Endlessly surprising and entertaining, Humiliation is an essay-in-fragments unlike any other you will read on the human condition. With a disarming blend of personal reflection and cultural commentary, Wayne Koestenbaum walks us – at times cajoles us – through a spectrum of mortifications, in history, current events, literature, art, music, film, and in his own life. The book’s timing, the New York Times tells us, “is flawless.”
At once a travel narrative, an allegorical journey, a withering comment on State-Building, a humanist philosophy of life, a preparation for death and a prophecy of resurrection (both for Armenia and for himself). This edition also includes the companion-piece, ‘Conversation about Dante’.
The great Victorian William Morris was fascinated by Iceland, which inspired him to write one of the masterpieces of travel literature. Poet Lavinia Greenlaw follows in his footsteps, combining excerpts from his Icelandic writings with her own eye-witness response to the country and creates a highly original meditation – part memoir, part prose poem, part criticism, part travelogue.
What happens when an art critic loses some of his sight to cataracts? What wonders are glimpsed once vision is restored? In this impressionistic essay written in the spirit of Montaigne, John Berger, whose treatises on seeing have shaped cultural and media studies for four decades, records the effects of cataract removal operations on each of his eyes.
Prize-winning author Jonathan Keates has a secret passion: collecting vintage guidebooks. These Victorian volumes contain an entire archeology of cultural loss and longing as Keates takes us on a poignant, enlightening, and at times hilarious tour of that mysterious country, the past.
Ahad Ha’am (the pen name of Asher Ginzberg) is mainly remembered as the ‘father of cultural Zionism’. But there was much more to the man and his thought. These essays, laced with a withering wit, show him to have been a brilliant exponent of the art of the essayist. Moreover, as the introduction by Brian Klug explains, his ideas have a direct relevance today, not least in confronting the future of Israel and Palestine.
