Live Through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

Olivia Laing · 336 pages

"You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavor to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by thousands of strangers. The Lonely City is a roving cultural history of urban loneliness, centered on the ultimate city: Manhattan, that teeming island of gneiss, concrete, and glass. What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we're not intimately involved with an

The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo

Amy Schumer · 336 pages

Amy Schumer, Emmy Award-winning comedian, actress, writer, and star, mines her past for stories about her teenage years, her family, relationship, and sex, and shares the experiences that have shaped who she is--a woman with the courage to bare her soul and stand up for what she believes in, all while making us laugh. Ranging from the raucous to the romantic, the heartfelt to the harrowing, this h

Dear Bully: Seventy Authors Tell Their Stories

Megan Kelley Hall, Carrie Jones · 369 pages

Presents top authors for teens as they share their stories about bullying--as silent observers on the sidelines of high school, as victims, and as perpetrators.

Women in Clothes

Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton · 521 pages

"An exploration of the questions we ask ourselves while getting dressed every day, and the answers from more than six hundred women"--From back cover.

It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living

Dan Savage · 338 pages

A collection of original essays and expanded testimonials written to teens from celebrities, political leaders, and everyday people. While many of these teens can't see a positive future for themselves, we can. We can show LGBT youth the kind of happiness, potential, and satisfaction their lives hold if they can just get through these early years.

Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression

Nell Casey · 320 pages

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

Oliver Sacks · 243 pages

In his most extraordinary book, “one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth century” (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who

The Clothing of Books

Jhumpa Lahiri · 80 pages

When I was a child, expressing myself through clothing was a source of anguish. I dreamt of sameness, even invisibility... When my books were first published, I discovered that another part of me had to be dressed and presented to the world.

Silence

John Cage · 276 pages

Silence, A Year from Monday, M, Empty Words and X (in this order) form the five parts of a series of books in which Cage tries, as he says, "to find a way of writing which comes from ideas, is not about them, but which produces them." Often these writings include mesostics and essays created by subjecting the work of other writers to chance procedures using the I Ching (what Cage called "writing t

The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture and Literature

Jose Ortega y Gasset · 204 pages

Living, Thinking, Looking

Siri Hustvedt · 384 pages

So Sad Today: Personal Essays

Melissa Broder · 210 pages

"A darkly funny and brutally honest collection of essays from Melissa Broder who has always struggled with anxiety. In the fall of 2012, she went through a harrowing cycle of panic attacks and dread that wouldn't abate for months. So she began @sosadtoday, an anonymous Twitter feed that allowed her to express her darkest feelings, and which quickly gained a dedicated following. In this collection,

If You Feel Too Much: Thoughts on Things Found and Lost and Hoped For

Jamie Tworkowski · 182 pages

In 2006, Jamie Tworkowski wrote a story called "To Write Love on Her Arms" about helping a friend through her struggle with drug addiction, depression, and self-injury. The piece quickly went viral, giving birth to a non-profit organization of the same name. Nine years later, To Write Love on Her Arms (TWLOHA) is an internationally-recognized leader in suicide prevention and a source of hope, enco

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

Georges Perec · 324 pages

The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art

Eileen Myles · 365 pages

Poet and post-punk hero Eileen Myles has always operated in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur. Myles travels the city—wandering on garbage-strewn New York streets in the heat of summer, drifting though the antiseptic malls of La Jolla, and riding in the van with Sister Spit—seeing it with a poet's eye for detail and with the consciousness that writing ab

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media

Walter Benjamin · 374 pages

A series of influential essays on the visual arts that were made possible by machines, and the implications for the future of culture.

The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired

Francine Prose · 432 pages

"In this new book, Francine Prose explores the complex relationship between the artist and his muse. In so doing, she illuminates with great sensitivity and intelligence the elusive emotional wellsprings of the creative process.". "There is no ideal muse, but rather as many variations on the theme as there are individual women who have had the luck, or misfortune, to find their destiny conjoined

The Empathy Exams: Essays

Leslie Jamison · 225 pages

A collection of essays explores empathy, using topics ranging from street violence and incarceration to reality television and literary sentimentality to ask questions about people's understanding of and relationships with others.

Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

Madeleine L'Engle · 208 pages

In this classic book, Madeleine L'Engle addresses the questions, What makes art Christian? What does it mean to be a Christian artist? What is the relationship between faith and art? Through L'Engle's beautiful and insightful essay, readers will find themselves called to what the author views as the prime tasks of an artist: to listen, to remain aware, and to respond to creation through one's own

White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

Geoff Dyer · 256 pages

"From "one of our most original writers" (Kathryn Schulz) comes an expansive and exacting book--firmly grounded, but elegant, witty, and always inquisitive--about travel, unexpected awareness, and the questions we ask when we step outside ourselves. Geoff Dyer's perennial search for tranquility, for "something better," continues in this series of fascinating and seemingly unrelated pilgrimages--wi

My Secret: A PostSecret Book

Frank Warren

A collection of artfully decorated postcards with secrets anonymously written on them by people from all over the world and sent to the founder of PostSecret, a community art project that evolved into a website.

Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth, I'm Kissing You Goodbye!

Cynthia Heimel · 192 pages

Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth

A.O. Scott · 282 pages

"The New York Times film critic shows why we need criticism now more than ever. Few could explain, let alone seek out, a career in criticism. Yet what A.O. Scott shows in Better Living Through Criticism is that we are, in fact, all critics: because critical thinking informs almost every aspect of artistic creation, of civil action, of interpersonal life. With penetrating insight and warm humor, Sc

Ways of Seeing

John Berger · 166 pages

How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever."Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.""But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we e