Essay

Selected from the favourite articles of the urban culture magazine Saigon CityLife, these titles includes writings by Saigon denizens, from viewpoints of both domestic artists and foreigners as well as Vietnamese overseas who came to live and work in this most hectic city of Vietnam. Exposing indepth understanding of its culture, culinary tradition, street life and favourite...

Selected from the favourite articles of the urban culture magazine Saigon CityLife, these titles includes writings by Saigon denizens, from viewpoints of both domestic artists and foreigners as well as Vietnamese overseas who came to live and work in this most hectic city of Vietnam. Exposing indepth understanding of its culture, culinary tradition, street life and favourite...

The translation of Goethe's "Prose Maxims" now offered to the public is the first attempt that has yet been made to present the greater part of these incomparable sayings in English. In the complete collection they are over a thousand in number, and not more perhaps than a hundred and fifty have already found their way into our language, whether as contributions to magazines here and in America,...

The Soul of Man under Socialism is an 1891 essay by Oscar Wilde in which he expounds a libertarian socialist worldview and a critique of charity. The writing of The Soul of Man followed Wilde's conversion to anarchist philosophy, following his reading of the works of Peter Kropotkin.  In The Soul of Man Wilde argues that,...

How to Tell a Story and Other Essays (1897) is a series of essays by Mark Twain. In them he describes his own writing style, attacks the idiocy of a fellow author, defends the virtue of a dead woman, and tries to protect ordinary citizens from insults by railroad conductors.

The eleven papers which are collected here were written between 1899 and 1905. With the exception of one, entitled "Aspects of Shakespeare's Philosophy," which is now printed for the first time, they were published in periodicals in the course of those six years. The articles treat of varied aspects of Shakespearean drama, its influences and traditions, but I think that all may be credited...

Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft is a series of essays by Sir Walter Scott on the subject of the witch-craze, demonology, and other occult topics. It is an early review of the literature that others such as Murray would be analyzing in the next century. Scott has an antiquarian mind, and obviously relishes exposing the reader to the grotesque and the unusual.

Transcribed from the 1880 Chatto and Windus edition by David Price.

These speeches will address themselves to the minds and hearts of those who read them, but not with the effect they had with those who heard them; Clemens himself would have said, not with half the effect. I have noted elsewhere how he always held that the actor doubled the value of the author's words; and he was a great actor as well as a great author. He was a most consummate actor, with this...

While the time of man’s first knowledge and use of the expansive force of the vapor of water is unknown, records show that such knowledge existed earlier than 150 B. C. In a treatise of about that time entitled “Pneumatica”, Hero, of Alexander, described not only existing devices of his predecessors and contemporaries but also an invention of his own which utilized the expansive...

The Eyes of Asia published in the U.S.A. in 1918, contains four letters purporting to be written to relations or friends at home in India by soldiers of the Indian Army (part of the normal British Forces in that country down to 1947) at the time of World War I, 1914-18. They were on active service in Europe and Africa, 1915-18. The articles forming The Eyes of Asia appeared in the American...

Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same. Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good. Do not love your neighbor as yourself. If you are on good terms with yourself it is an impertinence: if on bad, an injury. The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

In this essay originally published by the Fabian Society of Socialists, Mr. Shaw proposes situations of anarchy and follows them through to their logical finish.

[Date: 1601.] Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors or simply 1601 is the title of a short risquésquib by Mark Twain, first published anonymously in 1880, and finally acknowledged by the author in 1906. Written as an extract from the diary of one of Queen Elizabeth I's ladies-in-waiting, the pamphlet purports to record a conversation between Elizabeth...

On the Decay of the Art of Lying is a short essay written by Mark Twain in 1880 for a meeting of the Historical and Antiquarian Club of Hartford, Connecticut. Twain published the text in The Stolen White Elephant Etc. (1882). In the essay, Twain laments the four ways in which men of America's Gilded Age employ man's 'most faithful friend'. He concludes by insisting that: “The wise thing...

The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring (originally published London, 1898) is a philosophical commentary on Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, by the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw.  Shaw offered it to those enthusiastic admirers of Wagner who "were unable to follow his ideas, and do not in the least understand the dilemma of Wotan."...

A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick, commonly referred to as A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian satirical essay written and published anonymously by Jonathan Swift in 1729. Swift suggests that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children...

Why not give Christianity a trial? The question seems a hopeless one after 2000 years of resolute adherence to the old cry of "Not this man, but Barabbas." Yet it is beginning to look as if Barabbas was a failure, in spite of his strong right hand, his victories, his empires, his millions of money, and his moralities and churches and political constitutions. "This man" has not been a failure...

In an issue of the London World in April, 1890, there appeared the following paragraph: "Two small rooms connected by a tiny hall afford sufficient space to contain Mr. Rudyard Kipling, the literary hero of the present hour, 'the man who came from nowhere,' as he says himself, and who a year ago was consciously nothing in the literary world." Six months previous to this Mr. Kipling, then but...

Wilde’s literary reputation has survived so much that I think it proof against any exhumation of articles which he or his admirers would have preferred to forget. As a matter of fact, I believe this volume will prove of unusual interest; some of the reviews are curiously prophetic; some are, of course, biassed by prejudice hostile or friendly; others are conceived in the author’s...