Books like The fun stuff, and other essays by Wood, James

David Sedaris, fresh from New York and settled in Paris, delivers a collection of sharp, funny essays – from his battle with a harsh French teacher to family quirks and cultural mishaps.

A collection of David Foster Wallace stories that examine everyday moments with sharp wit and inventive prose.

James Baldwin’s first nonfiction collection, “Notes of a Native Son,” offers powerful essays on Harlem life, civil rights, and race relations that remain relevant today.

Joan Didion reflects on motherhood, aging, and grief through memories of her daughter’s wedding and her own sense of failure, offering a candid, intimate memoir of parenthood and personal history.

A compelling collection of essays where Zadie Smith blends personal reflection, literary criticism, and cultural commentary, exploring topics from film and American politics to identity and creative process.

"Jeanette Winterson argues in this collection for the importance of art in all our lives. In ten intertwined essays, the acclaimed author of such recent novels as Written on the Body and Art & Lies proposes art as an active force in the world - neither elitist nor remote, available to those who want it and affecting even those who don't." "An act of courage and effrontery, a uniquely human endeavor that defies time and differences, art offers new realities, emotions and worlds to anyone prepared to meet the demands it places on us. Art objects to the lie that life is small, fragmented and mean. Art objects to the myth of inevitable decay. Winterson's eloquent vision of objecting, transforming, exuberant art is presented in pieces on painting, autobiography, style and the future of fiction. She also declares her admiration for Modernism and examines the writing of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. More personally, she confronts the current fascination with the writer's life or sexuality instead of the work itself, and describes her relationship to her own fiction."--BOOK JACKET.

What the Twilight Says collects Derek Walcott's essays from over twenty years. It includes Walcott's moving and insightful examinations of the paradoxes of Caribbean culture (including his noted Nobel Lecture), and his reckonings of the work and significance of such poets as Robert Lowell, Joseph Brodsky. Robert Frost, and Ted Hughes and of the novelists V.S. Naipaul and Patrick Chamoiseau. The book also contains Walcott's short story "Cafe Martinique," which traces the life of a colonial writer who is trapped in the values of the nineteenth century. What the Twilight Says reveals that Walcott is a writer whose prose has the same lyric power and syncretic intelligence that have made him one of the major poetic voices of our time.

xvii, 414 pages ; 23 cm