More than sixty pieces exploring a broad range of interests and topics, including (but not limited to): authors past and present; music; storytelling; comics; bookshops; travel; fairy tales; America; inspiration; libraries; ghosts; and the title piece, at turns touching and self-deprecating, which recounts the author's experiences at the 2010 Academy Awards in Hollywood.

Honoring the author's mastery of the essay form, brings together such classic works as "Shooting an Elephant" with passages from his wartime diary and lesser-known journalistic pieces that weave together the personal and political in studies of his boyhood in an English boarding school and his experiences during the Spanish Civil War.

Covers the history of language from its beginnings to the explosion of English as a global language in the twentieth century.

Collects the best of the author's essays from five decades of the "Irish Times" to reflect a changing culture as well as her observations on such topics as the royal wedding, waitressing, and boring airline companions.

A generous and varied selection-the only hardcover edition available-of the literary and political writings of one of the greatest essayists of the twentieth century. Though best known as the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell left an even more lastingly significant achievement in his voluminous essays, which dealt with all the great social, political, and literary questions of the day and exemplified an incisive prose style...

"Bill Bryson turns away from the highways and byways of middle America, so hilariously depicted in his bestselling The Lost Continent, for a fast, exhilarating ride along the Route 66 of American language and popular culture. In Made in America, Bryson de-mythologizes his native land - explaining how a dusty desert hamlet with neither woods nor holly became Hollywood, how the Wild West wasn't won, why Americans say 'lootenant' and 'Toosday', how Americans...

John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, first published in 1865, stands as a classic nineteenth-century statement on the natures and duties of men and women. Although widely popular in its time, the work in its entirety has been out of print since the early twentieth century. This volume returns Sesame and Lilies to easy availability and reunites the two halves of the work: Of Kings' Treasuries, in which Ruskin critiques, Victorian manhood, and Of Queens'...

"A posthumous collection of journalism and other writings by Hilary Mantel, revealing in spectacular breadth the beloved writer's cutting wit and singular voice on books, films, the royals, and her own life"-- "In addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. 'Ink is a generative fluid,' she explains....

Tremendous Trifles is comprised of 39 chapters, each functioning as their own essay or story. With whimsical, light-hearted prose, vivid figurative language, and unparalleled insight, Chesterton covers a variety of philosophical principles of everyday life. Chesterton often used ordinary events and objects to explain deeper matters. Using relatable and accessible examples, Tremendous Trifles also test biases and preconceived ideas, specifically in...

American author, naturalist, and abolitionist, Henry David Thoreau was a principal figure of the 19th century movement of Transcendentalism. Central to the philosophy is a belief that people, who are inherently good, are corrupted by the organized institutions of society and that consequently the best community is one that is built upon on independence and self-reliance. This corrupting influence is discussed in one of Thoreau's most famous essay,...