Essay collections are a staple for every reader. From a compendium of opinions and philosophies, to personal stories and political musings, a collection of essays can be almost anything and everything. However, conclusively, they prove to be enlightening. So, we’ve curated a list of books of essays releasing this year that should be on your must-read list.
You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays by Zora Neale Hurston
You Don’t Know Us Negroes is the quintessential gathering of provocative essays from one of the world’s most celebrated writers, Zora Neale Hurston. Spanning more than three decades and penned during the backdrop of the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, Montgomery bus boycott, desegregation of the military, and school integration, Hurston’s writing articulates the beauty and authenticity of Black life as only she could. Collectively, these essays showcase the roles enslavement and Jim Crow have played in intensifying Black people’s inner lives and culture rather than destroying it.
Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021 by Margaret Atwood
In more than fifty pieces, Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humour at the world, and reports back to us on what she finds. This roller-coaster period brought the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump, and a pandemic. From debt to tech, the climate crisis to freedom; from when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to how to define granola, we have no better guide to the many and varied mysteries of our universe.
We Uyghurs Have No Say: An Imprisoned Writer Speaks by Ilham Tohti
The book is a collection of his plain-spoken calls for justice, scholarly explanations of the history of Xinjiang, and poignant personal reflections. While his courage and outspokenness about the plight of China's Muslim minorities is extraordinary, these essays sound a measured insistence on peace and just treatment for the Uyghurs. Winner of the PEN/Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award and the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought while imprisoned, this book is nonetheless the only way to hear from a man who has been called ‘a Uyghur Mandela’.
Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri
Translating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages. Featuring essays originally written in Italian and published in English for the first time, as well as essays written in English, the book brings together Lahiri’s most lyrical and eloquently observed meditations on the translator’s art as a sublime act of both linguistic and personal metamorphosis.
The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays by CJ Hauser
CJ Hauser expands on her viral sensation The Crane Wife with seventeen further essays in this intimate, frank, and funny book about love in the twenty-first century. Told with the late-night barstool directness of your wisest, most bighearted friend, The Crane Wife is a book for everyone whose life doesn't look the way they thought it would; for everyone learning to find joy in the not-knowing; for everyone trying, if sometimes failing, to build a new sort of life story, a new sort of family, a new sort of home, to live in.
Text Platform Desk
Date 03-02-2022