Washoe County Library System

“An extended spa treatment that stretches tired brains and unkinks the usual habitual responses where Hitchens is concerned.” —James Wolcott in his introduction An outstanding new collection, A HITCH IN TIME is a must have for Hitchens completists and the perfect starting point for understanding one of the most brilliant essayists of all time. Anthologized here for the first time, A HITCH IN TIME is a choice selection of Christopher Hitchens’s...

Award-winning writer, columnist, and journalists Carl Zimmer selects twenty science and nature essays that represent the best examples of the form published in 2022. “What's most compelling about a scientific story is the way it challenges us to think about the concepts we take for granted,” writes guest editor Carl Zimmer in his introduction. The essays in this year’s Best American Science and Nature Writing probe at the ordinary and urge...

"A companion to Nina MacLaughlin's luminous Summer Solstice. The year is fading. Light is fading. Solstice means sun-stilled. It's a wild sort of stilling, a thrashing frenzied sort of stilling, a stopping of time, a de-metering, a holding of the breath as the tension builds, as the dark expands, until it cracks and the light drives in. That's the hope. Pomegranate, holly branch, birch switch, mistletoe. We'll leaf with life and pass below the secret...

"With The Interpretation of Cultures, the distinguished anthropologist Clifford Geertz developed the concept of thick description, and in so doing, he virtually rewrote the rules of his field. Culture, Geertz argues, does not drive human behavior. Rather, it is a web of symbols that can help us better understand what that behavior means. A thick description explains not only the behavior, but the context in which it occurs, and to describe something...

"Throughout her life, Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, "starter witch kits" of sage, rose quartz, and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic. Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary...

"From beloved and bestselling author Roxane Gay, “a strikingly fresh cultural critic” (Washington Post) comes an exhilarating collection of her essays on culture, politics, and everything in between. Since the publication of the groundbreaking Bad Feminist and Hunger, Roxane Gay has continued to tackle big issues embroiling society—state-sponsored violence and mass shootings, women’s rights post-Dobbs, online disinformation, and the limits...

"In addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. 'Ink is a generative fluid,' she explains. 'If you don't mean your words to breed consequences, don't write at all.' A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades. Her subjects are wide-ranging, sharply observed, and beautifully...

"From a National Book Award finalist and a powerful literary mind, an incisive new work examining capitalism's toxic creep into the land, our bodies, and our thinking. When she receives a dermatological diagnosis of extreme sensitivity-thin skin-Jenn Shapland considers just how thin the barrier is between herself and the world, and how deeply vulnerable we all are to our surroundings. As she becomes aware of the impacts her tiniest choices have on...

"An unprecedented and intimate portrait of Russia, and a fearless cri de c�ur for journalism in opposition to the global authoritarian turn To be a journalist is to tell the truth. I Love Russia is Elena Kostyuchenko's fearless and unrelenting attempt todocument Putin's Russia as experienced by those whom it systematically and brutally erases: village girls recruited into sex work, queer people in the outer provinces, patients and doctors at a Ukrainian...

"Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) is, of course, best known as the author of Little Women (1868). But she was also a noted essayist who wrote on a wide range of subjects, including her father's failed utopian commune, the benefits of an unmarried life, and her experience as a young woman sent to work in service to alleviate her family's poverty. Her first literary success was a contemporary close-up account of the American Civil War, brilliantly depicted...