322-891-3 (1-58322-891-8)

With America ever under global scrutiny, Russell Banks contemplates the questions of our origins, values, heroes, conflicts, and contradictions. He writes with conversational ease and emotional insight, drawing on contemporary politics, literature, film, and his knowledge of American history.

“Russell Banks is not only one of our greatest novelists but also a... Read more >

Bento's Sketchbook

Written by John Berger

Format: Hardcover, 176 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: November 8, 2011
Price: $32.50
ISBN: 978-0-307-37995-5 (0-307-37995-7)

Bento's Sketchbook is an exploration of the practice of drawing, as well as a meditation on how we perceive and seek to explore our ever-changing relationship with the world around us.

“With his clear, sinuous prose, he gives an account of how the contours of reality ‘harass’ the act of drawing. ... Read more >

Hold Everything Dear
Dispatches on Survival and Resistance
Written by John Berger

Format: Trade Paperback, 160 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: November 11, 2008
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-38673-1 (0-307-38673-2)

From one of the most impassioned of writers of our time, this powerful collection of essays offers a stark portrait of post-9/11 realities. John Berger occupies a unique position in the international cultural landscape: artist, filmmaker, poet, philosopher, novelist, and essayist, he is also a deeply thoughtful political activist. In Hold... Read more >