WITH A TWO-PART INTERVIEW BETWEEN MARILYNNE ROBINSON AND PRESIDENT OBAMA THAT FIRST APPEARED IN THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS A Finalist for the 2016 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay One of TIME magazine's Best Nonfiction Books of the Year The spirit of our times can appear to be one of joyless urgency. As a culture we have become less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind, and more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield material well-being. But while cultural pessimism is always fashionable, there is still much to give us hope. In The Givenness of Things, the incomparable Marilynne Robinson delivers an impassioned critique of our contemporary society while arguing that reverence must be given to who we are and what we are: creatures of singular interest and value, despite our errors and depredations. Robinson has plumbed the depths of the human spirit in her novels, including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Lila and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, and in her new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern predicament and the mysteries of faith. These seventeen essays examine the ideas that have inspired and provoked one of our finest writers throughout her life. Whether she is investigating how the work of the great thinkers of the past, Calvin, Locke, Bonhoeffer--and Shakespeare--can infuse our lives, or calling attention to the rise of the self-declared elite in American religious and political life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on display. Exquisite and bold, The Givenness of Things is a necessary call for us to find wisdom and guidance in our cultural heritage, and to offer grace to one another.

An award-winning author, cultural critic and activist selects the best essays of the year from hundreds of magazines, journals and websites. Original. 30,000 first printing.

One of O, The Oprah Magazine’s Ten Best Books of the Year! The New York Times bestselling collection of essays from beloved poet, Mary Oliver. “In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.” So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which reveredpoet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature. Emphasizing the significance of her childhood “friend” Walt Whitman, through whose work she first understood that a poem is a temple, “a place to enter, and in which to feel,” and who encouraged her to vanish into the world of her writing, Oliver meditates on the forces that allowed her to create a life for herself out of work and love. As she writes, “I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.” Upstream follows Oliver as she contemplates the pleasure of artistic labor, her boundless curiosity for the flora and fauna that surround her, and the responsibility she has inherited from Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, Poe, and Frost, the great thinkers and writers of the past, to live thoughtfully, intelligently, and to observe with passion. Throughout this collection, Oliver positions not just herself upstream but us as well as she encourages us all to keep moving, to lose ourselves in the awe of the unknown, and to give power and time to the creative and whimsical urges that live within us.

A cultural examination of the ways in which the media influences self-perception, and discusses how society still needs to do better.

"This book is something new and wonderful--honest, funny, positive, completely original, and inspiring in the very best way: it made me remember I was alive." --George Saunders Hello! I looked into my brain and found a book. Here it is. Inside you will find: - The smell of honeysuckle - Heartbreak - A French-kissing rabbit - A haunted house - Death - A vagina singing sad old songs - Young geraniums in an ancient castle - Birth - A dog who appears in dreams as a spiritual guide - Divorce - Electromagnetic energy fields - Emotional horniness - The ghost of a sea captain - And more I hope you enjoy these little weirds. Love, Jenny Slate

New York Times-bestselling author and cultural critic Chuck Klosterman sorts through the past decade and how we got to now. Chuck Klosterman has created an incomparable body of work in books, magazines, newspapers, and on the Web. His writing spans the realms of culture and sports, while also addressing interpersonal issues, social quandaries, and ethical boundaries. Klosterman has written nine previous books, helped found and establish Grantland, served as the New York Times Magazine Ethicist, worked on film and television productions, and contributed profiles and essays to outlets such as GQ, Esquire, Billboard, The A.V. Club, and The Guardian. Chuck Klosterman's tenth book (aka Chuck Klosterman X) collects his most intriguing of those pieces, accompanied by fresh introductions and new footnotes throughout. Klosterman presents many of the articles in their original form, featuring previously unpublished passages and digressions. Subjects include Breaking Bad, Lou Reed, zombies, KISS, Jimmy Page, Stephen Malkmus, steroids, Mountain Dew, Chinese Democracy, The Beatles, Jonathan Franzen, Taylor Swift, Tim Tebow, Kobe Bryant, Usain Bolt, Eddie Van Halen, Charlie Brown, the Cleveland Browns, and many more cultural figures and pop phenomena.This is a tour of the past decade from one of the sharpest and most prolific observers of our unusual times.

In a collection of whimsical essays by the author of Me Talk Pretty One Day, the Rooster gets married at an uproarious wedding, an estrangement occurs over a rubber vs. plastic debate, and the author gets the upper hand during a slumber party game of strip poker. 450,000 first printing.

The author of Five Skies takes readers through the complete writing process in a series of essays that follow his own procedures as he creates the short story "The Governor's Ball," from the first glimmer of an idea to the final sentence. Original.

A new collection of essays by the author of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim celebrates the foibles of his everyday life in France and America, from an attempt to make coffee with water in a flower vase to a drug purchase in a North Carolina mobile home. (Literary Collections)

A collection of personal essays by the best-selling author of Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls and Me Talk Pretty One Day shares even more revealing and intimate memories from his upbringing and family life. 300,000 first printing.