National Network for Equitable Library Service

At a time when speculative fiction seems less and less far-fetched, Margaret Atwood lends her distinctive voice and singular point of view to the genre in a series of essays that brilliantly illuminates the essential truths about the modern world.

Why are there so few women in politics? Why is public space, whether it's the street or social media, still so inhospitable to women? What does Carrie Fisher have to do with Mary Wollstonecraft? And why is a wedding ceremony Satan's playground? These are some of the questions that bestselling author and acclaimed journalist Elizabeth Renzetti examines in her new collection of essays. Drawing upon Renzetti's decades of reporting on feminist issues, Shrewed is a book about feminism's crossroads.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon offers a compilation of pieces about literature--age-old classics as well as his own--that presents a unique look into his literary origins and influences.

Nature writer Craig Childs presents a collection of forty essays, each of which focuses on a personal encounter with a particular species. Replete with astonishing facts about the species' behavior, habitat, breeding, and lifespan, Childs' writing transports listeners beyond the human realm and deep inside the animal kingdom.

As the US and Cuba move toward the normalization of diplomatic relations after an epic fifty-six-year standoff, we find ourselves face-to-face with one of the few places in the world that has been off limits to most Americans. Standing on both sides of the political divide, twelve of our most celebrated writers investigate this period of momentous transition.

Alexander Chee presents a manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend.

Major thinkers engage with King's less studied writing, arguing its marginalization has let King be drafted into projects he would not endorse.

Comedian and star of The Office and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Ellie Kemper delivers a hilarious and uplifting collection of essays about one pale woman's journey from Midwestern naIf to Hollywood semi-celebrity to outrageously reasonable New Yorker. There comes a time in every sitcom actress's life when she is faced with the prospect of writing a book. When Ellie Kemper's number was up, she was ready.

A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections. In The End of the End of the Earth, which gathers essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes-both human and literary-that have long preoccupied him. Whether exploring his complex relationship with his uncle, recounting his young adulthood in New York, or offering an illuminating look at the global seabird crisis, these pieces contain all the wit and disabused realism that we've come to expect from Franzen.

"Delightfully horrifying."-Popular Science This wryly humorous collection of stories about bizarre medical treatments and cases offers a unique portrait of a bygone era in all its jaw-dropping weirdness. A puzzling series of dental explosions beginning in the nineteenth century is just one of many strange tales that have long lain undiscovered in the pages of old medical journals. Award-winning medical historian Thomas Morris delivers one of the most remarkable, cringe-inducing collections of stories ever assembled.