Although the Austrian poet Georg Trakl was born over a century ago, the mesmerising imagery and haunting visions of his highly sensitive and morbidly introspective poetry are as powerful today as they were when he poured forth his extraordinary and unclassifiable volume of work. A source of inspiration for artists, musicians and writers throughout the Expressionist period and beyond, Trakl's poetry – bleak, yet full of tenderness and hope, nightmarish yet eeriely beautiful...

After a childhood marked by loss and grief, Hölderlin studied theology in the illustrious company of Hegel and Schelling, before concentrating on poetry and writing his most famous work, Hyperion. But, afflicted by the pressures of life and a doomed love affair, he gradually went mad, and spent the final thirty-six years of his life in a solitary tower in Tübingen, cared for by a kindly carpenter. The younger poet Wilhelm Waiblinger (1804–30) was one of the few people to gain Hölderlin's c...

'He who thinks freely for himself, honours all freedom on earth.'Stefan Zweig was already an émigré-driven from a Europe torn apart by brutality and totalitarianism-when he found, in a damp cellar, a copy of Michel de Montaigne's Essais. Montaigne would become Zweig's last great occupation, helping him make sense of his own life and his obsessions-with personal freedom, with the sanctity of the individual. Through his writings on suicide, he would also, fi...

Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this multi-million-copy New York Times bestselleris the definitive manual for anyone interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control – from the author of The Laws of Human NatureIn the book that People magazine proclaimed “beguiling” and “fascinating,” Robert Greene and Joost Elffers have distilled three thousand years of the history of power into 48 essential laws by dra...

NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR • One of the most widely read novels of all time—from one of the best-known writers of all time—about a lawyer from Paris who brilliantly illuminates the human condition.Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality.

“These brief Ficciones have to be read one at a time, and slowly; then they throb with uncanny and haunting power.” —The Atlantic MonthlyThe seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the gargantuan powers of imagination, intelligence, and style of one of the greatest writers of this or any other century.Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sph...

“There's no writer alive like de Botton” (Chicago Tribune), and now this internationally heralded author turns his attention to the insatiable human quest for status—a quest that has less to do with material comfort than love.Anyone who’s ever lost sleep over an unreturned phone call or the neighbor’s Lexus had better read Alain de Botton’s irresistibly clear-headed new book, immediately. For in its pages, a master explicator of our civilization and its di...

The flourishing of radical philosophy in Baron Thierry Holbach's Paris salon from the 1750s to the 1770s stands as a seminal event in Western history. Holbach's house was an international epicenter of revolutionary ideas and intellectual daring, bringing together such original minds as Denis Diderot, Laurence Sterne, David Hume, Adam Smith, Ferdinando Galiani, Horace Walpole, Benjamin Franklin, Guillaume Raynal, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.In A Wicked Company, acclaimed hist...

On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) is a book about the history of ethics and about interpretation. Nietzsche rewrites the former as a history of cruelty, exposing the 4entral values of the Judaeo-Christian and liberal traditions - compassion, equality, justice - as the product of a brutal process of conditioning designed to domesticate the animal vitality of earlier cultures. The result is a book which raises profoundly disquieting issues about the violence of both ethics and interpretation...

Edited by Philip Thody, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy."Here now, for the first time in a complete English translation, we have Camus' three little volumes of essays, plus a selection of his critical comments on literature and his own place in it. As might be expected, the main interest of these writings is that they illuminate new facets of his usual subject matter."--The New York Times Book Review"...a new single work for American readers that stands among th...

A brilliant brief account of romanticism and its influence from one of the most important philosophers and intellectual historians of the twentieth centuryIn The Roots of Romanticism, one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers dissects and assesses a movement that changed the course of history. Brilliant, fresh, immediate, and eloquent, these celebrated Mellon Lectures are a bravura intellectual performance. Isaiah Berlin surveys the many...