For more than thirty years, Jonathan Raban has written with infectious fascination about people and places in transition or on the margins, about journeys undertaken and destinations never quite reached, and, as an Englishman transplanted in Seattle, about what it means to feel rooted in America. Spanning two decades, "Driving Home" charts a course through the Pacific Northwest, American history, and current events as witnessed by "a super-sensitive, all-seeing eye. Raban spots things we might otherwise miss; he calls up the apt metaphors that transform things into phenomena. He is one of our most gifted observers" ("Newsday").
Stops en route include a Missoula bar, a Tea Party convention in Nashville hosted by Sarah Palin, the Mississippi in full flood, a trip to Hawaii with his daughter, a steelhead river in the Cascades, and the hidden corners of his adopted hometown, Seattle. He deftly explores public and personal spaces, poetry and politics, geography and catastrophe, art and economy, and the shifts in various arenas that define our society. Whether the topic is Robert Lowell or Barack Obama, or how various painters, explorers, and homesteaders have engaged with our mythical and actual landscape, he has an outsider's eye for the absurd, and his tone is intimate, never nostalgic, and always fresh.
Frank, witty, and provocative, "Driving Home" is part essay collection, part diary--and irresistibly insightful about America's character, contradictions, and idiosyncrasies.
A sparkling collection of Zadie Smith's nonfiction over the past decade.
Zadie Smith brings to her essays all of the curiosity, intellectual rigor, and sharp humor that have attracted so many readers to her fiction, and the result is a collection that is nothing short of extraordinary.
Split into four sections Reading, ? ?Being, ? ?Seeing, ? and ?Feeling "Changing My Mind" invites readers to witness the world from Zadie Smith's unique vantage. Smith casts her acute eye over material both personal and cultural, with wonderfully engaging essays?some published here for the first time?on diverse topics including literature, movies, going to the Oscars, British comedy, family, feminism, Obama, Katharine Hepburn, and Anna Magnani.
In her investigations Smith also reveals much of herself. Her literary criticism shares the wealth of her experiences as a reader and exposes the tremendous influence diverse writers?E. M. Forster, Zora Neale Hurston, George Eliot, and others?have had on her writing life and her self-understanding. Smith also speaks directly to writers as a craftsman, offering precious practical lessons on process. Here and throughout, readers will learn of the wide-ranging experiences?in novels, travel, philosophy, politics, and beyond?that have nourished Smith's rich life of the mind. Her probing analysis offers tremendous food for thought, encouraging readers to attend to the slippery questions of identity, art, love, and vocation that so often go neglected.
"Changing My Mind" announces Zadie Smith as one of our most important contemporary essayists, a writer with the rare ability to turn the world on its side with both fact and fiction. "Changing My Mind" is a gift to readers, writers, and all who want to look at life more expansively.
Michael Sells brand new Imagine That series--short, popular histories of how the past didn't quite happen--launches with four titles this year.
Each book is a flight of imagination that explores how the smallest changes to history could have spiraled out of control.
Would a happy ending to Casablanca have led to a more prejudiced world? Would the death of a cat have been the most costly road accident in the history of technology?
Imagine That . . .
Michael Sells brand new Imagine That series--short, popular histories of how the past didn't quite happen--launches with four titles this year.
Each book is a flight of imagination that explores how the smallest changes to history could have spiraled out of control.
Would a happy ending to Casablanca have led to a more prejudiced world? Would the death of a cat have been the most costly road accident in the history of technology?
Imagine That . . .
When you hear that now ubiquitous phrase I find that offensive, you know you're being told to shut up. Social discourse is now dominated by competitive offence-claiming. But how did we become so thin-skinned? This book blames three culprits: official multiculturalism's relativistic conflation of tolerance with positive recognition, narcissistic identity politics, and finally therapeutic educational interventions such as anti-bullying campaigns.
Claire Fox is a British libertarian writer. She is the founder of the Institute of Ideas think tank and a broadcaster and social commentator, appearing regularly on BBC television and radio.
