"In 1976 Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene caused a seismic shift in our understanding of biology by proffering the gene-centered view of evolution and was called 'The best work of popular science ever written" by the New York Review of Books. Then in 2006, Dawkins wrote The God Delusion, transforming the world's cultural and intellectual landscape once again with this takedown of religious faith. In this carefully curated collection of forty-two...

The best-selling author offers a new collection of satirical and humorous essays that chronicle his own life and ordinary moments that turn beautifully absurd, including how he coped with the pandemic, his thoughts on becoming an orphan in his seventh decade, and the battle-scared America he discovered when he resumed touring.

When Jordan Kisner was a child, she was saved by Jesus Christ at summer camp, much to the confusion of her nonreligious family. She was, she writes, “just naturally reverent,” a fact that didn’t change when she—much to her own confusion—lost her faith as a teenager. Not sure why her religious conviction had come or where it had gone, she did what anyone would do: “You go about the great American work of assigning yourself to other gods:...

"A collection of touching and hilarious personal essays, stories, poems-- accompanied by his trademark illustrations-- covering topics such as mental health, happiness, and what it means to belong"--

"A monumental, canon-defining anthology of four centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith. Many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves--sometimes critically--to American values, but even in those that don't, one can detect a subtext about being American. The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable...

"From the Booker-shortlisted author of Umbrella, a world-girdling collection of writings inspired by a life lived in and for literature. From one of the most unusual and distinctive writers working today, dubbed "the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation" by The Guardian, Will Self's Why Read is a cornucopia of thoughtful and brilliantly witty essays on writing and literature. Self takes us with him: from the foibles of his typewriter...

"You fall down. You get hurt. You get up again. You know Jennifer Weiner as many things: a bestselling author, a Twitter phenomenon, and "an unlikely feminist enforcer" (The New Yorker). She's also a mom, a daughter, and a sister; a former rower and current runner; a best friend and a reality TV junkie. Here, in her first foray into nonfiction, she takes the raw stuff of her personal life and spins it into a collection of essays on womanhood as uproariously...

"A companion to Nina MacLaughlin's luminous Summer Solstice. The year is fading. Light is fading. Solstice means sun-stilled. It's a wild sort of stilling, a thrashing frenzied sort of stilling, a stopping of time, a de-metering, a holding of the breath as the tension builds, as the dark expands, until it cracks and the light drives in. That's the hope. Pomegranate, holly branch, birch switch, mistletoe. We'll leaf with life and pass below the secret...