Archives de catégorie : Essay

SEZ I TO MYSELF: The Collected Essays of Frank and Malachy McCourt

A treasure chest of never-before-collected essays from Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize–winning memoirist, and his boisterous brother Malachy, publishing on the 30th anniversary of Angela’s Ashes, with a foreword by Colum McCann.

SEZ I TO MYSELF:
The Collected Essays of Frank and Malachy McCourt
Abrams Press, September 2026

In 1996, a retired New York City high school English teacher published a memoir that took the publishing world by storm. Angela’s Ashes, the story of Frank McCourt’s childhood in Ireland, was a bold account of poverty and family tragedy, suffused with humor and compassion. It went on to sell over ten million copies and won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award.

Frank McCourt was suddenly an internationally celebrated memoirist, a writer who had invigorated the genre. But most readers didn’t know that Angela’s Ashes wasn’t Frank’s first published writing. For years, he and his actor brother Malachy contributed a column to a neighborhood newspaper called The West Side Spirit. Malachy, himself a bestselling writer, also contributed to Our Town, Irish America, and The Southampton Review. And Frank went on to write for prominent publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, Life, and Rolling Stone.

Frank McCourt (1930–2009) and Malachy McCourt (1931–2024) were born in Brooklyn, New York, to Irish immigrant parents, grew up in Limerick, Ireland, and returned to America as young adults. For 30 years, Frank taught in New York City high schools. His first book, Angela’s Ashes, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He was also the author of the memoirs ’Tis and Teacher Man. In the 1950s, Malachy opened New York City’s original singles bar Malachy’s. He went on to a long career in film, television, radio, and on the stage, and as a bestselling author of many books, including A Monk Swimming and Malachy McCourt’s History of Ireland.

Tom Allon is an award-winning journalist, columnist, media executive and publisher. He has written for The New York Times, the Daily News, New York Post, Huffington Post, Dan’s Papers, City & State, The West Side Spirit, Our Town, and many other publications. Allon is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Cornell University, and Stuyvesant High School. He has taught opinion writing at Hunter College, and journalism and American literature at Stuyvesant High School. He has four adult children, three cats, and is married to Rebecca Cohen. They live in Dumbo, Brooklyn, and East Moriches, Long Island.

sJonah Allon is a writer and political communications strategist who currently serves as Deputy Communications Director for New York Governor Kathy Hochul. A born-and-raised New Yorker, he lives in Brooklyn.

MEIN UNGLÜCK BEGINNT DAMIT, DASS DER STROMKREIS ALS RECHTECK ABGEBILDET WIRD de Saša Stanišić

Language – courage – magic: speeches against idleness, both delivered and undelivered.

MEIN UNGLÜCK BEGINNT DAMIT, DASS DER STROMKREIS ALS RECHTECK ABGEBILDET WIRD
(My Unhappiness Starts With the Fact that Electric Circuits Are Depicted As Rectangles)
by Saša Stanišić
Luchterhand/PRH Germany, October 2025

There’s nothing for it: we have to do something to counter hardship and human suffering, war, poverty, fascism and the rest of it. Each of us can do their bit. Everyone. Donate stuff, help out somewhere, that sort of thing. Take responsibility. If the world’s going down the drain, we might as well go down with dignity, goddamn it.

Hardly anyone takes literature seriously any more, and not just since mobile phones . Still, here you are holding a book in your hand and wondering whether to buy it. There are speeches in it. Which you think is stupid. Speeches are something you make, that’s all.

I get it. But anyway, here’s a list of what you’d miss out on:

• The word « unlikely », about twenty times
• my great uncle Stevo, who got six numbers right in the lottery in the late 1990s and promptly drowned (along with a trumpet player)
• a chair in a back yard
• language, courage, magic
• the sentence « Doing is the opposite of death »

Saša Stanišić, born in Višegrad in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1978, has lived in Germany since 1992. His novels and stories have been translated into more than 30 languages, and have won numerous awards, including the 2019 German Book Prize (for Herkunft) and the 2014 Leipzig Book Fair Prize (for Vor dem Fest), as well as the Eichendorff Book Prize, Schiller Prize and Hans Fallada Prize. He lives in Hamburg.

NOTHING LESS THAN LOVE de June Jordan

The definitive selected essays of the revolutionary writer and activist June Jordan, the first publication in an ambitious program to reissue her long out-of-print work.

NOTHING LESS THAN LOVE: The Selected Essays of June Jordan
Edited and introduced by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Penguin Classics, Spring 2027
(via Frances Goldin Literary)

Known in her time as the most widely published African American writer to date, June Jordan was a courageous agitator for change, writing with love and rage at the frontlines of literature and injustice on an international scale. A contemporary of Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, she received a congressional citation for her outstanding contributions to literature, the progressive movement, and the civil rights movement.

And yet Jordan knew that she never got her due within her lifetime. She was too fiery, too fierce in her political commitments to be embraced and lauded by the establishment. In the years after her untimely death in 2001, her remarkable work largely fell out of print. Yet it is the very fierceness and foresight of Jordan’s commitment to freedom and human dignity that has fueled a recent, international upsurge of interest in her work. NOTHING LESS THAN LOVE will be the first in a major reissue program from Penguin Classics in the US.

Edited by the celebrated poet and Black feminist scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and timed to coincide with the first biography of Jordan (also by Gumbs) for Yale University Press, this definitive selected essays includes hugely influential treatises alongside lesser known gems, all organized around the power of Jordan’s unyielding commitment to love.

“In political journalism that cuts like razors, in essays that blast the darkness of confusion with relentless light … [June Jordan] has comforted, explained, described, wrestled with, taught and made us laugh out loud before we wept… I am talking about a span of forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art.” —Toni Morrison

June Jordan (1936 – 2002) became, in her lifetime, the most published Black poet in American history. Known for her fierce commitment to human rights and political activism, she founded the Poetry for the People program at U.C. Berkeley and received, among many honors, a congressional citation for her outstanding contributions to literature, the progressive movement and the civil rights movement.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of Survival is a Promise, the biography of Audre Lorde (FSG, 2024), a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year, Guardian Book of the Week, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Award. She is a 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize Winner in Poetry, and a 2022 Whiting Award Winner in Nonfiction.

THE HEARTBEAT OF THE WILD de David Quammen

In this inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed author David Quammen journeys to places where civilization meets raw nature and explores the challenge of balancing the needs of both.

THE HEARTBEAT OF THE WILD:
Dispatches From Landscapes of Wonder, Peril, and Hope
by David Quammen
National Geographic, May 2023
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

For more than two decades, award-winning science and nature writer David Quammen has traveled to Earth’s most far-flung and fragile destinations, sending back field notes from places caught in the tension between humans and the wild. This illuminating book features 20 of those assignments: elegantly written narratives, originally published in National Geographic magazine and updated for today, telling colorful and impassioned stories from some of the planet’s wildest locales.
Quammen shares encounters with African elephants, chimpanzees, and gorillas (and their saviors, including Jane Goodall); the salmon of northeastern Russia and the people whose livelihood depends on them; the lions of Kenya and the villagers whose homes border on parks created to preserve the species; and the champions of rewilding efforts in southernmost South America, designed to rescue iconic species including jaguars and macaws.
With a new introduction, afterword, and notes framing each story, Quammen reminds us of the essential role played by wild nature at the heart of the planet.

Three-time winner of the National Magazine Award (the Ellie) and author of 15 books, David Quammen is one of the world’s top nature and science writers. His 2012 book Spillover, which predicted a worldwide pandemic, was shortlisted for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and has made him one of the most sought-after commentators on the coronavirus. He is a regular contributor to National Geographic, The New Yorker, and the New York Times. He lives in Bozeman, Montana.

UNTITLED ESSAY de Tyson Yunkaporta

A new essay by Tyson Yunkaporta, the best-selling author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World.

UNTITLED ESSAY
by Tyson Yunkaporta
Text Publishing, October 2023

When Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk was published in 2018, the American writer Tommy Orange commented that it ‘shows how vital and alive and essential Indigenous ways of being and thinking are.’ Sand Talk examined global systems from an Indigenous point view. It was, as Miles Franklin-winning author Melissa Lukashenko remarked, ‘an extraordinary invitation into the world of the Dreaming’.
Tyson Yunkaporta’s new book extends his explorations of how we can think and act and speak by combining an analysis of indigenous thinking and living with an equally revelatory critique of postindustrial society. Like Sand Talk, this new book is a formidably original essay.
It describes how the ways that we relate to each other are inseparable from how we relate to the environments we live in. It is about how we talk to each other, or yarn: how we teach and learn. Along the way, Tyson talks to a range of people: liberal economists, performance and memorisation experts, Nordic stone carvers, Frisian ecologists, and Indigenous Australian thought-leaders, mathematicians, and storytellers.
This book is a sequence of thought experiments, which are, as Yunkaporta writes, ‘crowd-sourced narratives where everybody’s contribution to the story, no matter how contradictory, is honoured and included…the closest thing I can find in the world to the Aboriginal collective process of what we call “yarning”.’

Tyson Yunkaporta is an Aboriginal scholar, and founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University in Melbourne. His work focuses on applying Indigenous methods of inquiry to resolve complex issues and explore global issues. His first book, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, was published in 2019 and won the Small Publishers’ Adult Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards and the Ansari Institute’s Randa and Sherif Nasr Book Prize on Religion & the World.