Books like Trick Mirror
Nine essays on how late-2010s America scams itself, the internet as self, the wedding industry, athleisure and optimisation, written from inside the trap by someone who does not pretend to be above it.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Trick Mirror
White
Bret Easton Ellis's essays on post-Empire America: celebrity, social media and the fate of the transgressive artist in a culture that demands likability.
A Room of One's Own
Woolf's lecture-turned-book on why women who want to write need five hundred a year and a lockable door, in a voice that invented its own form of argument.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
Essays on state fairs, cruise ships, tennis, and television that reveal the absurdity and melancholy hiding in American entertainment culture.
The Labyrinth of Solitude
Paz's essays on the Mexican character, on the pachuco, the fiesta, death, and the masks Mexicans wear.
Minor Feelings
Hong writes about Asian-American shame, Richard Pryor, friendship, and why the minor feelings of a model-minority life refuse to stay put.
The Philosophy of Modern Song
Sixty-six short essays on songs by other people, from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, each with a riff on what the song is really about.
The Collected Schizophrenias
Thirteen essays on living with schizoaffective disorder, the diagnosis, the institutions and Wang's own experience of a high-functioning illness, written with a clinician's precision.
Notes of a Native Son
Baldwin returns from Paris to America to bury his father, and in ten essays lays out what the country's racial lie has cost a son, a church, and a prose style.
On Photography
Six essays on what it means to see the world through photographs, and what the camera consumes, numbs and moralises away.
Regarding the Pain of Others
Sontag returns to her On Photography territory a quarter-century later to ask what we do with images of atrocity, and whether there is a form of looking that is not a kind of spectator-sport.
Between the World and Me
A letter from a father to his fifteen-year-old son about what it means to live in a Black body in America, written in the shadow of Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Prince Jones.
The Empathy Exams
Essays that start from Jamison's work as a medical actor, paid to perform symptoms for students, and move through Morgellons, ultramarathons and her own body to ask what empathy is for.