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Why read essays?

Essays can take you through the author’s mind to reveal insights across every topic imaginable. Scribe has published essay collections thad discuss climate change and intersectional identities, pop culture and sexuality, post-partum depression, fearless explorations of romantic relationships, and so on.

Each individual essay is short and achievable, the writing often personal, all bundled in a collection covering a breadth of topics, essay anthologies hold something for every reader. Read on for some of our suggestions.

The Nerves and Their Endings

‘For those who haven’t yet experienced climate collapse in our own bodies, a history not yet written into us, the feeling it arrives in the shape of shadows, an atmospheric wrongness, and harrowing predictions; these are stories that change our own. The moment we begin to truly engage with climate science, our narratives of self and future are whirled out of orbit.’

In The Nerves and their Endings, writer, activist, and migrant Jessica Gaitán Johannesson explores how we respond to crises, moving from the personal to the political and back again. The synapses that spark between these essays connect essential narratives of response and responsibility, community and choice, belonging and bodies.

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So Sad Today

‘I am an eater who knows, intellectually, that control is an illusion. I know it experientially and spiritually, through peak experiences and gentle experiences and love and sudden pain and tragedy. But asking the mind to give up control and the mind actually obeying is another animal. I am an eater whose mind says no.’

Sexually confused, a recovering addict, suffering from an eating disorder and marked by one very strange sex fetish: Melissa Broder's life is full of extremes. But from her days working for a Tantric nonprofit in San Francisco to caring for a severely ill husband, there's no subject that Broder is afraid to write about, and no shortage of readers who can relate. So Sad Today is an unapologetic, unblinkingly intimate book that splays out a soul and a prose of unusual beauty.

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Things That Helped

‘The lipsticks that I own are steeped in sex and blood. In my collection, I have Lady Danger; Relentlessly Red; Good to Go. Cosmo tells me early on that the painted mouth is supposed to evoke the labia, voluptuous and slightly parted, and the names of my lipsticks bear this out: they are unequivocal. There are fast cars, dangers, and passion. There is fire, lust, anger poppies, roses, all of them packed into small, dark tubes.’ 

In Things That Helped, Jessica Friedmann navigates her journey through postpartum depression after the birth of her son. Drawing on critical theory, popular culture, and personal experience, her wide-ranging essays touch on class, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as motherhood, creativity, and mental illness.

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Something That May Shock and Discredit You

‘I fear—how could I not?—that I will merely replace one error with another, that I will take avowal of desire in itself as an unalloyed, uncomplicated good in alll places and in all situations, that no atter what I try to make of my life, I will never be free of that counterweight, whether I ever speak to another member of my family of origin again—always reacting, equally and oppositely, to someone else's commitments.’

From the beloved writer behind The Toast and Slate’s ‘Dear Prudence’ column comes a personal essay collection exploring popular culture, literature, religion, and sexuality. With wit and compassion, Something That May Shock and Discredit You revisits beloved cultural and literary figures in the light of his transition.

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The Nerves and Their Endings

Jessica Gaitán Johannesson

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Things That Helped

Jessica Friedmann

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So Sad Today

Melissa Broder

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Something That May Shock and Discredit You

Daniel Mallory Ortberg

Cover view