Engaging EssaysLike this list

10 items

• Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

  Wallace, David Foster

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  Wallace’s essays always manage to be both deliriously fun, with a fanatical eye for telling detail and precisely playful language, and often kind of punishing, with the full moral and philosophical weight of just about everything that occurs to him…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Slouching Towards Bethlehem

  Essays

  Didion, Joan

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  Arguably the book that did the most to create the modern conception of the essay as a place to try to sort things out, where absolutely nothing was outside the realm of the writer, as long as they could make you desperately want to read it. Maybe a…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Against Everything

  Essays

  Greif, Mark

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  One of the co-founders of n+1, who have been responsible for some of the best essays of the past two decades, Greif’s collection isn’t so much against everything as the state of a world in which everything is sold to us, a deeply smart and drily…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Patricia Lockwood at the London Review of Books

  View on co.uk

  I’m not sure why Lockwood’s relentless, absurdist, exhaustive, delirious essays (which have been equally brilliant in a few other venues, too) haven’t been collected into book form yet, but whether she is devouring and excreting the entrails of…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Had I Known

  Collected Essays

  Ehrenreich, Barbara

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  Proof that thorough reporting doesn’t need to dull the sting of moral clarity, nor wash out the wry sarcasm of someone who has never met a seat of power they’re not suspicious of, Ehrenrich is no less effective and electric in her essays than she is…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

  Abdurraqib, Hanif, 1983-

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  Abdurraqib’s various considerations of popular music were the absolute best of the 2010s tendency to make popular music the kaleidoscope through which you can view everything (which, of course, it is). These essays feel like something between a live…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

  Koul, Scaachi

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  The Calgary-born Koul sifts through the mess of her upbringing and early days as a journalist and writer with an acid wit and deceptive exuberance for life. Brutal and hilarious, with an unsparing willingness to throw everyone under the bus and see…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• ContraPoints (YouTube)

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  Equal parts sussing out social media discourse through Socratic dialogue and fleshing out the various ways our identities, opinions and attempts at connection get ground to dust and mixed into their most toxic forms online, Natalie Wynn started by…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Curry

  Eating, Reading, and Race

  Ruthnum, Naben

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  A book-length essay absolutely eviscerating the uncomfortably convenient ways Indian diasporic writing and experience get flattened down into a generically palatable mush, Ruthnum’s high-karat diamond style — both in hardness and clarity — will make…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• I Feel Bad About My Neck

  and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

  Ephron, Nora

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  It is incredibly hard to be funny in print, where you leave almost everything in the reader’s control, but you would never know it from reading Nora Ephron. [Also available as an eBook and eAudiobook]