Literature is one of the few places left for savoring the gifts of maturity; in this vein, the musings and conclusions of Edward Hoagland, long-time essayist, must not be missed. Hoagland has traveled widely—the essays in this book... Read More

Novelist, playwright, and non-fiction author Caryl Phillips has been the “other” in several cultures: in 1950s Britain after his family migrated from St. Kitts; in the US, where he spends part of the year on the faculty of Yale... Read More

To be human means striving to come to terms with impermanence, change, and loss. Rationally, one knows that nothing lasts forever, including youth or a perfect moment. But when the hard, cold, unavoidable reality of dissonance destroys... Read More

A title like "Otherwise Known as the Human Condition" sets expectations of broad strokes: one imagines an encyclopedic knowledge of humanity. To his immense credit, Dyer delivers such breadth in a series of analyses of cultural... Read More

“We inhabit a world where history doesn’t matter,” writes scholar Cynthia Haven in the introduction to this collection of biographical essays. “As a result, we lose the ability to think and learn from the past…we only fetishize... Read More

The late journalist Nuala O’Faolain, (Oh-FWAY-lawn) was prized in her native Ireland for good reason. Unafraid of correlating political and private issues in her columns for the Irish Times, she trained her light on the daily lives of... Read More

Veteran journalist Juan Luis Cebrián finds his occupation embattled on many fronts: newspapers losing readers to the immediate news available online; the globalizing effects of the world wide web reshaping languages everywhere; plus the... Read More

Themed anthologies strive to present a buffet, varied yet unified, so readers attracted by the overall idea can dig in and find, perhaps to their delight, that their favorite bites are sometimes not those they anticipated. Bob Cowser... Read More