Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Essays

Upon becoming a new mother, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was called to Mexico to reconnect with her ancestors and recover her grandmother’s story, only to return to the sudden loss of her marriage, home, and reality. In Magical/Realism, Villarreal crosses into the erasure of memory and self, fragmented by migration, borders, and colonial and intimate violence, reconstructing her story with pieces of American pop culture, and the music, video games, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all.

We talk about achieving 'LGBTQ+ equality', but around the world, LGBTQ+ people are still suffering discrimination and extreme violence. How do we solve this urgent problem, allowing queer people everywhere the opportunity to thrive? In We Can Do Better Than This, 35 voices explore this question. Through deeply moving stories and provocative new arguments on safety and visibility, dating and gender, care and community, they map new global frontiers in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights.

At 20, Londoner Ann Ingle fell madly in love with an Irish fellow she met on holiday in Cornwall. At the church to arrange their shotgun wedding, she discovered that he hadn't even told her his real name. Sixty-odd years later, Ann looks back on that first glorious fall, and in a series of essays considers what she has learned from the life that followed.

In Love in Exile, Shon Faye shows love is much greater than the narrow ideals we have been taught to crave so desperately that we are willing to bend and break ourselves to fit them. Wise, funny, unsparing, and suffused with a radical clarity, this is a book of and for our times: for seeing and knowing love, in whatever form it takes, is the meaning of life itself.

The New York Times best seller from the author of Slaughterhouse-Five—a “gripping” posthumous collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s previously unpublished work on the subject of war and peace. A fitting tribute to a literary legend and a profoundly humane humorist, Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of 12 previously unpublished writings. Imbued with Vonnegut's trademark rueful humor and outraged moral sense.

Rapper and singer Dessa gives a candid account of her life as a touring musician, her determination to beat long odds to make a name for herself, and her struggle to fall out of love with someone in her band. Raw and intimate, Dessa demonstrates just how far the mind can travel while the body is on the six-hour ride to the next rap show. Dessa finds unconventional approaches to all of her subjects - braiding her lived experience with academic research and a poet's tone and timing. In the vein of thinkers who defy categorization, we get the debut of a deft, likable, and unusual voice.

Collected Essays contains nearly 80 essays, reviews and occasional pieces composed between novels, plays and travel books over four prolific decades. From Henry James and Somerset Maugham to Ho Chi Minh and Kim Philby, the range of subjects is eclectic and stimulating, his subjects brought vividly to life. The resulting collection is as revealing as autobiography and characteristically rich in humour, insight and doubt.

Discontent and Its Civilizations collects the best of Mohsin Hamid's writing on subjects as diverse and wide-ranging as Pakistan, fatherhood, the death of Osama Bin Laden and the writing of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Unified by the author's humane, clear-headed and witty voice, the audiobook makes a compelling case for recognising our common humanity while relishing our diversity—both as readers and citizens, for resisting the artificial mono-identities of religion or nationality or race and for always judging a country or nation by how it treats its minorities.

Building from his acclaimed anthology Tales of Two Americas, beloved writer and editor John Freeman draws together a group of our greatest writers from around the world to help us see how the environmental crisis is hitting some of the most vulnerable communities where they live. In the past five years, John Freeman, previously editor of Granta, has launched a celebrated international literary magazine, Freeman's, and compiled two acclaimed anthologies that deal with income inequality as it is experienced.

The first book of its kind, The Penguin Book of Latina Writings shines a light on a robust community of U.S.-based Latina voices that have been historically overlooked and underrepresented in literature, and demonstrates the valuable contributions Latina writers have made to the literary and intellectual community. The curated selections in this unique anthology elucidate U.S. Latina writers' intersectionality and give readers an understanding of the various positions they are writing to and from.

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer edits a collection of Alain Locke's influential essays on the importance of the Black artist and the Black imagination.

In 1915, Puerto Rican activist Luisa Capetillo was arrested and acquitted for being the first woman to wear men's trousers publicly. While this act of gender-nonconforming rebellion elevated her to feminist icon status in modern pop culture, it also overshadowed the significant contributions she made to the women's movement and anarchist labor movements of the early 20th century - both in her native Puerto Rico and in the migrant labor belt in the eastern United States.

Raised in Manhattan by her overly protective sex-therapist mother who wore "seven layers of shoulder pads" and her two doting grandparents, life in Wendy Spero's world has never been dull. As a child, she passed the time organizing impromptu "garage sales" on city sidewalks, sniffing fruit-scented magic markers to intoxication, parenting dozens of high-maintenance stuffed animals, and seeking out other "microthrills", which she writes about in this hilarious audiobook of odd but true stories.

As a young intern at Pride magazine, Diana Evans was catapulted into the role of culture editor, and so began her career as a journalist, writing about musicians, dancers and artists, interviewing the likes of Viola Davis, Alice Walker and Edward Enninful. Crafted over twenty-five years, with the intelligence and sensitivity that Diana Evans is known for, I Want to Talk to You invites you into a conversation about literature, art, identity, and everything in between.

Canonized, overlooked, and forgotten African American poets star in Terrance Hayes's brilliant contemplations of personal, canonical, and allegorical literary development. Proceeding from Toni Morrison's aim to expand the landscape of literary imagination in Playing in the Dark ("I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography"), Watch Your Language charts a lyrical geography of reading and influence in poetry.

What if we reconsidered our assumptions about how fiction should be written? And can we then apply our discoveries to both what we read and how we read? This book explores these questions and encourages us into a more inclusive conversation about storytelling. Filled with empathy and wisdom, personal experiences and creative inspiration, this is a vital collection of essays on the power of literature and the craft of writing from an international array of writers of colour.