free online essays to read

25 Great Nonfiction Essays You Can Read Online for Free

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Alison Doherty

Alison Doherty is a writing teacher and part time assistant professor living in Brooklyn, New York. She has an MFA from The New School in writing for children and teenagers. She loves writing about books on the Internet, listening to audiobooks on the subway, and reading anything with a twisty plot or a happily ever after.

View All posts by Alison Doherty

I love reading books of nonfiction essays and memoirs , but sometimes have a hard time committing to a whole book. This is especially true if I don’t know the author. But reading nonfiction essays online is a quick way to learn which authors you like. Also, reading nonfiction essays can help you learn more about different topics and experiences.

Besides essays on Book Riot,  I love looking for essays on The New Yorker , The Atlantic , The Rumpus , and Electric Literature . But there are great nonfiction essays available for free all over the Internet. From contemporary to classic writers and personal essays to researched ones—here are 25 of my favorite nonfiction essays you can read today.

free online essays to read

“Beware of Feminist Lite” by  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The author of We Should All Be Feminists  writes a short essay explaining the danger of believing men and woman are equal only under certain conditions.

“It’s Silly to Be Frightened of Being Dead” by Diana Athill

A 96-year-old woman discusses her shifting attitude towards death from her childhood in the 1920s when death was a taboo subject, to World War 2 until the present day.

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“Letter from a Region in my Mind” by James Baldwin

There are many moving and important essays by James Baldwin . This one uses the lens of religion to explore the Black American experience and sexuality. Baldwin describes his move from being a teenage preacher to not believing in god. Then he recounts his meeting with the prominent Nation of Islam member Elijah Muhammad.

“Relations” by Eula Biss

Biss uses the story of a white woman giving birth to a Black baby that was mistakenly implanted during a fertility treatment to explore racial identities and segregation in society as a whole and in her own interracial family.

“Friday Night Lights” by Buzz Bissinger

A comprehensive deep dive into the world of high school football in a small West Texas town.

“The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Coates examines the lingering and continuing affects of slavery on  American society and makes a compelling case for the descendants of slaves being offered reparations from the government.

“Why I Write” by Joan Didion

This is one of the most iconic nonfiction essays about writing. Didion describes the reasons she became a writer, her process, and her journey to doing what she loves professionally.

“Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Roger Ebert

With knowledge of his own death, the famous film critic ponders questions of mortality while also giving readers a pep talk for how to embrace life fully.

“My Mother’s Tongue” by Zavi Kang Engles

In this personal essay, Engles celebrates the close relationship she had with her mother and laments losing her Korean fluency.

“My Life as an Heiress” by Nora Ephron

As she’s writing an important script, Ephron imagines her life as a newly wealthy woman when she finds out an uncle left her an inheritance. But she doesn’t know exactly what that inheritance is.

“My FatheR Spent 30 Years in Prison. Now He’s Out.” by Ashley C. Ford

Ford describes the experience of getting to know her father after he’s been in prison for almost all of her life. Bridging the distance in their knowledge of technology becomes a significant—and at times humorous—step in rebuilding their relationship.

“Bad Feminist” by Roxane Gay

There’s a reason Gay named her bestselling essay collection after this story. It’s a witty, sharp, and relatable look at what it means to call yourself a feminist.

“The Empathy Exams” by Leslie Jamison

Jamison discusses her job as a medical actor helping to train medical students to improve their empathy and uses this frame to tell the story of one winter in college when she had an abortion and heart surgery.

“What I Learned from a Fitting Room Disaster About Clothes and Life” by Scaachi Koul

One woman describes her history with difficult fitting room experiences culminating in one catastrophe that will change the way she hopes to identify herself through clothes.

“Breasts: the Odd Couple” by Una LaMarche

LaMarche examines her changing feelings about her own differently sized breasts.

“How I Broke, and Botched, the Brandon Teena Story” by Donna Minkowitz

A journalist looks back at her own biased reporting on a news story about the sexual assault and murder of a trans man in 1993. Minkowitz examines how ideas of gender and sexuality have changed since she reported the story, along with how her own lesbian identity influenced her opinions about the crime.

“Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell

In this famous essay, Orwell bemoans how politics have corrupted the English language by making it more vague, confusing, and boring.

“Letting Go” by David Sedaris

The famously funny personal essay author , writes about a distinctly unfunny topic of tobacco addiction and his own journey as a smoker. It is (predictably) hilarious.

“Joy” by Zadie Smith

Smith explores the difference between pleasure and joy by closely examining moments of both, including eating a delicious egg sandwich, taking drugs at a concert, and falling in love.

“Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan

Tan tells the story of how her mother’s way of speaking English as an immigrant from China changed the way people viewed her intelligence.

“Consider the Lobster” by David Foster Wallace

The prolific nonfiction essay and fiction writer  travels to the Maine Lobster Festival to write a piece for Gourmet Magazine. With his signature footnotes, Wallace turns this experience into a deep exploration on what constitutes consciousness.

“I Am Not Pocahontas” by Elissa Washuta

Washuta looks at her own contemporary Native American identity through the lens of stereotypical depictions from 1990s films.

“Once More to the Lake” by E.B. White

E.B. White didn’t just write books like Charlotte’s Web and The Elements of Style . He also was a brilliant essayist. This nature essay explores the theme of fatherhood against the backdrop of a lake within the forests of Maine.

“Pell-Mell” by Tom Wolfe

The inventor of “new journalism” writes about the creation of an American idea by telling the story of Thomas Jefferson snubbing a European Ambassador.

“The Death of the Moth” by Virginia Woolf

In this nonfiction essay, Wolf describes a moth dying on her window pane. She uses the story as a way to ruminate on the lager theme of the meaning of life and death.

free online essays to read

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Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her Career From 1965 to 2013

in Literature , Writing | January 14th, 2014 3 Comments

free online essays to read

Image by David Shankbone, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In a clas­sic essay of Joan Didion’s, “Good­bye to All That,” the nov­el­ist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time—to prod her read­er. She rhetor­i­cal­ly asks and answers: “…was any­one ever so young? I am here to tell you that some­one was.” The wry lit­tle moment is per­fect­ly indica­tive of Didion’s unspar­ing­ly iron­ic crit­i­cal voice. Did­ion is a con­sum­mate crit­ic, from Greek kritēs , “a judge.” But she is always fore­most a judge of her­self. An account of Didion’s eight years in New York City, where she wrote her first nov­el while work­ing for Vogue , “Good­bye to All That” fre­quent­ly shifts point of view as Did­ion exam­ines the truth of each state­ment, her prose mov­ing seam­less­ly from delib­er­a­tion to com­men­tary, anno­ta­tion, aside, and apho­rism, like the below:

I want to explain to you, and in the process per­haps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from some­where else, a city only for the very young.

Any­one who has ever loved and left New York—or any life-alter­ing city—will know the pangs of res­ig­na­tion Did­ion cap­tures. These eco­nom­ic times and every oth­er pro­duce many such sto­ries. But Did­ion made some­thing entire­ly new of famil­iar sen­ti­ments. Although her essay has inspired a sub-genre , and a col­lec­tion of breakup let­ters to New York with the same title, the unsen­ti­men­tal pre­ci­sion and com­pact­ness of Didion’s prose is all her own.

The essay appears in 1967’s Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem , a rep­re­sen­ta­tive text of the lit­er­ary non­fic­tion of the six­ties along­side the work of John McPhee, Ter­ry South­ern, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thomp­son. In Didion’s case, the empha­sis must be decid­ed­ly on the lit­er­ary —her essays are as skill­ful­ly and imag­i­na­tive­ly writ­ten as her fic­tion and in close con­ver­sa­tion with their autho­r­i­al fore­bears. “Good­bye to All That” takes its title from an ear­li­er mem­oir, poet and crit­ic Robert Graves’ 1929 account of leav­ing his home­town in Eng­land to fight in World War I. Didion’s appro­pri­a­tion of the title shows in part an iron­ic under­cut­ting of the mem­oir as a seri­ous piece of writ­ing.

And yet she is per­haps best known for her work in the genre. Pub­lished almost fifty years after Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem , her 2005 mem­oir The Year of Mag­i­cal Think­ing is, in poet Robert Pinsky’s words , a “traveler’s faith­ful account” of the stun­ning­ly sud­den and crush­ing per­son­al calami­ties that claimed the lives of her hus­band and daugh­ter sep­a­rate­ly. “Though the mate­r­i­al is lit­er­al­ly ter­ri­ble,” Pin­sky writes, “the writ­ing is exhil­a­rat­ing and what unfolds resem­bles an adven­ture nar­ra­tive: a forced expe­di­tion into those ‘cliffs of fall’ iden­ti­fied by Hop­kins.” He refers to lines by the gift­ed Jesuit poet Ger­ard Man­ley Hop­kins that Did­ion quotes in the book: “O the mind, mind has moun­tains; cliffs of fall / Fright­ful, sheer, no-man-fath­omed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there.”

The near­ly unim­peach­ably author­i­ta­tive ethos of Didion’s voice con­vinces us that she can fear­less­ly tra­verse a wild inner land­scape most of us triv­i­al­ize, “hold cheap,” or can­not fath­om. And yet, in a 1978 Paris Review inter­view , Didion—with that tech­ni­cal sleight of hand that is her casu­al mastery—called her­self “a kind of appren­tice plumber of fic­tion, a Cluny Brown at the writer’s trade.” Here she invokes a kind of arche­type of lit­er­ary mod­esty (John Locke, for exam­ple, called him­self an “under­labour­er” of knowl­edge) while also fig­ur­ing her­self as the win­some hero­ine of a 1946 Ernst Lubitsch com­e­dy about a social climber plumber’s niece played by Jen­nifer Jones, a char­ac­ter who learns to thumb her nose at pow­er and priv­i­lege.

A twist of fate—interviewer Lin­da Kuehl’s death—meant that Did­ion wrote her own intro­duc­tion to the Paris Review inter­view, a very unusu­al occur­rence that allows her to assume the role of her own inter­preter, offer­ing iron­ic prefa­to­ry remarks on her self-under­stand­ing. After the intro­duc­tion, it’s dif­fi­cult not to read the inter­view as a self-inter­ro­ga­tion. Asked about her char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of writ­ing as a “hos­tile act” against read­ers, Did­ion says, “Obvi­ous­ly I lis­ten to a read­er, but the only read­er I hear is me. I am always writ­ing to myself. So very pos­si­bly I’m com­mit­ting an aggres­sive and hos­tile act toward myself.”

It’s a curi­ous state­ment. Didion’s cut­ting wit and fear­less vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty take in seem­ing­ly all—the expans­es of her inner world and polit­i­cal scan­dals and geopo­lit­i­cal intrigues of the out­er, which she has dis­sect­ed for the bet­ter part of half a cen­tu­ry. Below, we have assem­bled a selec­tion of Didion’s best essays online. We begin with one from Vogue :

“On Self Respect” (1961)

Didion’s 1979 essay col­lec­tion The White Album brought togeth­er some of her most tren­chant and search­ing essays about her immer­sion in the coun­ter­cul­ture, and the ide­o­log­i­cal fault lines of the late six­ties and sev­en­ties. The title essay begins with a gem­like sen­tence that became the title of a col­lec­tion of her first sev­en vol­umes of non­fic­tion : “We tell our­selves sto­ries in order to live.” Read two essays from that col­lec­tion below:

“ The Women’s Move­ment ” (1972)

“ Holy Water ” (1977)

Did­ion has main­tained a vig­or­ous pres­ence at the New York Review of Books since the late sev­en­ties, writ­ing pri­mar­i­ly on pol­i­tics. Below are a few of her best known pieces for them:

“ Insid­er Base­ball ” (1988)

“ Eye on the Prize ” (1992)

“ The Teach­ings of Speak­er Gin­grich ” (1995)

“ Fixed Opin­ions, or the Hinge of His­to­ry ” (2003)

“ Pol­i­tics in the New Nor­mal Amer­i­ca ” (2004)

“ The Case of There­sa Schi­a­vo ” (2005)

“ The Def­er­en­tial Spir­it ” (2013)

“ Cal­i­for­nia Notes ” (2016)

Did­ion con­tin­ues to write with as much style and sen­si­tiv­i­ty as she did in her first col­lec­tion, her voice refined by a life­time of expe­ri­ence in self-exam­i­na­tion and pierc­ing crit­i­cal appraisal. She got her start at Vogue in the late fifties, and in 2011, she pub­lished an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal essay there that returns to the theme of “yearn­ing for a glam­orous, grown up life” that she explored in “Good­bye to All That.” In “ Sable and Dark Glass­es ,” Didion’s gaze is stead­ier, her focus this time not on the naïve young woman tem­pered and hard­ened by New York, but on her­self as a child “deter­mined to bypass child­hood” and emerge as a poised, self-con­fi­dent 24-year old sophisticate—the per­fect New York­er she nev­er became.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Joan Did­ion Reads From New Mem­oir, Blue Nights, in Short Film Direct­ed by Grif­fin Dunne

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

10 Free Sto­ries by George Saun­ders, Author of Tenth of Decem­ber , “The Best Book You’ll Read This Year”

Read 18 Short Sto­ries From Nobel Prize-Win­ning Writer Alice Munro Free Online

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments (3) |

free online essays to read

Related posts:

Comments (3), 3 comments so far.

“In a clas­sic essay of Joan Didion’s, “Good­bye to All That,” the nov­el­ist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time,..”

Dead link to the essay

It should be “Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem,” with the “s” on Towards.

Most of the Joan Did­ion Essay links have pay­walls.

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

Emily Temple

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Top 5 Best Free Essay Websites Review: Find a Great Sample on Your Topic

If you’re a student, you would probably love to find websites that’ll write papers for you for free. Does free cheese ever come cheaply? No, but with this best free essay websites review, you’ll see that exception happen. Our team checked numerous writing platforms and settled on five top options. Read about our insights and draw your conclusions.

Updated: 21.02.2023

All ratings, opinions, and reviews you see on this site do not necessarily reflect the official position of any other company, educational establishment, or employer. These reviews are always subject to revision and change. Please do not hold us to them — visit actual websites to make any decision.

To decide what score each company deserves, we compare our team’s grades, academics’ ratings, and individual reviews. Opinions of LetsGradeIt.com team is worth 30% of the total grade. Academics’ ratings comprise 35%, and individual grades account for 35%. In cases when there are no individual reviews posted about a firm, academics have a say by 60%, while our team gets 40%.

Top 5 Free Essays Websites

  • a good collection of free essay samples
  • customer support
  • helpful blog for college students
  • reliable payment methods and privacy rules
  • you cannot choose your writer
  • Discounts 13% and various 10% and 5%, depending on your customer history
  • Minimum Deadline 6 hours
  • Payment Methods VISA, MasterCard, American Express, Discover
  • Guarantees Money-Back Guarantee, 24/7 Support, No Plagiarism, Confidentiality
  • Types of Papers Essays, Research papers, Term paper, Thesis, Dissertation, Coursework, Book report, Book review, Research summary, Case Study, Lab report, PowerPoint presentation, Article, Article critique, Reaction paper, Admission essay, Personal statement, Proofreading, Editing, Rewriting
  • Lowest Price Starting at $11.99 per page
  • Number of Samples 100k+
  • Number of Categories 4k+
  • Access Free
  • Originality Almost Original
  • Samples Accuracy & Categorization Accurate
  • Quality of Samples High
  • Website Navigation Simple
  • Excellent blog with helpful articles, writing guides, topic lists, and other valuable information for college students and educators

It is one of the best choices for essay and research writing work, according to our reviews. This company provides good grammar quality and follows all formatting and grading rubric rules. Timely delivery and free revisions work as advertised. Their selection of free samples seems to be curated by the company’s specialists since they are mostly good. What makes them even better is their customer support service, which is available immediately and provides custom help with order placement, payment procedure, and revisions. If you want to choose something that is affordable and customized to your needs, this service is the safest bet.

This company has been offering free essays online starting with 2013, and many students use its services when completing their studies. There is a big number of samples on its website: they are situated in alphabetic order, and you could also type your keywords in a welcoming search space to locate something specific. If you’d like to read an essay, you could do it for free and without making an account. But in case you want to use any of these papers for your own writing, you’ll have to give your email address and the company will send your chosen sample to you. These free essays are good: website’s owners pick only the best options. If you like any of them, try paid writing services at this firm, too. Its prices are affordable and its writers could produce great essays based on your instructions. Refunds and revisions are present. But note that if you need urgent order, you’ll have to clarify how possible it is for TopEssayWriting to handle it. Its experts aren’t fond of rushed work in most cases.

  • best customer support
  • fast delivery
  • cool design
  • new website
  • Minimum Deadline: 3 hours
  • Lowest Price: $11.99
  • Discounts: 10%
  • Payment Methods: VISA, MasterCard, American Express, Discover
  • Guarantees: 24/7 Support, Confidentiality, Customer Satisfaction, Money Back, Native Writers, No Hidden Charges, No Plagiarism, On-time Delivery, Proofreading, Quality, Revision
  • Types of papers:  Essay, Research, Term paper, Thesis, Dissertation, Coursework, Capstone project, Book report, Outline, Book review, Movie review, Research summary, Report, Case Study, Lab report, PowerPoint presentation, Article, Article critique, Annotated bibliography, Reaction paper, Project
  • Number of Categories 5k+
  • Originality of Samples Almost all Original

Paraphrasing tool, conclusion generator

This WritingUniverse review was born after we got numerous requests to investigate it. Our team quickly did preliminary research, and we realized why students showed interest in it. WritingUniverse is mysterious in several ways at once: we have no idea when it was established and reviews on its website don’t have any dates mentioned. It’s very in tune with its logo of an alien with a UFO. The company offers writing-related services; it asks for adequate prices and works with the shortest deadlines. Even a 3-hour timeframe is accepted. Few reviews from customers we saw are mostly positive, but they aren’t informative enough to draw conclusions. So, we launched our own investigation.

This is an impressive platform with an interesting design that offers a choice between 100K different essays on any topic. They are all divided into specific categories like art, business, literature, healthcare, etc., so every student will be able to find something that meets their demands. Of course, these sample papers won’t follow your unique instructions 100%, but you can still get enough material for completing your own essay. The ones we checked were plagiarism-free, and while they weren’t always ideal, the level of writing in them was pretty high. They also relied on good sources and followed academic citation rules. Students won’t have to create an account or pay anything to use them, but if they want to download them, they’d have to share their email. This is a minor flaw our review team noted. WritingUniverse showed extra care in making all its papers and articles useful for students. This makes its paid services more trustworthy: these writers don’t ask for much, but they are efficient and produce their works on time. Revision helps protect you from any accidents or mistakes on the writer’s side. Considering all these facts, we give WritingUniverse the second place on our list.

  • no plagiarism
  • excellent free essay samples
  • timely delivery
  • variety of different help and subjects on offer
  • excellent blog
  • things may get pricey if you have an urgent order or request services like resume writing
  • Lowest Price $14.99
  • Minimum Deadline 3 hours
  • Discounts 15%
  • Payment Methods VISA, MasterCard, American Express, Discover.
  • Guarantees 24/7 Support, Confidentiality, Customer Satisfaction, Money Back, No Plagiarism, On-time Delivery, Proofreading, Quality, Revision
  • Types of Papers Rewriting, Proofreading, Editing, Admission essay, Dissertation, Resume/CV, Essays, Research papers, Term paper, Coursework, Capstone project, Book report, Outline, Book review, Movie review, Research summary,  Report, Case Study, Lab report, PowerPoint presentation, Article, Article critique,  Annotated bibliography, Reaction paper, Project.
  • Number of Samples 1k+
  • Number of Categories 30+
  • Originality of Samples Only Original
  • Types : Free conclusion generator, paraphrasing tool, essay maker, and a good blog with dissertation topics and various writing style guides.

This company offers a plethora of popular writing services and those types of academic writing help that are not so common like resume writing and business report assistance. They have a good pricing scheme that instantly shows you the price. Additionally, you may request drafts, plagiarism reports, proofreading by an editor, and urgent writer’s selection. They offer excellent quality, a good collection of free essay samples, a good blog that will help many students learn about writing styles and find inspiration, and the majority of payment methods. They are a reliable service that is safe to consider for most tasks. Just remember that things may get a bit pricey, yet it is always paid off as our review experts have found out.

This is one of the best free essay sites that has been providing assistance to students since 2013. It has a simple but pleasant design where everything is comprehensive, so you won’t have issues with figuring out how to use it. There are many best samples here, and what we liked is that they point out what format they have, how many sources writers used, etc. Some of them aren’t perfect, but you need to remember that they were written by fellow students who studied different subjects in different educational establishments. For instance, someone from college could perform great research, but for university students, it could seem overly basic. So try several options before choosing something; after making sure they are great, consider hiring your own writers from GrabMyEssay. Prices here are higher than they are at two previous companies, hence its third place on this list, but with a discount, it might not matter much. Writing experts have professional backgrounds and do a great job following clients’ instructions. Most reviews about GrabMyEssay are positive, and we liked it, too: these guys produced our essay right by our deadline. They don’t enjoy hot orders, though, so keep this in mind. Apart from this, we found its policies friendly and its work impressive.

  • lots of different academic services
  • supportive team of operators
  • free essays present
  • good quality
  • no discounts
  • repetitive website
  • Q&A Yes
  • Tutoring Yes
  • Online courses Upon request
  • Mobile app No
  • Access Free subscription with limited access
  • Discounts No info
  • Payment Methods Visa, MasterCard, Discover, Wire Transfer, American Express
  • Guarantees confidentiality, tutors work 24/7, 1 free question, no plagiarism, no hidden charges, refunds
  • Quality of help Medium-to-high
  • Subjects All subjects
  • Types of services Essays, Questions & answers, Proofreading, Editing, Study resources
  • Number of Samples 1000+
  • Number of Categories 100+ categories
  • Access Free & don’t require an account
  • Originality Most samples are original
  • Website Navigation  Easy

CleverrUp is a relatively new company that provides many-layered homework services in a variety of spheres. It could solve your Math problems, write an essay, find an answer to a particularly complex question, give you a tutor, and so on. Its prices are affordable and its quality is of acceptable level. It follows deadlines properly, but there are next to no Cleverr Up reviews online because a firm hasn’t been working long.

Design of this free essay online provider is outdated and might be unclear at first, but its work is still impressive. There is a solid database with samples on various topics. For downloading any of them, you should create an account or log in if you already have one, which is a complication. In comparison with other papers, we found these free essays a little more flawed, but all in all, they had a satisfying level of quality. As for paid writing services, they cost too much. Writers are going to follow your instructions, but they don’t always upload their work on time, so this is something to look out for. Still, CleverrUp has customer-friendly policies — you can count on getting what you want sooner or later, depending on deadline and complexity. If something is wrong, refunds are present, so one way or another, you won’t be disappointed.

  • large selection of free essay samples
  • affordability
  • good customer support
  • we required several revision requests
  • Discounts Not Available
  • Minimum Deadline  4 hours
  • Payment Methods Visa, Mastercard
  • Types of Papers Argumentative Essay, Admission/Application Essay, Annotated Bibliography, Article, Assignment, Book Report/Review, Case Study, Coursework
  • Lowest Price Starting at $26.55 per page
  • Guarantees Private communication, Complete confidentiality, No registration, Free Unlimited Revisions, Money Back Guarantee, 24/7 Support
  • Number of Samples 100+
  • Number of Categories 49
  • Access Free Subscription
  • Originality of Samples Plagiarized
  • Quality of Samples Medium
  • Website Navigation Complicated
  • GPA Calculator
  • Thesis Generator
  • Essay Topic Generator

It is a new company that has left a good impression as we cooperated with them for our essay order. Still, very few online reviews make it difficult to shape one’s opinion. Some plagiarism issues have been encountered, yet they offer timely delivery and their prices are quite competitive. If some grammar issues and formatting could be polished along with more information regarding their writers, this company could be listed among those that are safe to use. They also provide basic information regarding free revisions and refunds, yet it is always a matter of luck as they have their own QA department that rules out their final decision.

StudentShare creates free online essays for students by generating papers from volunteers who want to share their works. Quality varies: some are great, others not so much. You’ll need to pay close attention to each essay you’re reading — don’t automatically assume they are perfect. This platform has a convenient system where you can type in relevant keywords, indicate document type, pages, number of views, etc. for finding papers that fit your needs best. Premium writing service is available as well, but it is really expensive even with discounts. One page costs more than $20, so not everyone, especially with the request “write my essay for free,” is going to be able to afford it. Writers are very welcoming, but their attitude to work varies. Some will do everything perfectly while others could be late. In many ways, it is like a lottery: you can get the best service here, but it could take several tries.

Reasons Why You Need Free College Essays

Why do many students look for free essay examples? Here’s your answer.

  • Needing to understand how to structure an essay correctly
  • Wanting to see new ideas for getting inspiration
  • Struggling with understanding their topic and wanting to see what others said
  • Hoping to see correct academic style usage in free essay samples
  • Lacking time and wanting to download an essay
  • Making sure their own ideas are unique
  • Checking what sources other writers used
  • Comparing their ideas to understand the topic better
  • Looking at thesis for formulating their own essay direction

Review Process

Selection of companies for investigation. The essay writing niche grows rapidly. We keep our fingers on the pulse and review all new and double-check old companies.

Background check. It is important to know how much information about every company is available online, how easy it is to access it and understand if it is true. We study the website, online presence, and client reviews.

Investigation of quality. We cannot assess the service if we do not use it. So, we pick a few random essay samples from the site and check them. Also, we order an essay with our own requirements and analyze every step our order goes through – placing, delivery, communication with writer and support, revision, and in some cases refund.

Evaluation of policies. We pay close attention to guarantees and policies: money-back guarantee, revision guarantee, terms and conditions, and other features offered.

Why Is Reading Reviews Vital?

Before paying, you need to learn if website that writes essays for you is trustworthy. But unless one of your friends tried it, how would you know? Through reviews. They help you see the experience of other people and read objective thoughts of professionals.

Are Free Essays Online for Students Unique?

Not really. There are many samples online, and you cannot tell how many students used which of them. There is every chance that someone else has already downloaded an example and submitted it to their professor, so don’t do it, too. It’s not worth the risk. If you need substantial help, order an original paper.

Criteria That Best Websites with Free Samples Must Meet

When it comes to free college papers online or free essay writer services, quality matters. There is no point in offering samples if they are terrible and students will only get into trouble with them. Here are the criteria each best essay writing service must follow.

  • Having a big database with papers.
  • Making sure these papers have medium-high quality.
  • Including at least some unique essays.
  • Not asking for money / registration.
  • Establishing an easy navigation system.
  • Including many categories.

How Could I Benefit From Them?

Essays for free are great as long as you know how to use them. Don’t send them to the professor and pretend they are yours — this could get you in trouble. Instead, look at how they are written. Take practical tips about structure; use some ideas and make your own on their basis.

Are All Online Reviews Real?

Not all of them are real, Never trust the testimonials on the site, as every company publishes them and can add and alter them to make them sound positive. We collect only real reviews from clients who really paid for essay services and can provide proof. Our own investigation also helps to be unbiased and true. We stand behind every word.

Why Trust Our Recommendations

Tips for finding real reviews.

Let’s discuss how to find reliable reviews. If you know what to look for, it’ll be a piece of cake.

  • Find several review platforms. Never limit yourself to just one platform. Try a couple, preferably the first ones you see in Google. Open them and start reading comments there.
  • Check details of reviews. What do these reviews mention? If they promise free non plagiarized essays that will be done in 1 hour, it’s clearly a lie. But if they mention some personal details, it is likely that they are genuine. Tone matters, too: never trust sheer positivity.
  • Look into posters’ history if applicable. Click on reviewers’ profiles and look at how often they post something and what it is. If the history is empty or advertising in nature, they are fake.
  • Make sure reviewers have personal experience. If you’re on a website like ours, check how many reviews are present and how new they are. Never trust old sources.

Specific Ways to Find the Best Writing Companies

Now let’s discuss on what specific platforms you stand higher chances of finding real reviews. Most of them don’t concern the aspect of writing essay online free, but they are helpful for those who need professional help and are ready to pay for it.

  • Reddit. There are many subs where you can find reliable reviews and check posters’ history. Join student communities and use their recommendations.
  • SiteJabber. Type the name of the company you’re interested in on this website and read reviews. You could find opinions about paid or free essay paper providers there. Check what companies reply to these reviews — if they don’t, it’s a bad sign. If they address just negative reviews, it is also suspicious.
  • TrustPilot. It works similarly to SiteJabber. Look into each reviewer’s posting history before trusting what they say.
  • Quora. This is a great discussion platform where you can exchange opinions and find recommendations on the best companies. Whether you need an essay, a book, or lab work, type in your request and read answers. Like with all previous forums, check some info about posters and decide if they are trustworthy on this basis.

Could I Look for a Company without Reading Reviews?

In case your friend recommends something or you already have a reliable provider, you won’t need reviews. Maybe some agency looks particularly great and you loved chatting with its operators, but reviews about it are negative. Rely on your own gut. Online comments give you ideas — what you do with them is up to you.

Choose the Best Company and Enjoy Free Time

If you want to find websites that write essays for you free or pay experts for creating original papers, check 5 options we recommended. They are the best, and you’re guaranteed to find good websites that do your homework there. In case this isn’t enough, start a chat with operators and place an order. If you’re interested in more specific subjects or prices, check our other reviews. Let us know what you think — we want you to be happy with your choice.

Frequently Asked Questions About Websites with Free Essays

Yes and no. There are free essay writing websites where you could read hundreds of free samples, choosing one that you enjoyed and that matched your topic best. But the actual writing process from scratch isn’t free. If you want a unique essay that follows your specific instructions, you’ll have to pay for it.

Our choice in 2021 is WritingUniverse. It has excellent free essay papers, English speakers who specialize in various subjects and could write a fantastic paper, and low prices made even lower with good discounts.

Yes, of course, but not everywhere. In our experience, only the best companies that really care about students and their needs offer free samples. Even fewer offer good ones.

No, unfortunately, this isn’t something you should expect. Apart from you, many other students are searching for samples, and they might like the exact same one you picked. This creates repeated plagiarism if you use it instead of writing something yourself.

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Quill.org, a non-profit, provides free literacy activities that build reading comprehension, writing, and language skills for elementary, middle, and high school students.

Writing Across the Curriculum: Quill's nonprofit mission is to now build both reading and writing skills through free, OER content across the curriculum. Over the coming years, we will be building a library of free ELA, social studies, and science activities that engage students in deeper thinking through writing prompts that provide immediate feedback.

9 million students have written 2 billion sentences on Quill.

Quill Reading for Evidence

Provide your students with nonfiction texts paired with AI-powered writing prompts, instead of multiple-choice questions, to enable deeper thinking.

Students read a nonfiction text and build their comprehension through writing prompts, supporting a series of claims with evidence sourced from the text. Quill challenges students to write responses that are precise, logical, and based on textual evidence, with Quill coaching the student through custom, targeted feedback on each revision so that students strengthen their reading comprehension and hone their writing skills.

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Quill Connect

Help your students advance from fragmented and run-on sentences to complex and well structured ones.

Using the evidence-based strategy of sentence combining, students combine multiple ideas into a single sentence. They then receive instant feedback designed to help them improve their clarity and precision.

Quill Lessons

The Quill Lessons tool enables teachers to lead whole-class and small-group writing instruction.

Teachers control interactive slides that contain writing prompts, and the entire class responds to each prompt. Each Quill Lessons activity provides a lesson plan, writing prompts, discussion topics, and a follow up independent practice activity.

Quill Diagnostic

Quickly determine which skills your students need to work on with our diagnostics.

The diagnostics cover vital sentence construction skills and generate personalized learning plans based on the student’s performance.

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Quill Proofreader

Proofreader teaches your students editing skills by having them proofread passages.

Students edit passages and receive personalized exercises based on their results. With over 100 expository passages, Proofreader gives students the practice they need to spot common grammatical errors.

Quill Grammar

Students practice basic grammar skills, from comma placement to parallel structure.

Quill Grammar has over 150 sentence writing activities to help your students. Our activities are designed to be completed in 10 minutes so you have the freedom to use them in the way that works best for your classroom.

How Quill Works

Set up your classroom, without it.

You can quickly and easily set up your classroom in Quill by inputting student names or providing students with a unique code. If you use Google Classroom or Clever, you can automatically set up your classroom with one click.

Choose activities

Decide if you want your students to proofread passages, combine sentences, or complete a diagnostic. Use our ten minute activities as building blocks during your classroom instruction.

Use easy-to-consume reporting

Use our reporting to spot trends and identify growth opportunities. Monitor comprehension on specific writing standards.

Get immediate feedback for your students

Save time grading and watch your students correct their mistakes instantly.

Intervene where students struggle

See exactly where your students need intervention with our comprehensive reports.

Differentiate learning to meet the needs of all students

Assign specific activities for ELLs and students with learning differences.

Engage students with adaptive activities

Challenge students with questions that automatically adapt based on their previous responses.

Align with the Common Core Standards

Easily meet Common Core language standards with our aligned activities.

Easily sign up with Google Classroom

With one click all of your students and classes will be imported.

Over 100 concepts totaling 50 hours of quality curriculum.

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SARA ANGEL, KIPP LA

COLETTE KANG, EAST BAY INNOVATION ACADEMY

DANIEL SCIBIENSKI, PRINCETON PUBLIC SCHOOLS

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Free Essays Online: Get Your Best Paper

Looking for free essays online? We have a massive database of free essay examples just for you. Browse our collection of countless essays at any time of the day to find the one that aligns with your objectives. You can set various filters when checking our free essays database, including topic, and discipline. To make things even easier, we allow you to search our free examples by alphabet.

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Enjoy Free Essay Download in Three Easy Steps Right Here

Searching for a place that offers free essay download? There’re several essay templates to pick from online and all at no fee. Each writeup you’ll find here is of incredible quality, even though we don’t charge you for them. Also, our platform is user-friendly and easy to understand. But in case you’re not sure of the approach of getting an example, we’ve described the steps below. Our essay download process doesn’t take much time and is as straightforward as:

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What Is a Free Essay?

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  • Biology Social science Religion and Theology Journalism & Communication Engineering and Construction Geography Gender & Sexual Studies
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  • Outline Annotated Bibliography Movie Review Thesis Proposal Lab Report Book Report/Review Term Paper
  • Math Problem Coursework Report Literature review Speech or Presentation Thesis Case Study
  • Admission/Application Essay Research Paper Essay Personal Statement Article Assignment Dissertation
  • My New Year Resolution Essay 5 pages (1250 words) The Effects Of Social Media On Today's Life 6 pages (1500 words) Christmas Break Essay 5 pages (1250 words) Why Same Sex Marriage Should Be Legal Essay 5 pages (1250 words) What Is Beauty Essay 5 pages (1250 words)
  • Who Am I Essay 5 pages (1250 words) What s Love Essay 5 pages (1250 words) Poverty and Teenage Pregnancy 4 pages (1000 words) What Is Happiness Essay 5 pages (1250 words) What Is Learning: Essay about Learning Importance 5 pages (1250 words)
  • Types of Information Systems 2 pages (500 words) Impact of Alzheimer's on Family Members 4 pages (1000 words) Strategic Management Competitive Advantage 4 pages (1000 words) Peer Groups in Addressing Childrens Social Needs 3 pages (750 words) A Mothers Love in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 3 pages (750 words)
  • HIV and AIDS Spreading amongst World Populations 4 pages (1000 words) The Democratic Peace Hypothesis and Realist Theory 2 pages (500 words) Persuasive Speech on Drilling for oil in Alaska's Wildlife Refuge 3 pages (750 words) Was the Revolutionary War More a Revolutionary or Civil War 3 pages (750 words) Impact of Air Pollutants on Maternal and Perinatal Health 2 pages (500 words)
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Essay Reader: Online Text-to-Speech Tool

If you’re a college or high school student, you might constantly struggle with writing assignments. Whether it is homework or a task in the classroom, you can use the essay reading tool to write a better paper.

❓ Essay Reader: How to Use

  • 🤔 Why Using the Tool?
  • 💬 Reading out Loud Strategies
  • 🔍 References

Essay readers are a part of assistive technology. You might be wondering how this online text speech tool works. So, here’s how to use it.

  • Paste your essay to the window. Copy your essay sample (or a part of it) and paste it into the window. Our essay reader allows you to insert up to 5,000 characters at once.
  • Choose the preferable voice. We have different variations of voices to read your essay. The options include choosing between male and female voices, picking the timbre, and setting the reading speed.
  • Press the “READ MY ESSAY” button. Once you’ve clicked it, the tool will read your text for you.
  • New essay. In case you want to listen to one more essay, press the button below. Alternatively, you can download the audio for the current text using the according link.

🤔 Why Using Our Essay Reader?

How does reading out loud benefit your essay? Reading something aloud makes the text appear differently in our minds. We can see it from different perspectives and identify what is lacking. Most people are used to hearing and pronouncing English rather than reading and writing it.

First, there might be typos or mistakes that are hard to identify. Although we don’t intend it, we might also miss a word or write it twice. If we look through the text, we tend to skip those mistakes. On the other hand, if you read it out loud, you’ll easily spot them.

It is also easier to check your paper’s readability if you read it aloud. Sometimes the sentences and the paragraphs are too long and complicated, which makes them hard to understand. Reading them out loud can help to fix the format, style and make your paper readable.

Your essay should make sense overall. If your essay is very informative or complicated, you might be focusing on delivering your points rather than its readability . So, check if your transitions from topic to topic are smooth and if your explanations make sense by reading them aloud.

Let’s find out how you can use our free essay reader to make your paper even better!

💬 Reading out Loud: 7 Best Strategies

If you have already tried reading the paper out loud but still don’t identify all the mistakes or typos, you probably have been doing it wrongly. Our mind tends to correct minor errors naturally. We gathered these strategies that you can follow for the best result.

  • Try reading from a printed copy. It is easier to make notes by hand on a printed copy. These notes can help identify the most crucial parts of your paper so that you can spend more time on them.
  • Follow the text by pointing at it. Following the text as you read helps to concentrate. Reading significant amounts of texts, you might quickly lose focus. By following the text pointing at it with your finger, you can also focus on grammar.
  • Don’t read too fast. Try not to hurry while reading. The faster you read, the more mistakes our brain misses. Slow reading doesn’t mean spending more time. If you read fast, you might need to reread the same passage several times. So, slow reading can save you time.
  • Read from the end to start. If you want to focus on scanning your essay for mistakes and typos, try reading from the end so you won’t focus on the whole paper but each sentence.
  • Cover everything except for the passage you’re working on. If you still find it hard to concentrate on reading your paper, try covering the parts you are not working on at the moment. That can help you concentrate on a specific passage.
  • Ask someone to read for you. Another option you can use is to ask someone to read it aloud. Another person can take a look at it from another perspective. Since you are the one who is working on the paper, you might get used to it and not see something others see. Try to make notes as they read it for you.
  • Use technology. Technology helps us with our studying a lot these days. There are online timers, graders, grammar correctors, etc. If you don’t want to bother others, you can use text-to-speech technology to read the essay for you. It has a list of advantages. First, unlike humans, it doesn’t miss any mistakes. You can also control the speed, the number of reading times, and where to start or to finish.

Online Text-to-Speech Tool: How to Choose?

Here’s what you should take into account when choosing an online tool:

  • Speed control. Can you adjust the speed or pause the reader? It may be crucial, especially if your text is long.
  • Voice. Can you choose between the voices? Don’t they sound robotic? You can also switch between the voices so that you won’t get tired of listening to it several times.
  • Text control. How does the software work? Can you upload the documents? Can you highlight the crucial parts?
  • Accessibility. Does it work offline? Do you need to download and install it?
  • Tool speed. How long do you need to wait to hear the result? What’s the volume of an essay that the tool can convert at once?

If you are wondering, “Where can I have an essay read to me?” you can check our essay reader out for free and see if it’s suitable for you!

✏️ Online Text-to-Speech Tool: FAQ

  • You can spot typos, misspellings, and mistakes.
  • You can check the paper’s readability.
  • You can see if it is informative.

Try our essay reader to listen to your essay for free!

🔗 References

  • Teaching Techniques: Reading Aloud Artfully! | Scholastic
  • 7 Powerful Public Speaking Tips From One of the Most-Watched TED Talks Speakers
  • 10 Tips for Reading Aloud with Children
  • What Are the Benefits of Reading Aloud? An Instructional
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The tool available here is designed to turn any text into speech. You can choose the voice type and its timbre to make it sound just the way you like. The tool can be useful for when you need to know how long it will take to red through your speech, how it sounds live, or when you need a quick voiceover.

Free online proofreading and essay editor

A reliable proofreading tool and essay editor for any writer or student, a complete environment.

Typely is more than just a proofreading tool. It's a complete writing environment.

Thousands of checks

More than a thousand checks are being performed and we've only scratched the surface.

Inspired by the greatest writers

Gain access to humanity’s collective understanding about the craft of writing.

A proofreading tool that does not bark at every tree

Typely is precise. Existing tools for proofreading raise so many false alarms that their advice cannot be trusted. Instead, the writer must carefully consider whether to accept or reject each change.

We aim for a tool so precise that it becomes possible to unquestioningly adopt its recommendations and still come out ahead — with stronger, tighter prose. Better to be quiet and authoritative than loud and unreliable.

Relax, focus, write your next masterpiece...

Writing presumes more than simply laying out words on a paper. Typely helps you get in the mood and keeps you focused, immersed and ready to write your story.

Whether you need a distraction-free environment, some chill relaxing sounds or a pomodoro timer to manage your time we got you covered.

Got questions? We have answers.

No. Typely is completely free and we plan on keeping it that way. We are considering some advanced features however that might be available under a premium plan.

The only limit we have applied thus far is on the number of characters you can submit and that is being set at a maximum of 50,000.

In theory yes but that will require a lot of work and professionals dedicated for this job. We are considering a way of letting the community participate somehow.

Typely does not do grammar checking because it's hard and almost impossible to get right. The aim for Typely is to be precise and reliable.

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  • Speed: Get an accurate summary within seconds, thanks to AI
  • Flexible: Adjust summary length to get more (or less) detailed summaries

How to use this summarizer

1. insert, paste or download your text, 2. pick the way you want to summarize, 3. adjust your summary length, 4. get your summary in seconds.

2 ways of summarizing text

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1. key sentences.

Extracts the key points of your text and turns them into digestible bullet points 

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Summarize your text today

Want to make sure your summary doesn’t contain any plagiarism, ask our team.

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Frequently asked questions

Yes, it can. The AI has been trained on a big dataset, so technical or complex data won’t be a problem for the text summarizer .

The text summarizer is accessible on both desktop and mobile.

This text summarizer can condense long text within seconds.

At the moment, a maximum of 600 words can be summarized at once, within a few seconds. Want to summarize more? Just paste another block of text. There’s no limit on how much text you can summarize with our text summarizer .

The text summarizer can give you a longer or shorter summary, depending on your wishes. Want a more detailed summary? Just adjust the summary length at the top.

The 21 Best Places to Find Free Books Online

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Blog – Posted on Monday, Apr 20

The 21 best places to find free books online.

The 21 Best Places to Find Free Books Online

If you’re anything like us, you go through books fast . Sometimes it seems like an addiction you can’t keep up with — and if there’s one thing any bookworm can tell you, it’s that this habit can quickly get expensive.

Luckily, the savvy reader knows there are plenty of places online to legally download books without spending a single penny. In this post, we’re giving you 21 of the best places to find free books online, so that you can satisfy even the most debilitating of book addictions, guilt-free.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of great books out there, you can also take our 30-second quiz below to narrow it down quickly and get a personalized book recommendation  😉

Which book should you read next?

Discover the perfect book for you. Takes 30 seconds!

1. Project Gutenberg

free online essays to read

2. The Online Books Page

If that’s not enough books for you, The Online Books Page , hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, boasts a staggering list of over three million free ebooks! Unlike Project Gutenberg, they don’t actually host any of the books themselves, instead providing links to where you can download them. And their website does look like something straight out of 1996. Still, when we’re talking about this many ebooks at our fingertips, can we really complain? This is a great source for classics and obscure titles that offer deep dives into arcane topics, though some newer books can also appear.

3. Kindle Store

free online essays to read

4. Smashwords

Like Amazon, Smashwords has a page where you can easily see all the books authors have chosen to give away for free . With the ability to browse by categories such as “newest,” “bestseller,” and “highest-rated,” as well as filtering by the book’s length and genre, this is an easy way to instantly find free books. (Just remember to re-select the “free” category at the top if you choose to browse by genre!) The best part? Most stories are available in a wide range of file formats, and you don’t even need an account to download them.

free online essays to read

6. Robin Reads

A book promotion service in the vein of BookBub, Robin Reads is another great way to stay in-the-know on all the hottest new titles and discounts. With everything from romance to horror to nonfiction, there’s sure to be something interesting in nearly all of their daily emails.

7. eReader News Today

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8. FreeBooksy

Most of the other book promotion services focus on both free and discounted books, but FreeBooksy is the biggest site that’s dedicated solely to ebooks you don’t have to pay for. Unlike some of its competitors, it seeks out deals from all the major retailers, so even if you’re totally loyal to Kobo or Nook, you’re bound to find some great books gratis . (Can you tell we’re desperately trying not to use the word “free” too much?)

9. Manybooks

free online essays to read

10. Goodreads Free Shelves

Sometimes the easiest way to find free books is to crowdsource for them, and Goodreads shelves make this process easy. Browsing by shelf collects all the books that users put in shelves of the same name, and you can easily find shelves marked as “ free-ebooks ,” “ free-ebook ,” “ free ” and more. Now, because this is dependent on users marking ebooks themselves, it is possible that some of the books were shelved during a period when a book was once being given away free and now comes with a heavier sticker price. They may also shelve books in the public domain that you can find through sites such as Project Gutenberg, but it’s not a guarantee that you’ll find these for free if you follow the link to them on Amazon. Still, it’s a rich resource that may easily give you titles you don’t find on other sites, so it’s definitely worth a look.

11. Reedsy Discovery

free online essays to read

Love indie books and want to read them for free, before anyone else does? That's exactly what you get if you sign up to become a Reedsy Discovery reviewer , as indie authors provide free ebooks in exchange for an honest review. Simply take notes of your thoughts as you read, and use them to write up a coherent review when you've finished reading. You'll be helping out the author as well as would-be readers, while getting a free read! Writing book reviews can also be an excellent way to break into the publishing industry if you're at the start of your career, but most of all they're great fun to write and read alike.

12. Riveted by Simon Teen

free online essays to read

13. Harlequin Online Reads

The leading publisher of romance novels, Harlequin’s website also offers a huge collection of serialized stories from some of their best authors — for free. New chapters are posted every week, or you can browse a massive back catalogue of completed works. With filters such as “Fall in Love,” “Walk on the Dark Side,” and “Take a Trip Down the Aisle,” plus the ability to show titles based on how much time you have to read at the moment (yes, really!), this collection is sure let you zero in on the exact romance fix you’re craving.

14. Tor.com

free online essays to read

15. Libby / OverDrive

In the wise words of Arthur the Aardvark, “Having fun isn’t hard when you’ve got a library card!” So it is with Libby , the new app by OverDrive. OverDrive allows libraries to purchase ebooks for lending out to their patrons. Each “copy” of the ebook can only be checked out by one patron at a time. Loan lengths and the total number of titles you can have at once varies by library. Books may be checked out and downloaded directly through Libby, or downloaded for reading via Kindle. Because only one person can check out each copy at a time, though, there are often hold lists on popular titles — sometimes significant ones — so be sure to keep an eye on that when you’re picking your next read. However, the catalogue available to each library is quite extensive, and if there’s ever a title your library hasn’t purchased yet, there’s an easy button to request it right in the app.

free online essays to read

17. Wattpad

Lovers of fanfic have long been familiar with sites where users can upload stories one chapter at a time, but Wattpad brings that idea to life in the original fiction world — with a few additional benefits as well. Started in 2006, Wattpad is perfect if you’re looking for a wide range of diverse voices and unconventional stories that might get overlooked by big publishers. Chock-full of talented writers and enthusiastic readers, it’s a community unlike anything else in the reading landscape. Leave comments, follow your favorite authors, and upvote the stories you love. With the free app, you can even keep up with all the best stories right from your phone.

18. PaperBack Swap

free online essays to read

19. Open Culture

In Open Culture’s own words, they scour the internet for the “audio books you need, the language lessons and educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.” As a curator of free online learning resources , this sounds great to us! Their audiobook selection is top-notch as well, including some surprisingly high-profile narrators . ( The Wizard of Oz as read by Tituss Burgess? Where do they even find these treasures?)

20. LibriVox

free online essays to read

21. Storynory

Lastly, in all the rush to find free books, let’s not forget about the littlest readers among us! Storynory offers free audiobooks for kids, featuring everything from classics to brand-new originals exclusive to the Storynory site. While not as extensive a collection as some of the sites on our list, the stories are charming and offer a welcome distraction when someone just won’t settle down.

Still can't get enough books? Check out our list of the 115 Best Books of All Time . Or why not get paid to read, by applying to some of the legitimate sites that pay reviewers ?

Continue reading

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Play Text Out Loud

Reads out loud plain text, files, e-books and websites. Remembers text & caret position, so you can come back to listening later, unlimited length, recording and more.

Create Humanlike Voiceovers

Murf is a text-to-speech tool offering 200+ natural voices for creating high-quality voiceovers for e-learning, podcasts, YouTubes & audiobooks, simplifying audio content production.

Additional Text-To-Speech Solutions

Turns your articles, PDFs, emails, etc. into podcasts, so you can listen to it on your own podcast player when convenient, with all the advantages that come with your podcast app.

SpeechNinja says what you type in real time. It enables people with speech difficulties to speak out loud using synthesized voice (AAC) and more.

Battle tested for years, serving millions of users, especially good for very long texts.

Need to read a webpage? Simply paste its URL here & click play. Leave empty to read about the Beatles 🎸

Books & Stories

Listen to some of the best stories ever written. We have them right here. Want to upload your own? Use the main player to upload epub files.

Simply paste any URL (link to a page) and it will import & read it out loud.

Chrome Extension

Reads out loud webpages, directly from within the page.

TTSReader for mobile - iOS or Android. Includes exporting audio to mp3 files.

NEW 🚀 - TTS Plugin

Make your own website speak your content - with a single line of code. Hassle free.

TTSReader Premium

Support our development team & enjoy ad-free better experience. Commercial users, publishers are required a premium license.

TTSReader reads out loud texts, webpages, pdfs & ebooks with natural sounding voices. Works out of the box. No need to download or install. No sign in required. Simply click 'play' and enjoy listening right in your browser. TTSReader remembers your text and position between sessions, so you can continue listening right where you left. Recording the generated speech is supported as well. Works offline, so you can use it at home, in the office, on the go, driving or taking a walk. Listening to textual content using TTSReader enables multitasking, reading on the go, improved comprehension and more. With support for multiple languages, it can be used for unlimited use cases .

Get Started for Free

Main Use Cases

Listen to great content.

Most of the world's content is in textual form. Being able to listen to it - is huge! In that sense, TTSReader has a huge advantage over podcasts. You choose your content - out of an infinite variety - that includes humanity's entire knowledge and art richness. Listen to lectures, to PDF files. Paste or upload any text from anywhere, edit it if needed, and listen to it anywhere and anytime.

Proofreading

One of the best ways to catch errors in your writing is to listen to it being read aloud. By using TTSReader for proofreading, you can catch errors that you might have missed while reading silently, allowing you to improve the quality and accuracy of your written content. Errors can be in sentence structure, punctuation, and grammar, but also in your essay's structure, order and content.

Listen to web pages

TTSReader can be used to read out loud webpages in two different ways. 1. Using the regular player - paste the URL and click play. The website's content will be imported into the player. (2) Using our Chrome extension to listen to pages without leaving the page . Listening to web pages with TTSReader can provide a more accessible, convenient, and efficient way of consuming online content.

Turn ebooks into audiobooks

Upload any ebook file of epub format - and TTSReader will read it out loud for you, effectively turning it into an audiobook alternative. You can find thousands of epub books for free, available for download on Project Gutenberg's site, which is an open library for free ebooks.

Read along for speed & comprehension

TTSReader enables read along by highlighting the sentence being read and automatically scrolling to keep it in view. This way you can follow with your own eyes - in parallel to listening to it. This can boost reading speed and improve comprehension.

Generate audio files from text

TTSReader enables exporting the synthesized speech with a single click. This is available currently only on Windows and requires TTSReader’s premium . Adhering to the commercial terms some of the voices may be used commercially for publishing, such as narrating videos.

Accessibility, dyslexia, etc.

For individuals with visual impairments or reading difficulties, listening to textual content, lectures, articles & web pages can be an essential tool for accessing & comprehending information.

Language learning

TTSReader can read out text in multiple languages, providing learners with listening as well as speaking practice. By listening to the text being read aloud, learners can improve their comprehension skills and pronunciation.

Kids - stories & learning

Kids love stories! And if you can read them stories - it's definitely the best! But, if you can't, let TTSReader read them stories for you. Set the right voice and speed, that is appropriate for their comprehension level. For kids who are at the age of learning to read - this can also be an effective tool to strengthen that skill, as it highlights every sentence being read.

Main Features

Ttsreader is a free text to speech reader that supports all modern browsers, including chrome, firefox and safari..

Includes multiple languages and accents. If on Chrome - you will get access to Google's voices as well. Super easy to use - no download, no login required. Here are some more features

Fun, Online, Free. Listen to great content

Drag, drop & play (or directly copy text & play). That’s it. No downloads. No logins. No passwords. No fuss. Simply fun to use and listen to great content. Great for listening in the background. Great for proof-reading. Great for kids and more. Learn more, including a YouTube we made, here .

Multilingual, Natural Voices

We facilitate high-quality natural-sounding voices from different sources. There are male & female voices, in different accents and different languages. Choose the voice you like, insert text, click play to generate the synthesized speech and enjoy listening.

Exit, Come Back & Play from Where You Stopped

TTSReader remembers the article and last position when paused, even if you close the browser. This way, you can come back to listening right where you previously left. Works on Chrome & Safari on mobile too. Ideal for listening to articles.

Vs. Recorded Podcasts

In many aspects, synthesized speech has advantages over recorded podcasts. Here are some: First of all - you have unlimited - free - content. That includes high-quality articles and books, that are not available on podcasts. Second - it’s free. Third - it uses almost no data - so it’s available offline too, and you save money. If you like listening on the go, as while driving or walking - get our free Android Text Reader App .

Read PDF Files, Texts & Websites

TTSReader extracts the text from pdf files, and reads it out loud. Also useful for simply copying text from pdf to anywhere. In addition, it highlights the text currently being read - so you can follow with your eyes. If you specifically want to listen to websites - such as blogs, news, wiki - you should get our free extension for Chrome

Export Speech to Audio Files

TTSReader enables exporting the synthesized speech to mp3 audio files. This is available currently only on Windows, and requires ttsreader’s premium .

Pricing & Plans

  • Online text to speech player
  • Chrome extension for reading webpages
  • Premium TTSReader.com
  • Premium Chrome extension
  • Better support from the development team

Compare plans

Sister Apps Developed by Our Team

Speechnotes

Dictation & Transcription

Type with your voice for free, or automatically transcribe audio & video recordings

Buttons - Kids Dictionary

Turns your device into multiple push-buttons interactive games

Animals, numbers, colors, counting, letters, objects and more. Different levels. Multilingual. No ads. Made by parents, for our own kids.

Ways to Get In Touch, Feedback & Community

Visit our contact page , for various ways to get in touch with us, send us feedback and interact with our community of users & developers.

TOEFL iBT ®  Test

The premier test of academic English communication

Learn more by selecting any step in your TOEFL iBT ®  journey.

TOEFL ® TestReady™

No other English language test provider has a prep offering like this — designed for you, with you. TOEFL ® TestReady ™ combines the best TOEFL iBT prep offerings with exclusive features and deeper insights to enhance your English communication skills. All feedback, recommendations, personalized insights and tips are developed by the same teams that write and produce the TOEFL iBT test.

Whether you’re just embarking on your TOEFL iBT journey or aiming to boost your scores, TOEFL TestReady can help you get further, faster, with tailored study solutions for your skill level and goals.

Your Free TOEFL TestReady Account

Create or log in to your free account now to get instant access to your personalized, one-stop prep portal and explore all of the benefits TOEFL TestReady has to offer.

What’s included?

Research shows that performance in TOEFL TestReady can help you accurately predict your score on test day. The better your performance in the portal, the more likely it is for you to achieve a higher TOEFL iBT score 1 .

Free Practice Test

Practice for your TOEFL iBT test anytime, anywhere, for free, with a full-length practice test.

  • AI-powered automated scoring
  • Performance feedback for all 4 sections
  • Personalized feedback and tips for Speaking and Writing responses

Free Activity of the Day

Log in every day to challenge yourself with a free activity from one of the 4 test sections, such as a Reading passage and related questions. This activity rotates daily.

Free Tailored Study Plan

Not sure when to start preparing for the TOEFL iBT test? Answer 5 short survey questions to generate a free interactive study plan to fit your schedule and help you stay organized, track your progress and focus on the skills you need to boost.

TOEFL Practice Online (TPO) tests simulate the real TOEFL iBT testing experience.

  • Review and answer authentic test questions.
  • Receive scores and performance feedback within 24 hours.
  • Choose from volumes that include complete tests, half tests or speaking tests.

Section Tests

Practice a section in test mode and receive a score, performance feedback and additional insights.

  • Receive estimated section score and CEFR level
  • Get personalized feedback on Speaking and Writing responses
  • Review correct and incorrect answers in the Reading and Listening sections

Section Practice

Practice a complete section at your own pace and receive immediate scores, feedback and insights to help you improve.

  • Reading and Listening: learn why your response was correct/ incorrect as well as why other response options were correct/incorrect.
  • Speaking: receive feedback on speech rate, rhythm, pronunciation, grammar, and more, plus transcripts of your responses and exemplars for comparison.
  • Writing: get specific feedback on grammar, usage, mechanics and more. Includes exemplars for comparison.

Focused Practice

Boost your skills and confidence by focusing on sets of specific question types with immediate scores, feedback and insights.

Guides & Books

Best-selling guides and books to help you prepare for the TOEFL iBT test.

The Official Guide to the TOEFL iBT ® Test

This guide is a comprehensive, all-in-one reference to help you prepare for the test and get your best score. It is available in eBook and paperback formats and includes:

  • Four full-length practice tests
  • Interactive versions of all four tests, in addition to the book versions
  • valuable tips
  • scoring criteria
  • hundreds of sample questions for all four test sections

Official TOEFL iBT ® Tests, Volumes 1 & 2

Get 10 authentic, full-length TOEFL iBT tests with previous test questions. Available in paperback or eBook formats, each volume offers five practice tests and includes:

  • Interactive online versions of all five tests
  • Sample Speaking and Writing responses
  • Audio files and written transcripts for all listening passages

Learn about TOEFL iBT courses to help you prepare for your test.

Official TOEFL iBT ® Prep Course

Build the skills you need to communicate in English in an academic environment with this self-paced course. With the 6-month subscription, you’ll be able to:

  • Do in-depth lessons and activities across the 4 skills — Reading, Listening, Speaking and Writing
  • Take pre- and post-tests to help you evaluate your performance
  • Receive score ranges for the Speaking and Writing post-tests, using the same automated scoring as in the actual TOEFL iBT test

You can choose one of two options:

  • The Prep Course — standard course
  • The Prep Course PLUS — everything in the standard course, plus additional scoring and feedback, including score ranges for Speaking and Writing activities and tests, and written feedback on your Speaking responses

TOEFL ® Test Preparation: The Insider's Guide

With this free self-paced course, you can learn and practice whenever it’s most convenient for you. It includes:

  • An introduction to the test and each section
  • Short quizzes
  • Collaborative discussion boards
  • Tips from expert instructors
  • Scaled-score range for Speaking and Writing practice questions
  • Information and sample questions for the new Writing for an Academic Discussion task

Value Packs

Save money when you purchase multiple prep offerings bundled together into an expertly curated package. Find discounts on test registrations, practice tests, guides, books, additional score reports and more.

Performance Insights, Feedback and Guidance

As you engage with TOEFL TestReady prep offerings, robust AI algorithms serve up valuable information to help you maximize your score potential.

Feel confident on test day! The overwhelming majority of learners we surveyed reported that the new test prep offerings and features within TOEFL TestReady boosted their confidence, improved their skills and increased their readiness for the TOEFL iBT test 2 .

Curated Prep Recommendations

Close skill gaps and focus your time more effectively and efficiently with curated prep recommendations. Receive evolving guidance on where to focus your efforts and which prep offerings to try next based on insights drawn from your past performance.

Continuous Progress Tracking

Monitor your progress in real time with tracking of overall performance, section performance and question type performance. Your personal Insights page showcases your skill trends, as well as an estimated TOEFL iBT score and CEFR level to help you gauge your readiness.

1 Source: Statistics gathered from 765 users who also took the TOEFL iBT test (China, India, and the U.S.)

2 Source: Survey of 765 users across China, India and the U.S.

Debt Free Family

Free Online Novels: Discover Where to Find Your Next Great Read

R eading books has significantly changed from being done traditionally in print to digitally. The way we consume has changed dramatically thanks to the internet, which is also true of books. Readers now have the option of reading novels online for free, thanks to the development of online platforms. In addition to making literature more approachable, this change has made a variety of genres, such as visual novels and graphic novels, more accessible. We will explore the world of online novels in this post, talking about their advantages, variety, and ease, with a focus on the accessibility of free options.

The Rise of Reading Novels Online

A journey to the neighborhood library or bookshop, picking up a physical copy, and submerging oneself in the author's imaginary world was the conventional methods of reading novels. The ability to read novels online has challenged this convention in the digital age. Numerous benefits that adapt to the preferences and lifestyles of contemporary readers have resulted from this shift.

1. Convenience and Accessibility

The convenience of reading novels online is one of its most important benefits. Readers have quick and easy access to a vast library of international novels. This saves time and effort because there is no longer a need to travel to a physical site. Additionally, because internet platforms are available around the clock, readers can satisfy their cravings for literature whenever they want.

2. Variety of Genres

By offering a wide range of genres to accommodate different interests, online platforms have democratized the literary scene. The internet is a veritable gold mine of alternatives whether you enjoy science fiction, fantasy, romance, mystery, or modern fiction. This also applies to graphic novels and visual novels, which blend narrative with visual components to produce a distinctive reading experience.

3. Cost-Effectiveness

Cost is frequently a barrier to reading good literature. Online platforms have addressed this issue by providing a variety of free reading options. Now that novels are available online for free, readers no longer need to spend money on pricey physical copies. Because of this, reading has become more accessible to people who might not otherwise have had the wherewithal to engage in their reading habits.

Exploring Free Online Novels

The way we access and consume written information has completely changed as a result of the democratization of literature in the digital age. The availability of free online books has broadened the literary scene with the introduction of multiple online platforms, giving readers unmatched access to a diversified selection of high-quality literature. Let's look more closely at some of the well-known venues that have thrown open the doors to this treasury of literature:

1. Project Gutenberg

With its huge library of more than 60,000 free eBooks, Project Gutenberg serves as a guiding light for the literary past. A sanctuary for fans of classic literature, this platform specializes in hosting works whose copyrights have lapsed. Project Gutenberg offers free access to classic literature for modern readers, including Jane Austen's enthralling novels, Mark Twain's funny writing, and Charles Dickens' ageless works. Because of the platform's dedication to preserving and sharing cultural treasures, future generations will continue to be enthralled by these masterpieces.

Reading and writing are now a team effort, thanks to Wattpad. This platform gives prospective writers a platform from which to exhibit to the world their talent as writers. With a diverse readership, authors share their short stories, novels, and poems, encouraging interaction, criticism, and conversations. Readers, in turn, have free access to a wide variety of information. The interactive features of Wattpad make it difficult to distinguish between authors and readers, fostering a vibrant literary community where there are no restrictions on storytelling.

3. Librivox

Librivox provides services for fans of audiobooks who wish to become fully immersed in reading through spoken word. This website provides a substantial collection of free audiobooks with a concentration on public domain titles. Librivox makes sure that literature is accessible not only via reading but also through listening, preserving everything from the rhythmic cadence of Shakespearean soliloquies to the gripping storylines of classic novels. Librivox offers a simple and rewarding aural literary experience, whether during commuting, exercises, or leisurely strolls.

4. Kindle Unlimited

While Amazon's Kindle Unlimited subscription service does have a monthly fee, there are different methods of reading highly reviewed books for free. Right now there is a two months free promotion that will renew at $11.99 per month after the promotional period ends. Be sure to set a reminder and cancel autorenewal before you're charged. Another route to free reading pleasure is to simply search Free Kindle Books on Amazon. Having an Amazon Prime account also gives you access to over 3000 books free of charge without signing up for Kinde Unlimited. Books care be read directly from Amazon's cloud without the need to download to any of your devices.

5. ManyBooks

ManyBooks distinguishes out for its dedication to accommodating readers' varied preferences. This platform makes sure there is something for everyone with a wide range of free eBooks in different genres. ManyBooks has a handpicked selection that may satisfy even the most diverse readers, whether you enjoy romantic romance, spine-tingling mystery, thought-provoking science fiction, or epic fantasy. Users of the platform can easily find their next literary fixation thanks to the platform's user-friendly search and filtering capabilities.

6. Open Library

The literary gems of the past and the contemporary artistic expressions are perfectly merged by Open Library. This portal functions as an online library, providing access to both classic and modern literature in the public domain. Open Library connects these two literary worlds, whether you're looking for the nostalgic embrace of classic literature or long to discover the novelties of modern authors. For those who want to explore the rich history of literature while remaining aware of the pulse of contemporary storytelling, it is a virtual haven.

Looking for deeply discounted used books?

Check out Thriftbooks.com . They carry over 7 million books and stand as one of the largest online retailers in the United States for secondhand books.

Visual Novels and Graphic Novels: What's the Difference?

The digital age has cleared the door for creative storytelling formats that go beyond conventional textual narratives as they continue to transform the way we consume material. Prime examples of this evolution are visual novels and graphic novels, which provide readers with a multidimensional and aesthetically immersive experience in addition to reading.

In essence, the key difference lies in interactivity and presentation. Graphic novels are static, while visual novels offer choices and multiple paths, bridging the gap between literature and gaming. Both mediums offer unique storytelling experiences, catering to diverse preferences.

1. Visual Novels

Readers have a new way to connect with narratives because of the seamless blending of interactive components and storytelling in visual novels. These interactive stories frequently give readers decisions that influence the plot's course, allowing for a variety of results and engaging storytelling experiences. Intricate stories are at the heart of visual novels, brought to life through a seamless fusion of written text, visuals, and occasionally even voice acting and music. The combination of these factors produces an experience that appeals to both the reader and the gamer in all of us.

Readers are encouraged to reread and play through the story several times to explore the range of options because their choices can result in different storylines as they move through the narrative. Readers have the freedom to explore and experiment in the world of free online visual novels without being constrained by a limited budget. Access to graphic novels in all genres—from romance to mystery to fantasy—is available on a number of platforms. Because of its accessibility, visual novels are now a dynamic medium that encourages readers to get fully immersed in stories in ways that go beyond reading traditional text.

2. Graphic Novels

The success of graphic novels is proof of the effectiveness of visual storytelling. The reading experience is enhanced by these narratives' use of images to portray the story's storyline, characters, emotions, and atmosphere. The synergy between the visually striking artwork and the thoughtfully written dialogue relates to readers on many different levels. Graphic novels give readers a clear visual image, whereas traditional novels rely on descriptive writing to create a mental picture. This not only improves the reading experience but also makes it possible to tell more intricate stories that profit from the extra layer of visual signals.

Graphic novels provide a thorough storytelling experience, from the characters' rich world-building to their realistic facial expressions. Graphic novels have a home in online platforms, just as the world of traditional novels does so in the digital age. A large number of these platforms provide a variety of free graphic novels to download, opening up this appealing style to a larger audience. Readers now have more access to a variety of genres and aesthetic expressions, which has led to a renewed appreciation for the blending of narrative and visual art.

A new era of reading has begun in the digital age, giving readers unprecedented access to a vast body of literature. Reading is now a widely available pleasure for people all around the world, thanks to the possibility of reading novels for free online. The internet has a ton of possibilities to satisfy your desire for books, whether you prefer classic literature, modern fiction, visual novels, or graphic novels. The means by which we interact with literature will change along with technology, ensuring that the written word continues to be a dynamic and essential part of our lives.

Free Online Novels: Discover Where to Find Your Next Great Read

OpenAI introduces AI model that turns text into video

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Reporting by Juveria Tabassum; Editing by Anil D'Silva

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Take down notice issued by a group of global intelligence to Lockbit

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India's Motilal Oswal Financial Services said on Monday its operations were unaffected following a cyber incident last week.

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How to Watch CBS News Online Without a Cable Subscription

  • By Jessica Murtaugh

Jessica Murtaugh

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Rolling Stone may receive an affiliate commission.

Quick Answer: You can watch CBS News online for free with trials to live streaming services like DirecTV Stream , fuboTV , and Paramount+ .

CBS News has been a source for breaking updates since its first radio broadcast in 1929, and shortly after, informing generations of Americans through their television sets. CBS News has evolved from 15-minute segments to several programs today, like CBS Evening News , CBS Morning News , and CBS Mornings , its newsmagazines CBS Sunday Morning , 60 Minutes , and 48 Hours , and the political affairs program, Face the Nation — all of which you can livestream online.

But just as news landscapes change, so has our need to be tethered to traditional cable. The great news is that several streaming services now allow viewers to tune into their local stations for breaking coverage they need, bundled with the entertainment they want. If you’ve bid farewell to cable television, here’s how to livestream CBS News online.

Editor’s Note: New episodes of CBS News programs air daily on local networks. Check the network’s website for specific local broadcast channels and regional air times.

How to Watch CBS News Online Without Cable

To catch the latest CBS News coverage online without cable, choose a live TV streaming service that offers CBS in its lineup, like our list of preferred options below.

Stream CBS News Online on DirecTV Stream

Never miss a beat of CBS News with a subscription to DirecTV Stream . Starting with a five-day free trial, and plans from $79.99 (plus tax) a month, the service brings you your local CBS programs and news online. The base plan is also stacked with popular entertainment channels for the whole family, like AMC, Comedy Central, HGTV, and AMC, and you can upgrade anytime to DirecTV’s Choice, Ultimate, or Premier subscriptions for even more.

Stream CBS News Online on fuboTV

Another service we recommend for staying up on CBS News is fuboTV , which also grants access to local stations, like CBS, ABC, and NBC. Whether watching the big game with its large list of sports networks or tuning into the 24/7 news cycle on CNBC, FOX Live Now, or MSNBC, you’ll stay informed round the clock. Try the service for one week free, then choose between monthly subscription plans, starting at $79.99.

Stream CBS News Online on Hulu + Live TV

Hulu is a popular streaming service for watching episodes of your favorite shows, as well as its critically acclaimed originals and live news coverage. The Hulu + Live TV plan lets subscribers stream local stations in real-time, like CBS, to catch local news, sporting events, and other programming. With Hulu + Live TV, you won’t have to miss a moment of breaking CBS News. There’s even unlimited, free DVR included to record live TV when you can’t tune in. Get a Hulu + Live TV plan starting at $76.99 monthly (with ads).

Stream CBS News Online on Paramount+

Paramount+ offers around-the-clock streaming of CBS News with its base Essential package, which comes with a one-week free trial. After your trial, the subscription runs $5.99 per month. You can also get an annual plan for $59.99 a year, which amounts to $5 a month in the end.

Can you Watch CBS News Live Online For Free?

To watch CBS News programs without spending cash, take advantage of a streaming service’s limited-time, free trial that includes CBS in its offering, such as DirecTV Stream , Fubo , or Paramount+ . You can also catch 24/7 real-time coverage on CBS.com’s live news stream or by signing into your cable TV provider (if you haven’t cut the cord) on the CBS app.

Here's Where to Find Jennifer Lopez 'This Is Me... Now' Tour Tickets Online

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How to Watch 'Messi's World Cup: The Rise of a Legend' Docuseries Online

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Here's Where to Buy Odesza Tickets to the Duo's 'Last Goodbye Finale' Tour

How to watch 'wheel of fortune' online without cable.

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Those $399 Gold Trump Sneakers Are About a Lot More Than Shoes

What is Trump really selling when he is selling footwear?

Former President Donald J. Trump stands onstage at a microphone. Before him on the podium is a gold hightop sneaker with an American flag at the ankle.

By Vanessa Friedman

Of all the merch hawked by the former president and current presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and related entities over the past few months — the gold (chocolate) bars, the wines , the superhero NFTs — is any of it more Trumpian than the $399 Never Surrender sneakers unveiled over the weekend at Sneaker Con in Philadelphia ? They are like a road map to Mr. Trump’s value system and electoral strategy in sartorial form.

Gilded hightops as shiny as the chandeliers at Mar-a-Lago, they have an American flag wrapping the ankle like the forest of flags that spring up behind Mr. Trump whenever he takes a stage. They have red soles made to match his trademark red ties (and the flag) and perhaps as a sly nod to Christian Louboutins and the semiology of luxury footwear. Also, there’s a large embossed “T” on the side and on the tongue.

While they are “bold, gold and tough, just like President Trump,” according to the Trump sneakers website, allowing potential owners to “be a part of history,” they boast zero technical performance attributes. While they have a shape similar to Nike Air Force 1s (get it? Air Force One!), they are unabashed imitations of the original.

It’s tempting to dismiss the offering as all flash and marketing with little substance. That’s what Michael Tyler , a spokesman for the Biden campaign, did, saying, “Donald Trump showing up to hawk bootleg Off-Whites is the closest he’ll get to any Air Force Ones ever again for the rest of his life.”

Or to think of them as Mr. Trump’s answer to the Biden campaign’s TikTok presence : an effort to associate himself with the cool embedded in the whole idea of sneaker culture, not to mention the energy and athleticism implied by the “Just Do It” model. Despite the fact that Mr. Trump himself is almost never seen wearing a sneaker, or doing much exercise.

Yet the merching of the moment is more dangerous than it may initially appear.

There has been a lot of eye-rolling since the sneakers’ debut, and jokes about the fact that, given the millions of dollars in penalties levied on Mr. Trump in his various civil cases, he has to make more money somewhere. And there was a lot of focus on the boos that met his appearance at Sneaker Con. (To be fair, the sneakerhead community is not the market for the kicks since there’s nothing original about them; it’s the MAGA market.)

It’s easy to get distracted by the sheer absurdity of it all — a former president, selling sneakers!

There are so many ways Mr. Trump has challenged the norms of the presidential system that such merch can seem the least of the matter. What is selling NFTs with pieces of a mug shot suit compared with the indictment that necessitated the mug shot? What is offering $99 Victory47 cologne in a gold bottle with a gold Trump head as a stopper (another product available on the sneaker website) compared with offering to throw NATO allies to Russia like little pieces of red meat? Besides, realistically, there’s no way the sneakers will provide much of a financial boost to Trump World.

The sneakers are being created by a company known as 45Footwear LLC and are not officially “designed, manufactured, distributed or sold by Donald J. Trump, the Trump Organization or any of their respective affiliates or principals,” according to a disclaimer on the sneaker website. That company licenses the Trump name and image from one called CIC Ventures LLC , which happens to have the same address as the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla. The Trump sneaker website looks a lot like the Trump NFT website, and as with that arrangement, Mr. Trump most likely receives a licensing fee. He did present the sneakers at Sneaker Con himself.

Despite the fact that, as of Sunday, the website claimed that the 1,000 pairs of numbered Never Surrender sneakers had sold out, leaving the somewhat less exciting T-Red cherry knit sneaks and Potus 45 white knit sneaks available at $199 each, it’s hard to imagine a circumstance in which the shoes provide any meaningful source of income.

What they offer is something else.

Like Mr. Trump’s tendency to turn every courtroom appearance into a form of entertainment that can be used as a campaign op, his effort to commoditize his legal jeopardy is a long-term strategic play. In reducing his indictments to a slogan on a consumer good, he is reducing their gravity.

It’s a form of insidious trivialization, the sort of tactic that plays perfectly in the landscape of late-stage capitalism in which everything is a product for sale. Oh, those old federal charges? They’re not serious; they’re a style choice. He’s transforming indictments into accessories, a language everyone speaks. The more product he sells, the more he makes a mockery of his situation. That’s where the real profit lies.

Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014. More about Vanessa Friedman

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Who Pays for Dates?: Young people tend to lean more liberal on a range of issues pertaining to relationship norms. But when it comes to dating, the idea that men should pay still prevails  in heterosexual courtship.

Models Over 40 Wanted: The fashion label Batsheva dares to cast middle-aged (and up) women  in a runway show.

The Truth About Love: We hit the streets with the team behind Meet Cutes NYC, which publishes microportraits of modern love on social media .

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