Essays One by Lydia Davis
★★☆☆☆ Lydia Davis is the flagship writer of the “flash fiction” format: fictional works of extreme brevity, sometimes consisting of just a sentence or two. With a publishing record spanning back to the late...
Category: Essays
We Begin in Gladness by Craig Morgan Teicher
★★★★☆ Can any book, especially one as succinct (befitting a poet) as this one, explain the myriad factors that spark the production of a poem? Regardless of the precipitating factors, the key element, according...
Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know by Colm Tóibín
★★★☆☆ In 2012, Colm Tóibín published New Ways to Kill Your Mother, a collection of literary essays about writers and their families. This excellent book compiled texts ranging in subject from nineteenth century Irish...
The End of the End of the Earth by Jonathan Franzen
★★★☆☆ It’s fitting that Jonathan Franzen’s essay collection The End of the End of the Earth begins with a neurotic exploration of the essay format itself. Opening with this kind of self-doubt suggests that...
Late Essays 2006-2017 by J.M. Coetzee
★★★★★ Book reviews, literary essays and literary criticism all appear to belong under the same heading of “writing about books,” but the difference between these three fields is more nuanced that some may think....
Don’t Save Anything by James Salter
★★★☆☆ When James Salter died in 2015, he left behind some of the best American novels of the twentieth century. His 1957 debut, The Hunters, is a harrowing story of the Korean War built...
Silence in the Age of Noise by Erling Kagge
★★★★☆ What is silence? Where can it be found? Why is it now more important than ever? These are the questions that Erling Kagge explores in Silence in the Age of Noise, recently translated...
Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee
★★★★☆ With roughly 30 published books and more than 100 pieces in The New Yorker over the course of a half century, John McPhee is widely regarded a master and a pioneer of the...
Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose
★★★★☆ Part essays, part memoir, Durga Chew-Bose’s collection Too Much and Not the Mood is a thoughtful homage to the humans and passions that have contributed to the author’s present self. It is Chew-Bose’s...
