Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings by John Fowles

$20.00 NZD

Category: Essays | Reading Level: very good

The Burroughs File by William S. Burroughs

$14.00 NZD

Category: Essays | Reading Level: very good

Trenchant writings by that sardonic "hombre invisible," William Seward Burroughs, perpetrator ofNaked Lunch and other shockers. These malefic and beatific, mordant and hilarious straight-face reports on life are mostly from scatter-shot publications in obscure places, foreign and domestic. Including com plete texts fromWhite Subway,Cobblestone Gardens, andThe Retreat Diaries, this collection delineates Burroughs' comprehensive world-view and his "insurrectionary sense of America's underside," as Tom Carson epitomized it inThe Village Voice. Also included are essays on Burroughs by Alan Ansen and Paul Bowles, and facsimile pages from the famous cut-up scrapbooks of the mid-century:The Book of Hours,John Brady's Book, andThe Old Farmer's Almanac. "...his Swiftian vision of a processed, prepackaged life, of a kind of electrochemical totalitarianism, often evokes the black laughter of hilarious horror."--Playboy "Burroughs may be our only writer whose socio-political apacalyptica transcend both paranoia and triviality; his imagination is superb, his ear savagely satiric."--Kirkus Reviews "Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift."--Jack Kerouac William Burroughs (1915-1997) is widely recognized as one of the most innovative writers of the twentieth century. His books include:Junky,Naked Lunch,The Soft Machine, andCities of the Red Night. ...Show more

A Writer's People: Ways of Seeing and Feeling by V. S. Naipaul

$10.00 NZD

Category: Essays | Reading Level: very good

The Nobel Prize winner writes candidly about cultural currents, ideas, experiences and the part they play in a life of writing. Over the course of his astonishing fifty-year career, V.S. Naipaul

Romulus or The Future of The Child by Robert T. Lewis

$8.00 NZD

Category: Essays | Series: Today and Tomorrow | Reading Level: very good

The Painted Kipper by Harman Grisewood

$12.00 NZD

Category: Essays | Series: The New Thinker's Library | Reading Level: very good

A Study of the Spurious in the Contemporary Scene

Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey

$12.00 NZD

Category: Essays | Series: The Pheonix Library | Reading Level: good

How to Cure a Fanatic by Amos Oz

$8.00 NZD

Category: Essays | Reading Level: very good

Internationally acclaimed novelist Amos Oz grew up in war-torn Jerusalem, where as a boy he witnessed firsthand the poisonous consequences of fanaticism. In two concise, powerful essays, the award-winning author offers unique insight into the true nature of extremism and proposes a reasoned and respectf ul approach to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He also comments on related issues--the Gaza pullout, Yasser Arafat's death, and the war in Iraq--in an extended interview at the end of the book. The brilliant clarity of these essays, coupled with Oz's ironic sense of humor in illuminating the serious, breathes new life into this old debate. Oz argues that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a war of religion or cultures or traditions, but rather a real estate dispute--one that will be resolved not by greater understanding, but by painful compromise. Fresh, insightful, and inspiring, How to Cure a Fanatic brings a new voice of sanity to the cacophony on Israeli-Palestinian relations--a voice no one can afford to ignore. ...Show more

On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry

$8.00 NZD

Category: Essays | Reading Level: good

Various political arguments have been put forward against beauty: that it distracts us from more important issues; that it is the handmaiden of privilege; that it masks political interests. In "On Beauty and Being Just" Elaine Scarry challenges such theories, offering not only a passionate defence of be auty from the political arguments against it, but also that beauty does indeed have a positive effect on life. Rather than serving the privileged it presses all of us towards a greater concern for justice. ...Show more

Religio Medici and Other Writings by Sir Thomas Browne

$10.00 NZD

Category: Essays | Series: Everyman's Library No. 92 | Reading Level: very good

Pietà by George Klein

$16.00 NZD

Category: Essays | Reading Level: good-very good

As Albert Camus's famous dictum has it, the only truly important philosophical question is suicide, or whether or not life is worth living. Now, in Pieta, his latest collection of essays, George Klein--distinguished biologist, writer, Holocaust survivor, and humanist--faces this question head on, in a s eries of meditations on subjects ranging from the misuses of science to the vital importance of art, music, and literature to surviving catastrophes like the Holocaust and AIDS. Pieta is a passionate book of scientific and personal ethics, inspired by tragic events that resonate in the consciousness of each of us.Klein examines the thoughts of a number of people both famous and obscure--whose lives may provide some sort of answer to Camus's philosophical question. One essay, for example, deals with the tormented and unstable Atilla Jozsef, one of Hungary's greatest poets and now a national hero. Other figures from the past appear, too: fellow Holocaust survivor Rudolf Vrba, one of the first people to escape from Auschwitz; Simon Srebnik, a teenaged Pole who survived the Nazis by working on their riverboats, singing sentimental ballads for them; the geneticist Benno Multler-Hill, whose meeting with Klein leads to a fascinating discussion of the role of German scientists in preparing the conceptual underpinnings of the Nazi genocide.Klein moves on to a more general elaboration of the misuses of science, from CIA-sponsored LSD experiments to medical experimentation by the Japanese in Manchuria, and ultimately to a thoughtful reconsideration of his own role and responsibility as a scientist. He uses his extensive medical background to present a discussion of the processes of the biology of individuality, concluding with an extended and impassioned look at AIDS, as both a biological problem and a situation that will require the utmost pieta from each of us. ...Show more

Winter Pollen - Occasional Prose by Ted Hughes

$25.00 NZD

Category: Essays | Reading Level: very good

This volume contains writings by English poet Ted Hughes (1930-1998) that cover a period of over thirty years and include essays, book reviews, commissioned articles, prefaces, autobiographical reflections, and items never before published. He writes about Shakespeare, Keats, Coleridge, Isaac Bashevis S inger, and Sylvia Plath as well as the structure of poetry, the value of myths, education, the act of writing, and himself. ...Show more

Letter to My Mother (Mini Modern Classics) by Georges Simenon

$2.00 NZD

Category: Essays | Series: Mini Modern Classics | Reading Level: near fine

As you are well aware, we never loved each other in your lifetime. Both of us pretended.' Simenon explores the complexity of parent child relationships and the bitterness of things left unsaid in this stark, confessional piece.