Ten books ...of essays
This weekend marks the anniversary of the birth of Michel de Montaigne in 1533, widely regarded as the father of the essay. Here are ten great books by exponents of the form he helped invent.
1 Heart's Desire
By Edward Hoagland
Our favourite nature writer, this loner's accounts of the animals and people he meets in the American wilderness - or the city - are unforgettable. As with many fine writers of the outdoors, his subject is often himself as much as grizzly bears or the white-tailed eagle.
Selected Essays (Oxford World Classics)
By Virginia Woolf
According to Woolf, the goal of the essay "is simply that it should give pleasure...It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last." She practised what she preached, as shown in this often personal selection, covering the art of writing and biographies of well-known writers.
The Collected Essays
By George Orwell
The short essay was Orwell's natural medium, thanks to which we know his opinions on everything, from how to make a cup of tea to the death penalty. Few have bettered his clear tone and easy style.
Against Interpretation
By Susan Sontag
Published in 1966, Sontag's first collection includes 'Notes on Camp', which helped to make her name. Thereafter, this fierce left-wing cultural commentator was to become one of the most respected intellectuals of her era.
Digging up Scotland
By Alastair Reid
Galloway-born Reid is best known as a poet, but this collection of essays is a delightful mixture of observation and wit. As a frequent escapee from Scotland, who lived much of his life in New York and the Dominican Republic, Reid brought a detached, ironic eye to his homeland, though he still writes with affection.
A View from the Bed
By Jenny Diski
Such a fan of Montaigne that she wrote a novel in which he featured, Diski is arguably the best essayist of her generation. She is as cool an observer of herself as of the world: "As a general rule I try to maintain a balanced and realistic approach to life. I'm convinced that the best place for a rabbit's foot is at the end of a rabbit's leg..."
Collected Essays of EB White
By EB White
A stalwart of the New Yorker, EB White, author of Charlotte's Web, is the pre-eminent American stylist. His interests covered literature, farming, and much else besides. A master of pellucid prose and casual profundity.
Something to Declare
By Julian Barnes
Barnes's collected journalism has the gravity, and elegance of the essay form, and are as readable as his fiction. Here his subjects include Lloyd's Bank, the Tour de France, and the life of Petrarch.
The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America
By Andrew O'Hagan
O'Hagan's essays about Britain and America, he writes, "constitute a journey into the space between us, both a comedy of errors and portrait of a marriage, as both an argument about empire and a slow drama about the meeting of fame and ordinary life." Who could resist?
Best American Essays
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The connoisseur's compendium, this annual collection from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is the series that keeps on giving.
BY ALAN TAYLOR AND ROSEMARY GORING
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