This season’s essays take a turn toward joy, laughter, and survival. In addition to collections from notable names, be on the lookout for a feminist biography of the Wife of Bath from Chaucer’s The ...

Of the character sketches that the English satirist Samuel Butler wrote in the mid-seventeenth century—among them “A Degenerate Noble,” “A Huffing Courtier,” “A Small Poet,” and “A Romance Writer”—the ...