Our most eloquent champion of individualism, Emerson acknowledges at the same time the countervailing pressures of society in American life. Even as he extols what he called "the great and crescive self," he dramatizes and records its vicissitudes. Here is a collection of his classic essays, including the exhortation to "Self-Reliance" and the embattled realizations of "Circles" and "Experience." Here, too, are his wide-ranging discourses on history,...

Originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in the mid-nineteenth century, these philosophical essays were written by one of America's most celebrated thinkers. Poet and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes drew upon his youthful experiences at a Boston boarding house to add color and humor to his reflections. As the autocrat, or ruler, of the communal table, Holmes converses with his fellow boarders, including the Landlady, the Professor, the Divinity...

Twenty-six essays explore themes of family, community, and the natural world while considering such specific topics as modern motherhood, paper dolls, and high-tide oysters. Barbara Kingsolver has entertained and touched the lives of legions of readers with her critically acclaimed and bestselling novels The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams, and Pigs in Heaven. In these twenty-five newly conceived essays, she returns once again to her favored literary terrain...

Francis Bacon's classic collection of essays on various subjects. Includes the following essays: Of Truth, Of Death, Of Unity in Religion, Of Revenge, Of Adversity, Of Simulation and Dissimulation, Of Parents and Children, Of Marriage and Single Life, Of Envy, Of Love, Of Great Place, Of Boldness, Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature, Of Nobility, Of Seditions and Troubles, Of Atheism, Of Superstition, Of Travel, Of Empire, Of Counsel, Of Delays, Of...

"The essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like 'a fire-fighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them.' For the past twenty-five years, even as his novels have earned him worldwide acclaim, Franzen has led a second life as a risk-taking essayist. Now, at a moment when technology has inflamed tribal hatreds and the planet is beset by unnatural calamities, he is back with a new collection of essays...

"A collection of essays from #1 New York Times bestselling author Neal Stephenson"--

"Synthesizing Gravity gathers for the first time a thirty-year selection of Kay Ryan's probings into aesthetics, poetics, and the mind in pursuit of art. A bracing collection of critical prose, book reviews, and her private, previously unpublished soundings of poems and poets-including Robert Frost, Stevie Smith, Marianne Moore, William Bronk, and Emily Dickinson-Synthesizing Gravity bristles with Ryan's crisp wit, her keen off-kilter insights, and...

A plane crashes into a crowd of spectators at an air show, killing and injuring dozens. A thirteen-year-old girl named Ava is found huddled beneath a pocket of rubble with her best friend. He is injured and bleeding, and when Ava places her hands over him, his wounds heal. Ava has a unique gift: she can cure others' ailments. Now the whole world knows, and Ava is thrust into the spotlight. But Ava's gift costs her her own health, and as she grows...

The Collins edition of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde has long been recognized as the most comprehensive one-volume collection of Oscar Wilde's work available. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde contains his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, all his stories, plays and poems, and a substantial number of his essays and letters, all in their most authoritative texts. The Importance of Being Earnest, for example, is given in the four-act version,...

Proud of being socially inappropriate and sexually irresponsible, the author shares his carefree experiences.