"A portrait in her own words of the female Lawrence of Arabia. One of the great woman adventurers of the twentieth century and the chief architect of British policy in the Middle East after World War I, Gertrude Bell turned her back on Victorian society to study at Oxford and travel the world. Mountaineer, archaeologist, Arabist, writer, poet, linguist, and spy, she dedicated her life to championing the Arab cause and was instrumental in drawing the...
Represents Nietzsche's attempt to sum up his philosophy. In nine parts the book is designed to give the reader a comprehensive idea of Nietzsche's thought and style. With an inclusive index of subjects and persons.
"In Freud's view we are driven by the desire for pleasure as well as by the desire to avoid pain. But the pursuit has never been a simple thing. Pleasure can be a form of fear, a form of memory and a way of avoiding reality. Above all, as these essays show with remarkable eloquence, pleasure is a way in which we repeat ourselves." "The essays collected in this volume explore, in Freud's uniquely subtle and accessible style, the puzzles of pleasure...
"A new, definitive edition of Herman Melville's virtuosic short stories--American classics wrought with scorching fury, grim humor, and profound beauty. Though best-known for his epic masterpiece Moby-Dick, Herman Melville also left a body of short stories arguably unmatched in American fiction. In the sorrowful tragedy of Billy Budd, Sailor; the controlled rage of Benito Cereno; and the tantalizing enigma of Bartleby, the Scrivener; Melville reveals...
Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...
From the acclaimed author of The Quiet American, a sociopath rises to power in Britain's criminal underworld in this "brilliant and uncompromising" thriller (The New York Times).
Seventeen-year-old Pinkie Brown, raised amid the casual violence and corruption in the dire prewar Brighton slums, has left his final judgment in the hands of God. On the streets, impelled by his own twisted moral doctrine, he leads a motley pack of gangsters whose sleazy...
"With Candide, Voltaire bumptiously skewered the fashionable misinterpretation of the doctrine of philosophical optimism, unerringly offending kings, scientists, fanaticals, publishers, journalists, and even priests; composed in a mere three days, Candide's capacity to amuse, disgust, and surprise endures today, roughly ninety thousand days later. Theo Cuffe's new translation is invaluable for those English-speaking readers who cannot understand French,...
"The Harlem Renaissance writer's innovative and groundbreaking novel depicting African American life in the South and North, with a foreword by National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree Zinzi Clemmons Jean Toomer's Cane is one of the most significant works to come out of the Harlem Renaissance, and is considered to be a masterpiece in American modernist literature because of its distinct structure and style. First published in 1923 and told through...
It can be said of very few books that the world was changed as a result of its publication - but this is certainly the case of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx (1818-1883). Volume 1 appeared (in German) in 1867, and the two subsequent volumes appeared at later dates after the author's death - completed from extensive notes left by Marx himself.
Marx, famously writing in the Reading Room of the British Museum, set out to draw...
A gentlemanly Irish physician is innocently condemned to a life of slavery in the English colonies across the sea. There, on a Caribbean Island plantation, the good Dr. Peter Blood, toils as a slave. A chance raid by Spaniards affords Blood his opportunity to escape into a life of piracy and crime upon the high seas. But Blood is a pirate with a sense of honor. How Blood distinguishes himself against his enemies, is the tale in this enjoyable historical...
Harvey Cheyne, the son of a millionaire, learns lessons about life, responsibility, determination, and self-reliance when, saved from drowning by a fishing schooner, he is forced to share the life and hard work of his rescuers.
This story, set on an Indian reservation just after World War II, concerns the return home of a war-weary Laguna Pueblo young man. Tayo, a young Native American, has been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and the horrors of captivity have almost eroded his will to survive. His return to the Laguna Pueblo reservation only increases his feeling of estrangement and alienation. While other returning soldiers find easy refuge in alcohol and...
Froissart (1337-1410), sometimes described as the historian of the Hundred Years' War, was one of the first great journalists. His Chronicles reveal the same curiosity about character and customs which underlies the works of his contemporary, Chaucer. This selection depicts a panorama of Europe during the great age of Anglo-French rivalry, from the deposition of Edward II to the downfall of Richard II, Froissart's famous descriptions of chivalry in...
From the Publisher: Two famous, firsthand accounts of the holy war in the Middle Ages. Originally composed in Old French, the two chronicles brought together here offer some of the most vivid and reliable accounts of the Crusades from a Western perspective. Villehardouin's Conquest of Constantinople, distinguished by its simplicity and lucidity, recounts the controversial Fourth Crusade, which descended into an all-out attack on the Eastern Christians...
