Beautiful Essays

One of America’s most trusted theologians offers spiritual inspiration for every week of the year. This program is read by the author. A Beautiful Year: 52 Meditations on Faith, Wisdom, and Perseverance offers an essay for every week in the seasons of the Christian year: From Advent and...

Before the novel begins, someone is quoted: "The victor belongs to the spoils." — Anthony Patch. It reads like an epigraph borrowed from Sophocles or Ecclesiastes. It isn't. Anthony Patch is the novel's own protagonist, a man who over the eight years the book covers produces one published essay and nothing else — and Fitzgerald has taken his one moment of accidental wisdom, spoken once in passing and never mentioned again, and promoted it to the head of the book as its motto. The proverb it deforms — to the victor belong the spoils — describes a winner taking his due. Anthony's ...

Can a band comprised of six very talented but very different musicians make a difference with their music? What made it possible for Diamond Rio to weather the storms inherent in the fickle world of fame and fortune and go more than two decades without a single lineup change? Any reader in...

Paris Review contributor Katy Kelleher explores our obsession with gorgeous things, unveiling the fraught histories of makeup, flowers, perfume, silk, and other beautiful objects. April recommended reading by the New York Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, Goodreads, Jezebel, Christian Science...

Includes an introduction written and read by Jesmyn Ward, a foreword written and read by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan, and an afterword written and read by Professor James L. W. West III The only edition of the beloved classic that is authorized by Fitzgerald’s family...

“A book about a rare life, profound love, profound grief, anxiety, self-assurance, empowerment, aging, loss, and joy. It is nuanced, complex, insightful, helpful, and constantly surprising.” —Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of These Precious Days Writer and former model...

The life you already have, met with about fifteen percent more attention, is more than enough. This is not a book about adding things to your life. There is no morning routine to install, no expensive candles to buy, no five-thirty wake-up. The promise is smaller and stranger: the apartment you are in, the partner you have, the block you walk every day, the cup you have used since 2019, all of it already contains everything you have ever needed for a life that feels like a life. The work, if you can call it that, is to stop skipping the scenes you are already inside. Romanticize is a ...

What if the empty minute you keep fleeing is the one minute in the day that actually belongs to you? We treat boredom as a malfunction: something to patch with a screen before it can finish its sentence. The Beautiful Ache makes a different claim. Boredom is not emptiness. It is the un-commanded interval in a commanded life, and holding it, rather than fleeing it, is how a person becomes a self. This is not a digital detox plan. It is not a productivity system, a creativity hack, or a mindfulness program. It is a permission book: part memoir, part attention essay, part quiet argument that ...

A new collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories by American master Joyce Carol Oates, including the 2017 Pushcart Prize–winning “Undocumented Alien”. The diverse stories of Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates explore the most secret, intimate, and unacknowledged interior lives of characters...

A moving reflection on the author's father—plus a cat!—this is a beautiful short work of family history from one of our most beloved, iconic writers. Originally published in the New Yorker in 2019, and now presented in a full, unabridged form, Abandoning a Cat is a poignant, self-reflective...

In Search of a Beautiful Freedom brings together the best work from Farah Jasmine Griffin's rich forays on music, Black feminism, literature, the crises of Hurricane Katrina and COVID-19, and the Black artists she esteems. She moves from evoking the haunting strength of Odetta and the rise of soprano popular singers in the 1970s to the forging of a Black women's literary renaissance and the politics of Malcolm X through the lens of Black feminism. 

*Named one of TIME magazine's Most Anticipated Titles of 2022* From a Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author and poet comes a galvanizing meditation on the power of art and culture to illuminate America's unresolved problem with race. In the midst of civil unrest in the...

The internationally bestselling author's meditation on memory and family. In this meditation on memory and what makes us who we are, Haruki Murakami recalls his relationship with his father – the son of a priest who might have become a priest himself had a clerical error not sent him to fight...

Let It All Be Beautiful is a collection of 45 essays and energy practices designed to awaken the natural, authentic, and magnetic energy within all of us. Blending memoir, poetry, and lists with intentional practices, this book invites you to see yourself in your full glory. Whether you’re longing to feel more radiant, searching for healing, or motivated to become more mindful, this book will meet you where you are, celebrate everything you exude, and walk alongside you as you find your way home.

Walking Chickens in the Rain: Embracing the Chaos of Life is a wildly relatable, laugh-out-loud, heartwarming collection of essays for anyone who’s ever tried to hold it all together while everything—chickens included—ran wildly off-script. With wit, warmth, and muddy boots, Annie Rowen invites you into a life less filtered, full of flying feathers, sideways plans, and accidental wisdom. Whether she’s chasing a hen across the driveway in slippers or finding meaning in the cluck of an unimpressed bird, Annie reminds us that life doesn’t have to be tidy to be beautiful. This is not ...

The follow-up to Hanif Kureishi’s extraordinary hospital memoir, Shattered, this is the story of what came next – a year of living at home in London after paralysis, told through scenes of carers, physio, insomnia, sex, money, football, film sets, festivals and family. The song ‘Are You...

Animal expert Temple Grandin describes the benefits of the concrete thinking that accompanies her autism, in "Seeing in Beautiful, Precise Pictures," her contribution to NPR’s This I Believe series. This I Believe is a National Public Radio program that features Americans, from the famous to...

Five Alchemists. One book. A constellation of ideas. The second annual Alchemy Lecture was presented in November 2023 at York University to a sold out in-person audience and nearly one thousand live online viewers. Moderated by Dr. Christina Sharpe, the Alchemists—agile thinkers and...

Analyzing my own writings … i’ve realized that i was writing lots of books with love essays, but i was afraid of using the word … sex. Most probably i was not writing about it … at all … which is indeed a nonsense, cause the things are very well interconnected. Today … i look around myself … analyzing again and again … the connection between woman and man … trying to understand the meaning … studying the purpose of the connection … and realize that many of us see in that … a therapy … a way of healing ourselves. Well … analyzing more …i’ve came to the ...

Wyl Menmuir’s The Draw of the Sea is a beautifully written and deeply moving portrait of the Cornish Coast and the people who make their livings there, examining the ephemeral but universal pull the sea holds over the human imagination. ‘A beautiful portrait of lives shaped by the swell of...