best essays by authors

1. David Sedaris - Laugh, Kookaburra. A great family drama takes place against the backdrop of the Australian wilderness. And the Kookaburra laughs…. This is one of the top essays of the lot. It's a great mixture of family reminiscences, travel writing, and advice on what's most important in life.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass, Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer's gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there's one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp.When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex ...

After the jump, our picks for the 25 greatest essay collections of all time. Feel free to disagree with us, praise our intellect, or create an entirely new list in the comments. The Book of My ...

Walter Kirn. Lists about novelists, poets, short story authors, journalists, essayists, and playwrights, from simple rankings to fun facts about the men and women behind the pens. Over 1K readers have voted on the 75+ Best Essayists Of All Time, Ranked. Current Top 3: Michel de Montaigne, George Orwell, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I found over 12 best essays lists and several essay anthologies and combined the essays into one meta-list. ... The Best Writers and their Best Works, Part 1: 850 BCE - 1870. The Best Writers and their Best Works, Part 2: 1871-Present; My Five-Star Books. My Checklists - Literature;

The Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy Novels, as Chosen by Fans: the 2024 Hugo Award. Every year, members of the World Science Fiction Society nominate writers for the Hugo Award, then vote for the winner. All speculative fiction is eligible - fantasy as well as sci-fi - and the shortlist is one of the most prestigious for both genres. Here, Sylvia ...

Magic Hours by Tom Bissell "Award-winning essayist Tom Bissell explores the highs and lows of the creative process. He takes us from the set of The Big Bang Theory to the first novel of Ernest Hemingway to the final work of David Foster Wallace; from the films of Werner Herzog to the film of Tommy Wiseau to the editorial meeting in which Paula Fox's work was relaunched into the world.

3. Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit. (Viking) 12 Rave • 13 Positive • 1 Mixed. Read an excerpt from Orwell's Roses here. "… on its simplest level, a tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation.

Nonfiction. Longreads Best of 2020: Essays. A small sampling of standout essays published this year. by Cheri Lucas Rowlands December 18, 2020October 13, 2022. All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad. All through December, we're featuring Longreads' Best of 2020. This year, our editors picked and featured hundreds of ...

4. Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos. "In her new book, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, memoirist Melissa Febos handily recuperates the art of writing the self from some of the most common biases against it: that the memoir is a lesser form than the novel.

Robert Atwan's favorite lit­er­ary genre is the essay. As edi­tor and founder of The Best Amer­i­can Essays series, Atwan has read thou­sands of exam­ples of the remark­ably flex­i­ble form. "Essays can be lots of things, maybe too many things," writes Atwan in his fore­ward to the 2012 install­ment in the Best Amer­i­can series, "but at the core ...

9. ' Bookshop Memories '. As well as writing on politics and being a writer, Orwell also wrote perceptively about readers and book-buyers - as in this 1936 essay, published the same year as his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which combined both bookshops and writers (the novel focuses on Gordon Comstock, an aspiring poet).

The Art of the Personal Essay — anthology, edited by Phillip Lopate. 6. Bad Feminist — Roxane Gay. 7. The Best American Essays of the Century — anthology, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. 8. The Best American Essays series — published every year, series edited by Robert Atwan. 9. Book of Days — Emily Fox Gordon.

A Room of One's Own. Virginia Woolf | 4.75. A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on the 24th of October, 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928.

Fortunately, when I worked with Joyce Carol Oates on The Best American Essays of the Century (that's the last century, by the way), we weren't restricted to ten selections. So to make my list ...

The Destiny of Colored Americans : "Slavery is the peculiar weakness of America, as well as its peculiar crime." A Glorious Resurrection: "My long-crushed spirit rose." W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) W.E.B. Du Bois was an American scholar and human rights activist, a respected author and historian of literature.

Sojourner Truth. "The Clan of One-Breasted Women," Terry Tempest Williams. The Full List. (all essays by writers with at least one duplication or three disparate essays anthologized) "The Great American Desert," Edward Abbey. "The Cowboy and his Cow," Edward Abbey. "Havasu," Edward Abbey. "Superman and Me," Sherman Alexie.

Elif Batuman's first collection of essays, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, published last year, reveals her to be a complete nerd — in the best of ...

16) Reflections on Writing by Henry Miller. Henry Miller. Author of the infamously banned Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller blurs the line between autobiography and fiction. "Miller's revolution, though, was not a political one," writes Ralph B. Sipper in the Los Angeles Times' Miller's Tale: Henry Hits 100.

Eudora Welty. On E.B. White's "Charlotte's Web". Eudora Welty's review of this timeless tale is a sheer delight, starting from its headline ("Life in the Barn Was Very Good") and its ...

So for starters, here are our top 10 books about writing: On Writing by Stephen King. The Kick-Ass Writer by Chuck Wendig. Dreyer's Englis h by Benjamin Dreyer. The Elements of Style by Strunk, White, and Kalman. The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.

Zadie Smith's Intimations, Helen Macdonald's Vesper Flights, Claudia Rankine's Just Us, and Samantha Irby's Wow, No Thank You all feature among the Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2020. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub's "Rotten Tomatoes for books.". 1.

31. The Creative Penn. Besides being a bestselling author on various topics, Joanna Penn is also a leading voice in self-publishing. On her punnily named site, you'll find abundant information related to writing, self-publishing, marketing, and everything else you might need to make a living as a writer.

This resource is dedicated to archiving, fan fiction, fan art, fan videos, podfic, and more. As of January 1, 2024, the site hosts 12,290,000 works. Many authors cite AO3 as the place where they learned to hone their writing skills, bolstered by feedback from fellow fans and writers. 2. Association of Writers and Writing Programs. AWPWriter.org

K.M. Weiland is the award-winning and internationally-published author of the acclaimed writing guides Outlining Your Novel, Structuring Your Novel, and Creating Character Arcs. A native of western Nebraska, she writes historical and fantasy novels and mentors authors on her award-winning website Helping Writers Become Authors.