Essays
1580 · 1283 pages
Montaigne wrote short pieces on friendship, fear, sleep, and his kidney stones, and invented the essay doing it. As company on the page he remains unmatched in four centuries.
★ 9.3
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Souls of Black Folk
1903 · 165 pages
Du Bois named the double consciousness of seeing yourself through white eyes and called the color line the problem of the twentieth century. The chapter on his firstborn son's death is unbearable.
★ 8.2
A Room of One's Own
1929 · 112 pages
Give a woman five hundred a year and a room with a lock and she will write, Woolf argues, then invents a gifted sister for Shakespeare and follows her to a terrible end.
★ 8.0
Notes of a Native Son
1955 · 149 pages
Baldwin buries his father on his nineteenth birthday while Harlem riots, and winters as the only Black man in a Swiss village. He turns his own life into an argument about America.
★ 7.9
The Fire Next Time
1963 · 106 pages
Writing to his teenage nephew, Baldwin remembers preaching in Harlem and dining with the leader of the Nation of Islam. He spares white America nothing and refuses to hate it.
★ 7.8
The Pillow Book
1002 · 364 pages
A thousand years ago in the Japanese court, a lady-in-waiting kept lists of things that make the heart beat faster and things she found hateful. Her snobbery is part of the pleasure.
★ 7.4
The Myth of Sisyphus
1942 · 212 pages
The only serious philosophical question, Camus opens, is whether to kill yourself. His answer: the universe will never explain itself, so you live anyway, unreconciled, like Sisyphus happy pushing his rock uphill forever.
★ 7.2
On Photography
1977 · 224 pages
Taking a picture is a form of acquisition, close to aggression, Sontag argues, and a world drowning in images loses the power to feel them. You will not photograph casually again.
★ 7.1
Illuminations
1955 · 304 pages
Benjamin asks what photography did to art and answers that a work loses its aura once anyone can copy it. Elsewhere history appears as an angel blown backward, staring at the wreckage.
★ 7.1
Letters from a Stoic
60 · 254 pages
Nero's tutor sets down how to die, how to hold wealth lightly, and how to stop waiting for life to begin. Philosophy arrives as advice from someone who likes you.
★ 7.0
Essays in Idleness
1330 · 224 pages
Writing in fourteenth-century Japan, the monk Kenko set down fragments on manners, boredom, and death, asking why we look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom. Impermanence makes attention urgent.
★ 7.0
The Interpretation of Cultures
1973 · 547 pages
Culture is not what people do, Geertz argues, but the meanings hung on it, and thick description means reading a Balinese cockfight the way you would read a poem.
★ 7.0
Hojoki
1212 · 109 pages
Writing from a hut ten feet square, a Kyoto recluse recalls the fire, whirlwind, famine, and earthquake that destroyed the capital, and concludes that nothing built by people is meant to stay.
★ 7.0
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
1968 · 256 pages
Didion went into Haight-Ashbury in 1967 and came back with a five-year-old on acid and children improvising a society in a vacuum. She rebuilt American nonfiction prose around the sound of her sentences.
★ 7.0
The Captive Mind
1953 · 272 pages
Milosz, a Polish poet who served the new regime and then defected, explains how intelligent people talked themselves into Stalinism. Ketman, he calls it: believing one thing and professing another.
★ 7.0
The Living Mountain
1977 · 176 pages
Summits barely register. Shepherd spent a lifetime in the Scottish Cairngorms and writes about going into the mountain rather than up it, attending to water and frost until the seeing becomes the point.
★ 6.9
Against Interpretation
And Other Essays
1966 · 312 pages
Sontag's charge against criticism: pulling meaning out of a work is a way of not experiencing it. She wants attention paid to surface and speed, and asks for an erotics of art instead.
★ 6.8
The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
1882 · 850 pages
Trust thyself, Emerson writes, and every heart vibrates to that iron string. The poet Oliver Wendell Holmes called his Harvard address the declaration of independence of American intellectual life.
★ 6.8
The Subjection of Women
1869 · 109 pages
The legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong in itself and a hindrance to human improvement. Mill wrote that when a married Englishwoman could own nothing and had no vote.
★ 6.8
The Vocation Lectures
1919 · 100 pages
Weber told students in a collapsing Germany what science and politics demand: science can give you clarity but never choose your values, and politics is the slow boring of hard boards.
★ 6.7
The Burden of Southern History
1960 · 304 pages
Americans tell themselves a story of innocence, abundance, and invincibility. The South knew defeat, poverty, and the guilt of slavery, and Woodward offers that history as the corrective a superpower needs.
★ 6.7
The Uses of Literacy
1957 · 384 pages
Hoggart set down working-class Leeds as he had lived it, then indicted the slick magazines displacing it. Seven years later he founded the Birmingham center that made popular culture an academic discipline.
★ 6.6
The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr
1971 · 264 pages
Niebuhr's argument: an individual can rise above self-interest and a nation cannot, so justice comes from power balanced against power. Cold War strategists and Martin Luther King alike thought in his terms.
★ 6.6
The Labyrinth of Solitude
1950 · 398 pages
Mexicans wear masks, Paz argues, because the Conquest left them sons of a violated mother, heirs to two pasts they refuse to join. Mexico has quarreled with these essays for seventy years.
★ 6.5
The American Political Tradition
1948 · 560 pages
Hofstadter strips the myths off American statesmen from Jefferson to Franklin Roosevelt and finds one propertied creed underneath. The Emancipation Proclamation, he writes, had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.
★ 6.5
Gravity and Grace
1943 · 236 pages
Weil held that the soul falls by a law as fixed as gravity and that grace enters only a void, which is why affliction, stripping everything away, can open a person to God.
★ 6.5
The Book of Tea
1906 · 104 pages
Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage, writes Okakura, a Japanese art curator addressing the West, who then draws from one cup an entire aesthetic of imperfection and attention.
★ 6.5
The Proper Study of Mankind
1997 · 672 pages
Freedom from interference and freedom to become your true self are different things, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin warned, and tyrants prefer the second. His Tolstoy essay divides all thinkers into hedgehogs and foxes.
★ 6.4
Selected Non-Fictions
1999 · 560 pages
Borges wrote criticism the way he wrote fiction, in short pieces with trapdoors, on subjects from Dante to King Kong. Every writer creates his own precursors, he argues, and literary history rearranges itself.
★ 6.4
Consider the Lobster
2007 · 352 pages
Sent to the Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace asks whether boiling an animal alive is defensible. The same scruple drives his reports on a porn awards show and Senator McCain's presidential campaign.
★ 6.3
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
1998 · 353 pages
Seven nights on a Caribbean luxury liner, where the pampering drives Wallace to despair. He also traces how television swallowed the irony American novelists invented, and why that irony became a trap.
★ 6.3
A Small Place
1988 · 96 pages
You arrive in Antigua as a tourist and Kincaid tells you what you look like to the people who live there, then turns on the empire and the government that wrecked the island.
★ 6.2
But Beautiful
1991 · 240 pages
Dyer imagines his way into the nights of jazz musicians, Lester Young after the army broke him and Thelonious Monk alone at a piano, inventing scenes to reach what no biography can.
★ 6.2
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and Other Writings
1741 · 208 pages
Standing before a Connecticut congregation in 1741, Edwards said God holds sinners over hell as one holds a spider over a fire. The moaning grew so loud he had to pause.
★ 6.1
A Sand County Almanac
1949 · 240 pages
Leopold shot a wolf and watched the green fire go out of her eyes. Land is a community we belong to, he concluded, and his land ethic became American environmentalism's creed.
★ 6.1
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
1974 · 290 pages
For a year Dillard watches a creek in Virginia's mountains, where a giant water bug drains a frog to an empty skin. She wants to know what kind of God made this world.
★ 6.0
The White Album
1979 · 222 pages
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," the title essay begins, then takes the story apart: the Manson trial, a Doors session going nowhere, and a psychiatric report on Didion herself.
★ 5.9
Up in the Old Hotel
1992 · 716 pages
Mitchell listened to New York for decades: the regulars at McSorley's, the fishermen at Fulton Market, and Joe Gould, a Village drifter compiling a nine-million-word oral history from everything he overheard.
★ 5.7
Arguably
2011 · 816 pages
No English-language essayist of his generation wrote with more range or less caution. These 107 pieces run from Orwell and Jefferson to Iraq and Afghanistan, and Hitchens had himself waterboarded before writing one.
★ 5.6
The Sweet Science
1956 · 267 pages
Liebling covered Rocky Marciano knocking out an aging Joe Louis, writing the trainers and cornermen with as much relish as the champions. He set the standard American boxing writing still works from.
★ 5.6
The Warriors
Reflections on Men in Battle
1959 · 242 pages
What holds men to war, Gray decided, is the spectacle, the comradeship, and a delight in destruction nobody admits to. The day his Columbia doctorate arrived, so did his draft notice.
★ 5.6
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
2005 · 209 pages
How do you go about finding a thing whose nature is unknown to you? Solnit carries that question from Plato into deserts, ruins, and the blue of distance, making lostness a discipline.
★ 5.6
The Four Loves
1960 · 180 pages
To love at all is to be vulnerable, Lewis writes, then sorts the risk into affection, friendship, eros and charity. Each natural love turns demonic the moment it is made into a god.
★ 5.6
Arctic Dreams
1986 · 474 pages
Five years in the high Arctic, among narwhals and muskoxen and light that behaves like nothing further south. Lopez asks what Westerners have wanted from that country, and what the wanting cost.
★ 5.6
The Field of Cultural Production
1993 · 322 pages
Genius does not explain art, Bourdieu argues. Value is manufactured by the whole apparatus around the work: critics, dealers, publishers, rival artists. In this economy refusing money is precisely what buys prestige.
★ 5.5
The Mind's Eye
1999 · 109 pages
The camera is a sketchbook, Cartier-Bresson insists, an instrument of intuition and not of art. These short essays hand you the working method that made modern photojournalism look the way it does.
★ 5.5
The Journalist and the Murderer
1990 · 163 pages
Every journalist knows what he does is morally indefensible, Malcolm opens, then proves it through a convicted murderer suing the writer who befriended him and delivered him to readers as a sociopath.
★ 5.3
Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers
1994 · 96 pages
Beauty in things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. Koren traces the aesthetic from the Japanese tea room to the cracked bowl, and gives Western design a language for everything corporate polish cannot reach.
★ 5.3
Sister Outsider
Essays and Speeches
1984 · 190 pages
At a 1979 feminist conference that had sidelined Black and lesbian women, Lorde said the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. These essays turn anger and difference into working instruments.
★ 5.3
Mystery Train
1975 · 528 pages
Still the sharpest book written about rock and roll. Marcus treats Elvis, Robert Johnson, and Sly Stone as American artists on the scale of Melville, reading their records for what America is.
★ 5.1
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
1975 · 72 pages
For three days in October 1974, Perec sat in cafes on the Place Saint-Sulpice and wrote down every bus, pigeon, and passerby. Look long enough, he shows, and nothing is background.
★ 5.0
Men Explain Things to Me
2014 · 176 pages
At an Aspen party a man lectures Solnit about an important new book on the photographer Muybridge. She wrote it. Her essays track how silencing women shades into violence against them.
★ 4.9
Oranges
1967 · 149 pages
Curious why the juice from a Penn Station machine changed color through the winter, McPhee went to Florida. He came back with citrus botany, grove barons, and the entire industry of frozen concentrate.
★ 4.7
Killings
1984 · 320 pages
One killing per chapter, in towns no reporter usually visits, including a Kentucky landowner who shot a documentary filmmaker for trespassing. Trillin cares how these Americans lived, not how they died.
★ 4.7
Me Talk Pretty One Day
2000 · 272 pages
Speech therapy for a lisp, a methamphetamine phase of conceptual art, then a Paris classroom where a French teacher reduces grown adults to stammering. Sedaris finds humiliation funny and never spares himself.
★ 4.6
Thoughts on Design
1947 · 95 pages
Beauty and utility generate each other, Paul Rand argues, and the designer's job is fusing idea with image. He pulled European modernism into American advertising and made the trade take design seriously.
★ 4.5
Business Adventures
1969 · 464 pages
Twelve New Yorker reports on how companies behave: Ford burning millions on the Edsel, a grocer trying to corner his own stock. Bill Gates calls it the best business book he has read.
★ 4.3
Everyday Drinking
The Distilled Kingsley Amis
2008 · 336 pages
Nobody has written funnier prose about drink. Kingsley Amis separates the physical hangover from the metaphysical one, calculates what a party will actually consume, and hands down recipes he plainly tested.
★ 4.3