NCW Libraries

"From graffiti gangs and Grand Theft Auto to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing. Starting with Hodson's own work experience, which ranges from the mundane to the bizarre--including...

For this collection, Wallace immerses himself in the three-ring circus that is the presidential race in order to document one of the most vicious campaigns in recent history. Later he strolls from booth to booth at a lobster festival in Maine and risks life and limb to get to the bottom of the lobster question. Then he wheedles his way into an L.A. radio studio, armed with tubs of chicken, to get the behind-the-scenes view of a conservative talk show...

Writing with elegance and clarity, Wendell Berry is a compassionate and compelling voice for our time of political and cultural distrust and division, whether expounding the joys and wisdom of nonindustrial agriculture, relishing the pleasure of eating food produced locally by people you know, or giving voice to a righteous contempt for hollow innovation. He is our most important writer on the cultural crisis posed by industrialization and mass consumerism,...

"Lars Horn's Voice of the Fish, the latest Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, is an interwoven essay collection that explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a debilitating back injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak. In Horn's adept hands, the collection takes shape as a unified book: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries, and antiquities serve...

"A collection of the year's best essays, selected by award-winning journalist and New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz. 'The world is abundant even in bad times,' guest editor Kathryn Schulz writes in her introduction. 'It is lush with interestingness, and always, somewhere, offering up consolation or beauty or humor or happiness, or at least the hope of future happiness.' The essays Schulz selected are a powerful time capsule of 2020, showcasing...

But are these beautiful because we think them so, or because they are beautiful in the mind of Nature or the mind of God, beautiful by intention inborn in a world beloved? Beauty is the crisis of our knowing, the signature of love indwelling in all created things, called from nothing by love, recognized and answered by love in the human heart, not reducible by any analysis to any fact. I have no doubt at all that even if the global climate were getting...

"Millions of Americans dream about living in Mexico - and millions more do! From Oaxaca to Baja, Guanajuato to Puerto Vallarta, Lake Chapala to the Yucatan, more than two dozen women from all over Mexico share their stories in this new book. 'Why We Left: An Anthology of American Women Expats' is a fun, inspiring and humorous read you'll enjoy from cover to cover, full of useful and encouraging words of wisdom from 27 women who made the move and couldn't...

A compilation of fifteen of Wallace's seminal essays, all published in book form for the first time.