The Maker's Eye

Ten letters, 1903 to 1908, from Rilke to Franz Xaver Kappus, a nineteen-year-old military cadet who wrote to ask whether his poems were any good. Rilke never quite answers; instead: go into yourself, love your solitude, be patient with everything unsolved. Kappus published the letters in 1929, three years after Rilke's death. It has been pressed into more young hands than any book of its kind, and the fourth letter's 'live the questions' may be the most useful advice a stranger ever mailed to another.

The definitive essay on clear writing and political prose. Every journalist and every writer should read it. "Never use a long word where a short one will do." Still the best writing manual ever written.

The definitive anthology spanning Seneca to the present. Lopate's introductions are themselves masterworks of the form.

The most important feminist essay of the 20th century and a formal masterpiece: an argument delivered through narrative, digression, and invention (Judith Shakespeare). Changed what essays could do politically.

Berger's radical rethinking of how we look at art challenged the mystification of art history and opened visual culture to democratic interpretation. Originating as a 1972 BBC series, it remains the most taught art criticism text in universities worldwide. His essay on the male gaze presaged feminist theory by decades.

Auden's essays are the most intellectually pleasurable in the language: wide-ranging, aphoristic, opinionated, learned without pedantry. He writes on Shakespeare, Yeats, Kierkegaard, opera, detective fiction. The educated reader's delight.

Opens with one of the great opening sentences: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." An essay about the ethics of journalism that uses a specific case to argue a universal point.

The debut that announced the new essay renaissance of the 2010s. Personal essays about pain and the medical industry that were formally daring and emotionally precise. Jamison turns the self's most uncomfortable territories into investigation.

Chee writes essays on craft, identity, AIDS, and becoming a writer. Makes the personal essay feel vital.