Fifty Essays

"The carefully chosen selections in 50 Essays include both classic essays and high-interest, high-quality contemporary readings to hold your interest and inspire your writing. 50 Essays will help you acquire the critical thinking and academic writing skills you need to succeed, without making a dent in your bank account." --

A compact collection of essays at an affordable price,Twenty-Five Great Essaysoffers readers an excellent models of good writing and springboards to student writing.Selections range fromclassic essayssuch as E.B. White's, "Beauty" and Frederick Douglass', "Learning to Read and Write," tocontemporary essayssuch as Joan Didian's, "Marrying Absurd" and Stephen Jay Gould's, "Women's Brains."General readers.

Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook, No. 29: With a Non-argument that’s Actually an Argument. Captain Cook? It’s all so very complex. I’m going to sit on the fence. (Whose fence? On whose land? Dividing what from what? You only have a fence when you fear something or when you’re trying to keep something in. Or, as a renovation show on TV informed me, when you want to upgrade your street appeal.) Alice Te Punga Somerville employs her deep research and dark humour to skilfully channel her response to Cook’s global colonial legacy in this revealing and defiant BWB Text.

"Naked Lunch" was banned, castigated, and recognized as a work of genius on its first publication in 1959, and fifty years later it has lost nothing of its power to astonish, shock, and inspire. A lacerating satire, an exorcism of demons, a grotesque cabinet of horrors, it is the Black Book of the Beat Generation, the forerunner of the psychedelic counterculture, and a progenitor of postmodernism and the digital age. A work of excoriating laughter, linguistic derangement, and transcendent beauty, it remains both influential and inimitable.This is the first book devoted in its entirety to William Burroughs masterpiece, bringing together an international array of scholars, artists, musicians, and academics from many fields to explore the origins, writing, reception, and complex meanings of "Naked Lunch." Tracking the legendary book from Texas and Mexico to New York, Tangier, and Paris, "Naked Lunch@50" significantly advances our understanding and appreciation of this most elusive and uncanny of texts.Contributors: Contributors: Keith AlbarnEric AndersenGail-Nina AndersonTheophile AriesJed BirminghamShaun de WaalRichard DoyleLoren GlassOliver HarrisKurt HemmerAllen HibbardRob HoltonAndrew HusseyRob JohnsonJean-Jacques LebelIan MacFadyenPolina MackayJonas MekasBarry MilesR. B. MorrisTimothy S. MurphyJurgen PloogDavis SchneidermanJennie SkerlDJ SpookyPhilip Taaffe"""

Fifty all-new essays that got their authors into Harvard Medical School, including MCAT scores, showing what worked, what didn’t, and how you can do it too. Competition to get into the nation’s top medical schools has never been more intense. Harvard Medical School in particular draws thousands of elite applicants from around the world. As admissions departments become increasingly selective, even the best and brightest need an edge. Writing a personal statement is a daunting part of the application process. In less than 5,300 characters, applicants must weave together experiences and passions into a memorable narrative to set them apart from thousands of other applicants. While there is no magic formula for writing the perfect essay, picking up this book will put them on the right track. 50 Successful Harvard Medical School Essays is the first in a new line of books published by the Staff of the Harvard Crimson. It includes fifty standout essays from students who successfully secured a spot at Harvard Medical School. Each student has a unique set of experiences that led them to medicine. Each essay includes analysis by Crimson editors on essay qualities and techniques that worked, so readers can apply them to their own writing. This book will aid applicants in composing essays that reveal their passion for medicine and the discipline they will bring to this demanding program and profession. It will give them the extra help they need to get into the best medical school programs in the world.

The powerful tools in this invaluable resource equip students with the skills to write successful entrance essays for top-notch universities. The strengths and weaknesses of 50 application compositions from Ivy League schools, as well as Caltech, Duke, MIT, Stanford, and University of Chicago, are analyzed in detail, highlighting techniques to emulate and mistakes to avoid. College admission officers from some of these schools provide informative strategies and inside information on their writing assessment criteria. A comprehensive writing workshop provides tips toward selecting topics, developing stories, editing drafts, and applying finishing touches. Acknowledging that the written portion of the process is one of the most important factors for admission into highly selective schools, this helpful guidebook offers sage advice and inspiration to keep applicants on the right track.

The former U.S. Poet Laureate contemplates life, death, and the view from his window in these “alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny” essays (The New York Times). From an early age, Donald Hall dedicated his life to the written word. In his long and celebrated career, he was an accomplished poet, essayist, memoirist, dramatist, and children’s author. Now, in the “unknown, unanticipated galaxy” of very old age, his essays continue to startle, move, and delight. In Essays After Eighty, Hall ruminates on his past: “thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life, sixty extended the bliss of fifty . . .” He also addresses his present: “When I turned eighty and rubbed testosterone on my chest, my beard roared like a lion and gained four inches.” Most memorably, Hall writes about his enduring love affair with his ancestral Eagle Pond Farm and with the writing life that sustains him every day: “Yesterday my first nap was at 9:30 a.m., but when I awoke I wrote again.” “Deliciously readable…Donald Hall, if abandoned by the muse of poetry, has wrought his prose to a keen autumnal edge.” —The Wall Street Journal