Use the ‘additional suggestions’ box to tell us if your favourite essay or author is missing, or comment boxes on each essay’s page to discuss the selection, including where you feel we should have selected another essay by the same author. We will expand the Essay Library in future, using suggestions and comments received. Example intro length, with link to more if needed.
56
Seneca’s profound understanding of the psychology of State terror makes this more than standard advice literature, going beyond ‘clemency’ strictly defined into a...
Read Essay2005
Dyer tells the story of the Great Depression by looking at photographs of men’s hats. An author of far more stand-alone essays than most, this is in fact an excerpt – a brillia...
Read Essay2005
Originating in a fiercely satirical protest sent by a Kenyan-born author to the editors of Granta, this essay has turned Wainaina into the unofficial ‘censor’ of white writing...
Read Essay2002
An example of how the personal essay form can be used to say something both more simple and profound than any amount of in-depth commentary by political journalists. Start...
Read Essay2000
An essay about how the ‘broken umbrella of contemporary relativism’ does not change the essentially different aims of history (that which is owed to reality) and imagination (p...
Read Essay1997
America’s most popular living essayist, Sedaris begins this hilarious piece on cultural idiosyncrasies with the small-talk he makes in new places. One of his regular ope...
Read Essay1995
Despite an early definition (‘If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, Junk-Space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet.’), this essay is as disorient...
Read Essay1993
An acclaimed Polish poet portrays the ‘tulipomania’ that seized the Netherlands in the seventeenth century as exemplary of all ‘follies in the sanctuaries of reason’. ...
Read Essay1993
In this compact essay, which remains an unanswered enquiry more than most ‘essais’, an esteemed analyst of children wonders that the childhood experience of being tickled by a ...
Read Essay1993
The most intellectual yet unpretentious essay on the cultural impact of television – a crater so huge we forget we stand in it. Foster Wallace begins with a Walter Benjaminesque ...
Read Essay1990
The title catchily paraphrases: ‘Can the cosmic and historical drama be interpreted as a movement towards the ultimate reconciliation of all things?’ This is not simpl...
Read Essay1989
An elegant, short essay by Levi the scientist, rather than Levi the Auschwitz survivor, which nonetheless turns to subtle metaphor at the end and so speaks to the stable/unstable n...
Read Essay