Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick

$22.99 AUD

Category: Essays

'Hardwick's sentences are burned in my brain.' - Susan Sontag Sidelined. Betrayed. Killed off. Elizabeth Hardwick considers the history of women and literature. She imagines the lives of the Brontes, Woolf, Eliot and Plath; the fate of literary wives such as Zelda Fitzgerald and Jane Carlyle; and the s tories of fictional heroines from Richardson's Clarissa to Ibsen's Nora. With her radiant sympathy and wisdom, Hardwick mines their childhoods, marriages, and personalities to probe the costs of sex, love, and marriage. She asks who is the seducer and who the seduced; who the victim and who the victor. Both timely and timeless, these devastatingly stylish essays are nothing less than a reckoning, dissecting relations between the sexes, women and writing, work and life. ...Show more

Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write - An Autobiography Through Essays by Claire Messud

$29.99 AUD

Category: Essays

Bone House by Beverley Farmer

$29.95 AUD

Category: Essays

Explores the nature of grief and mourning, illness and separation, language and silence, and the power of vision and memory to counteract time.

Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby

$22.99 AUD

Category: Essays

Staring down the barrel of her fortieth year, Samantha Irby is confronting the ways her life has changed since the days she could work a full 11 hour shift on 4 hours of sleep, change her shoes and put mascara on in the back of a moving cab and go from drinks to dinner to the club without a second thoug ht. Recently, things are more 'Girls Gone Mild.' In Wow, No Thank You Irby discusses the actual nightmare of living in a rural idyll, weighs in on body negativity (loving yourself is a full-time job with shitty benefits) and poses the essential question: Sure sex is fun but have you ever googled a popular meme? ...Show more

One-Way Street and Other Writings by Walter Benjamin

$24.99 AUD

Category: Essays | Series: Penguin Modern Classics Ser.

Walter Benjamin - philosopher, essayist, literary and cultural theorist - was one of the most original writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. This new selection brings together Benjamin's major works, including "One-Way Street", his dreamlike, aphoristic observations of urban life in Weimar Germ any; "Unpacking My Library", a delightful meditation on book-collecting; the confessional "Hashish in Marseille"; and, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", his seminal essay on how technology changes the way we appreciate art. Also including writings on subjects ranging from Proust to Kafka, violence to surrealism, this is the essential volume on one of the most prescient critical voices of the modern age. It contains: "Unpacking My Library"; "One-Way Street"; "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"; "Brief History of Photography"; "Hashish in Marseille"; "On the Critique of Violence"; "The Job of the Translator"; "Surrealism"; "Franz Kafka"; and, "Picturing Proust". ...Show more

Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor by Vladimir Nabokov; Brian Boyd (Editor); Anastasia Tolstoy (Editor)

$22.99 AUD

Category: Essays | Series: Penguin Modern Classics Ser.

'Masterly, hilarious, truly insightful' - Philip Hensher, The Spectator A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2019 The last major collection of Nabokov's published material, Think, Write, Speak brings together a treasure trove of previously uncollected texts from across the author's extraordina ry career. Each phase of his wandering life is included, from a precocious essay written while still at Cambridge in 1921, through his fame in the aftermath of the publication of Lolita to the final, fascinating interviews given shortly before his death in 1977. Introduced and edited by his biographer Brian Boyd, this is an essential work for anyone who has been drawn into Nabokov's literary orbit. Here he is at his most inspirational, curious, playful, misleading and caustic. The seriousness of his aesthetic credo, his passion for great writing and his mix of delight and dismay at his own, sudden global fame in the 1950s are all brilliantly delineated. ...Show more

Not a Novel : Collected Writings and Reflections by Jenny Erpenbeck

$29.99 AUD

Category: Essays

A collection of intimate and explosive essays on literature, life, history, politics and place from the award-winning author of Go, Went, Gone and The End of Days. Not a Novel gathers together the best of Jenny Erpenbeck's non-fiction. Drawing from her 25 years of thinking and writing, the book plots a journey through the works and subjects that have inspired and influenced her. Written with the same clarity and insight that characterise her fiction, the pieces range from literary criticism and reflections on Germany's history, to the autobiographical essays where Erpenbeck forgoes the literary cloak to write from a deeply personal perspective about life and politics, hope and despair, and the role of the writer in grappling with these forces. Here we see one of the most searching of European writers reckoning with her country's divided past in all its complexity, and responding to the world today with insight, intelligence and humanity. ...Show more

2020: The Year That Changed Us by The Conversation; Molly Glassey (Contribution by)

$21.99 AUD

Category: Essays

In January 2020, Australia went from battling one of its worst-ever bushfire seasons to preparing for COVID-19 to hit its shores. What ensued was crisis: a pandemic, political upheaval, an international human rights movement, global recession and localised emergencies dwarfed by a world spinning on an a xis of turmoil.These essays from leading thinkers and contributors to The Conversation examine what will be one of the most significant and punishing years in the 21st century. 2020: The Year That Changed Us explores the lessons that cannot be overlooked from this remarkable year, and the most intelligent way forward.Contributors include:Michelle GrattanPeter MartinRaina MacIntyreJoëlle GergisPeter GresteThalia AnthonyShino KonishiFiona Stanley ...Show more

Fire Flood and Plague: Australian Writers Respond to This Extraordinary Year by Sophie Cunningham ed.

$29.99 AUD

Category: Essays

Writers, scientists, historians, journalists and commentators consider subjects as broad as culture and the arts, working as a doctor, travel, domestic violence, security, immigration, the death of a loved one, geopolitics, distance and zoom to ensure we never forget the experience of this pile-on of a year. Including original pieces from Lenore Taylor, Nyadol Nuon, Christos Tsiolkas, Melissa Lucashenko, Billy Griffiths, Jess Hill, Kim Scott, Brenda Walker, Jane Rawson, Omar Sakr, Richard McGregor, Jennifer Mills, Gabrielle Chan, John Birmingham, Tim Flannery, Rebecca Giggs, Kate Cole-Adams, George Megalogenis, James Bradley, Alison Croggan, Melanie Cheng, Kirsten Tranter, Tom Griffiths, Joelle Gergis and Delia Falconer.   ...Show more

The Scandal of the Century: And Other Writings by Gabriel García Marquez

$22.99 AUD

Category: Essays

I don't want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude or for the Nobel Prize but rather for my journalism," Gabriel Garcia Marquez said in the final years of his life. And while some of his journalistic writings have been made available over the years, this is the first volume to gather a repr esentative selection from across the first four decades of his career - years during which he worked as a full-time, often muckraking, and controversial journalist, even as he penned the fiction that would bring him the Nobel Prize in 1982. The Scandal of the Century brings together the first pieces he wrote while working for newspapers in the coastal Colombian cities of Cartagena and Barranquilla . . . his longer, more fiction-like reportage from Paris and Rome . . . his monthly columns for Spain's El Pa?s. And while all the work points in style, wit, depth, and passion to his fiction, these fifty pieces are, more than anything, a revelation of the writer working at the profession he believed to be "the best in the world. ...Show more

Our Women on the Ground by Zahra Hankir

$19.99 AUD

Category: Essays

'Determination, grit and humour shine through' Lindsey Hilsum, Observer Nineteen Arab women journalists speak out about what it's like to report on their changing homelands in this first-of-its-kind essay collection. A growing number of intrepid Arab and Middle Eastern sahafiyat - female journalists - a re working tirelessly to shape nuanced narratives about their changing homelands, often risking their lives on the front lines of war. Here, nineteen of these women tell us, in their own words, about what it's like to report on conflicts that (quite literally) hit close to home. Their daring and heartfelt stories, told here for the first time, shatter stereotypes about the region's women and provide an urgently needed perspective on a part of the world that is frequently misunderstood. With a foreword by CNN chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour. INCLUDING ESSAYS BY: Donna Abu-Nasr, Aida Alami, Hannah Allam, Jane Arraf, Lina Attalah, Nada Bakri, Shamael Elnoor, Zaina Erhaim, Asmaa al-Ghoul, Hind Hassan, Eman Helal, Zeina Karam, Roula Khalaf, Nour Malas, Hwaida Saad, Amira Al-Sharif, Heba Shibani, Lina Sinjab, and Natacha Yazbeck ...Show more

Index Cards - Selected Essays by Moyra Davey

$44.99 AUD

Category: Essays

In these essays, the acclaimed artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey often begins with a daily encounter--with a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book--and links that subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections, until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking. While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists--Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman, and Roland Barthes, among many others--in a way that is both elliptical and direct, clearheaded and personal, prismatic and self-examining, layering narratives to reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life. ...Show more