THE TEN GREATEST ESSAYS, EVER
Lia Purpura
James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (from 1941)
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (from 1955)
W.E.B Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folks (from 1903)
Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces (from Penguin Books, 1986)
Albert Goldbarth, Many Circles (from Graywolf Press, 2001)
Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (from 1953)
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory (from 1966)
David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster (from Little, Brown, and Co., 2005)
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being (from Mariner Books, 1985)
C.D. Wright, Cooling Time (from Copper Canyon Press, 2005)
About Lia Purpura
Lia Purpura’s new collection of essays, All the Fierce Tethers, will be published in 2019 with Sarabande Books. Her most recent collection of poems is It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Viking/Penguin). She is the author of three previous collections of poems (King Baby, Stone Sky Lifting, The Brighter the Veil); three collections of essays (Rough Likeness, On Looking, Increase), and one collection of translations (Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash). The recipient of four Pushcart Prizes, she has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, and the Fulbright Foundation (Translation, Warsaw, Poland).