Essay Collections

Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read

Virginia Woolf, Francesca Wade

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

Doris Lessing

Small Wonder

Barbara Kingsolver

Gold

Isaac Asimov

Reading Like a Writer

Francine Prose

Time Bites

Doris Lessing

Writings From the New Yorker 1927-1976

E. B. White

High Tide in Tucson

Barbara Kingsolver

The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler

I'll Fly Away

Wally Lamb, I'll Fly Away contributors

Burn This Book

Toni Morrison

Encounter

Milan Kundera

In Rough Country

Joyce Carol Oates

How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

Daniel Mendelsohn

Travels

Paul Bowles

On Cats

Charles Bukowski

Art Matters

Neil Gaiman, Chris Riddell

The Matter of Black Lives

Jelani Cobb, David Remnick

Somewhere We Are Human

Reyna Grande, Sonia Guiñansaca

On Writing (and Writers)

C. S. Lewis

I Want to Burn This Place Down

Maris Kreizman

The Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024

Padma Lakshmi, Jaya Saxena

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2025

Susan Orlean, Jaime Green

Both/and

Denne Michele Norris, Electric Literature

Essays

Michel de Montaigne, J. M. Cohen

The Book of War

John Keegan

The Portable Twentieth-century Russian Reader

Clarence Brown

Why I Write

George Orwell

The Portable Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jeffrey S. Cramer

The Principles of Uncertainty

Maira Kalman

A Last Supper of Queer Apostles

Pedro Lemebel, Gwendolyn Harper

Nonrequired Reading

Wislawa Szymborska

Abinger Harvest

E.M. Forster

The Amos Oz Reader

Amos Oz, Nitza Ben Dov

A Collection of Essays

George Orwell

Two Cheers for Democracy

E.M. Forster

Shadow Work

Emily Hodgson Anderson

Radio on

Sarah Vowell

Fire and Knowledge

Peter Nadas

Our Arab

Zaina Arafat