This collection brings together the six international winners of the Notting Hill Editions £20,000 Essay Prize. From the coolly analytical to the impassioned winning entry 'A Eulogy for Nigger', these essays showcase the dazzling literary range of the form.

Enter the haunting, beautiful and provocative world of Yukio Mishima, one of Japan's greatest writers, whose extraordinary life ended as dramatically as his fictionConsidered one of the greatest Japanese writers of the twentieth century, Mishima fused traditional Japanese aesthetics with modern ideas in works that explored sexuality, death, and political change and broke cultural boundaries. His extraordinary life was as provocative as his fiction, culminating in h...

Lily Cole stars as Helen of Troy, ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’, in Simon Armitage’s vivid, visceral adaptation of Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s AeneidFor ten years, the Greeks have been laying siege to Troy to win back their abducted queen, Helen. But as the war drags on, and the battlefields run scarlet with blood, the opposing forces are entrenched in a bitter stalemate. As Gods and mortals squabble amongst themselves for the spoils of...

The legendary reporter and author of The Right Stuff takes on Darwin, Chomsky, and the origin of language in "his boldest bit of dueling yet" ( The New York Times).Tom Wolfe, the great journalist-provocateur, aims his piercing wit at the presiding theories of what makes us human. The Kingdom of Speech is a captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech—not evolution—is responsible for humanity's com...

"Enthralling." —Frans de Waal, New York Times Book ReviewSurvival of the fittest or survival of the nicest? Since the dawn of time man has contemplated the mystery of altruism, but it was Darwin who posed the question most starkly. From the selfless ant to the stinging bee to the man laying down his life for a stranger, evolution has yielded a goodness that in theory should never be.Set against the sweeping tale of 150 years of scientific attempts ...

Writings on the South, Catholicism, and more from the National Book Award winner: "His nonfiction is always entertaining and enlightening" ( Library Journal).Published just after Walker Percy's death, Signposts in a Strange Land takes readers through the philosophical, religious, and literary ideas of one of the South's most profound and unique thinkers. Each essay is laced with wit and insight into the human condition. From race relations and the...

Since selections first appeared in the New Quarterly and the National Post as part of “The Afterword,” Steven Heighton’s memos and dispatches to himself — a writer’s pointed, cutting take on his own work and the work of writing — have been tweeted and retweeted, discussed and tacked to bulletin boards everywhere. Coalesced, completed, and collected here for the first time, a wholly new kind of book has emerged, one that’s as much about creative process as it is about crea...

For anyone who loves great literature -- or aspires to write it -- this is an essential collection, full of insight, wisdom, humour, and candour from Canada's most important and beloved literary figures.For the past twenty-five years, the Writers' Trust of Canada's annual lecture series, the Margaret Laurence Memorial Lecture, has invited some of Canada's most prominent authors to discuss the theme of "A Writer's Life" in front of their peers. Hugh MacLennan, Mavis Gallant, Timothy...

“One of the most exciting developments from the world of ideas in decades, presented with panache by two frighteningly brilliant, endearingly unpretentious, and endlessly creative young scientists.” – Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our NatureOur society has gone from writing snippets of information by hand to generating a vast flood of 1s and 0s that record almost every aspect of our lives: who we know, what we do, where we go, what we buy, ...

“A strange, wondrous, challenging, enriching book….Beautiful and powerful…you will not encounter another book like it.”—National Review onlineIn Digital Barbarism, bestselling novelist Mark Helprin (Winter’s Tale, A Soldier of the Great War) offers a ringing Jeffersonian defense of private property in the age of digital culture, with its degradation of thought and language and collectivist bias against the rights of individual creators. A timely, cogent, and important attac...

Child prodigy and brilliant MIT mathematician, Norbert Wiener founded the revolutionary science of cybernetics and ignited the information-age explosion of computers, automation, and global telecommunications. His best-selling book, Cybernetics, catapulted him into the public spotlight, as did his chilling visions of the future and his ardent social activism. Based on a wealth of primary sources and exclusive access to Wiener's closest family members, friends, and colleagues, Dark...

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea,” writes John Updike in his Foreword to this collection of literary considerations. But the sailor doth protest too much: This collection begins somewhere near deep water, with a flotilla of short fiction, humor pieces, and personal essays, and even the least of the reviews here—those that “come about and draw even c...