Must-Read Collections by Must-Read Authors

Ever the provocateur (as the title suggests), Camille Paglia, the author of the controversial and bestselling Sexual Personae, has challenged and enraged scholars and critics for the past three decades. Provocations collects Paglia’s wide-ranging essays on history, film, literature, feminism, education, sex, politics, and religion. “This book is not for everyone,” Paglia writes in the introduction, and she’s right in the sense that not everyone will agree with her many arguments. But the book is, undoubtedly, the work of a writer to be reckoned with.

Hannah Arendt was one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, a deeply dedicated philosopher, restless questioner, and the author of such seminal works as The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem. Thinking Without a Bannister, her collected essays, is an assemblage of Arendt at her most pressing and brilliant. If you haven’t read Hannah Arendt, just go and get this book. You’ll thank me for it.

One of the best literary critics of the past century, Elizabeth Hardwick, in books such as Seduction and Betrayal and Sight-Readings, took on the most celebrated figures in the literary canon with brio, inimitable acumen, and piercing intelligence. Her collected essays—covering iconic figures such as Martin Luther King, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and William James as well as lesser known writers like Christina Snead, Margaret Fuller, and Ring Lardner—function as a paean to her remarkable skill and her impossibly deep reserve of insight and analysis.

Diane Williams is, along with George Saunders and Deborah Eisenberg, one of America’s best short story writers. She is also, like Lydia Davis and Amy Hempel, a master of the short-short story. But unlike those other authors, Williams is staunchly experimental, avant-garde, and yet remains, amazingly, as assessable as any of them. The Collected Stories of Diane Williams brings together over three hundred of Williams’s oddball tales, each and every one a surprise, a delight, a baffling experience, a one-of-a-kind thrill, a weird and eerie treat.

Marie Ponsot’s first collection of poetry, True Minds, was, along with Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Lawrence Ferglinghetti’s Pictures of the Gone World, a City Lights Pocket Book (the fifth, to be exact). Ever since, she has produced books of verse that measure up to esteemed company from which her career began. Her Collected Poems is a wondrous journey through Ponsot’s unique playfulness with language, her transcendent skill with sonnets, and her joyous and profound celebration of her chosen form.

From the heartbreaking love story of Thomas and Beulah to the harrowing history of On the Bus with Rosa Parks, Rita Dove’s poetry collections have long been venerated for their beauty, their political depth, and their stark evocation of personal and cultural struggles. Brought together in one volume, Dove’s poems tell the story of one poet’s life, told with such unblinking bravery and uncannily wide-ranging perspective that it also tells the story of America.