Don Juan is an epic satirical poem that reinterprets the legendary figure of Don Juan as a young, naive, and passive adventurer who becomes involved in various romantic and adventurous exploits more by circumstance than by intent. The poem opens with Juan's early life in Seville, where his strict upbringing by his mother Donna Inez contrasts sharply with his eventual affair with Donna Julia, a married woman. This scandal forces Juan to flee, setting him on a series of adventures a...

Originally curated by Harvard President Charles W. Eliot as a complete liberal education in fifty volumes, the Harvard Classics gathers philosophy, science, literature, and history into a single indispensable library. Plato's dialogues and Marcus Aurelius's meditations sit alongside Dante's Divine Comedy, Francis Bacon's essays, Charles Darwin's scientific writing, and Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, tracing the foundations of Western thought from ancient Greece to the modern age. Homer...

The common media and scholarly story—especially with the rise of people who don’t identify with any religion—suggests that religion in America is in serious decline. In Death of Religion?: Nones, Others, and the Flourishing of Faith, Byron R. Johnson and Tommy Kidd strongly challenge this view. In this work, they argue that the idea of religion’s decline has been greatly exaggerated and that survey data can often be misleading or incomplete. Their approach is to show that ...

Bestselling author and clinical psychologist Tanya Byron shares why distress is not always a disorder, and encourages us to accept the pains and joys of being fully humanWe live in a world fluent in therapy-speak — where every bad day is ‘depression’, every worry is ‘anxiety’, and every disappointment is ‘trauma’. But what if this language, meant to heal, is stopping us from feeling what’s real?In You Are Not A Diagnosis, acclaimed clinical psychol...

Bestselling author and clinical psychologist Tanya Byron makes an urgent call to find the strength to sit with the pain of being human, rather than seek refuge in labelsWe live in a world fluent in therapy-speak — where every bad day is ‘depression’, every worry is ‘anxiety’, and every disappointment is ‘trauma’. But what if this language, meant to heal, is stopping us from feeling what’s real?In You Are Not A Diagnosis, acclaimed clinical psycholo...

On a summer morning in 1815, Ludwig van Beethoven emerges as both a solitary laborer and a force of nature: shabby, restless, and fiercely disciplined, yet sustained by sunlight, open air, and the landscape beyond Vienna. This portrait follows him from breakfast-table compositional struggles to the creation of Adélaide, the sonatas Pathétique, Moonlight, Waldstein, and Appassionata, and finally to the radiant vision of Schiller's "Ode to Joy" that would culminate in the Ninth Symphony. Alo...

You picked up this book because you are a busy man with a full life and a heavy load, and somewhere between the alarm at 5 in the morning and the last child asleep at night, your prayer life became the thing you keep meaning to do. You have bought the devotionals and started the plans, and you have fallen off by the second week, and the guilt on top of the exhaustion has made starting again feel impossible. Whatever brought you here, you share the conviction this book honors: you are not l...

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a lengthy narrative poem in four parts written by Lord Byron. It was published between 1812 and 1818 and is dedicated to "Ianthe". The poem describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands. In a wider sense, it is an expression of the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. T...

You are lying awake at 3 a.m. again, heart pounding, nightgown soaked, the fan on high and no amount of cool pillows bringing sleep back. By sunrise you feel like you ran a marathon in your sleep, and the day ahead expects you to be sharp, patient, and present for everyone except yourself. If this sounds familiar, you are not broken and you are not alone, because millions of women in midlife describe the same betrayal by their own bodies. The standard advice to eat well and exercise more i...

The Complete Harvard Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature epitomizes the expansive vista of immense thought and varied narrative styles spanning millennia and continents. This monumental collection assembles the seminal works of venerable authors like Homer and Virgil, to modern intellectuals like John Stuart Mill and Charles Darwin, encompassing an array of genres from epic poetry to philosophical essays and revolutionary treatises. Notable for its comprehensive representat...

Robert Louis Stevenson emerges here as a writer of rare vitality: frail in body yet fiercely disciplined in spirit, he turned illness, hardship, and sudden fame into fiction that felt immediate, thrilling, and alive. From Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll to Kidnapped and The Wrecker, he mastered the art of making a cry on the horizon, a glimpse of sail, or a flash of danger ignite whole worlds of adventure and suspense. Beneath the excitement lies a deep philosophy of courage, cheerfulness, ...

Loving What Is by bestselling author Byron Katie is a simple, straightforward antidote to the suffering we unnecessarily create for ourselves and has inspired and help millions of people transform their pain into freedom. Written in an easy-to-follow, interactive and accessible way and drawing on illustrative case studies, reading this is the first step to turning your life around and achieving inner peace and harmony...'A great blessing for our pl...