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François-Marie Arouet—Voltaire—perfected the philosophical tale, a literary form embedding profound questions about existence, justice, and human nature within entertaining narratives that made complex ideas accessible while evading censorship through wit and indirection. This volume presents his philosophical tales and essays spanning his career. In "Micromegas" (1752), a giant from Sirius visits Earth and discovers humanity's paradoxical nature: infinitesimal physical size matched against extraordinary intellectual achievement. The tale, among the first works of science fiction, uses...

Discover why intellectuals and historians alike consider Voltaire to be one of the most intriguing, influential, and elusive thinkers of the modern world. Focusing on the deepest, most enduring aspects of Voltaire's work and thought, but never losing sight of the colorful, fascinating man himself, these 12 lectures sketch for you a vibrant, thought-provoking vision of Voltaire as "the father of the Enlightenment" and one of the great literary personalities of all time.

A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of...

The legendary ironic insightful classic by Voltaire, considered the greatest artistic genius of his era. Introducing the legendary, best-of-all-possible-worlds Pangloss. A whirlwind trip around the globe with irony, wit, insight, genius, and more at each stop.

This is the tale of the happy but ill-fated Candide and his progressive disillusionment with the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds. His tutor, Dr. Pangloss, embodies this philosophy of good cheer, even in the face of ever more absurd misfortunes. Luckily, Candide's other companions provide an over-supply of good sense.

The Age of Voltaire, the ninth volume of The Story of Civilization, is an in-depth examination of France and England in the first half of the 18th century.

Voltaire’s Candide, first published in 1759, is one of the most influential and enduring works of satire in Western literature. Written during the Enlightenment, the novella presents a sharp critique of philosophical optimism, religious hypocrisy, and the cruelty of human society, all wrapped in a fast-paced and darkly humorous adventure. Through its witty and often absurd narrative, Candide remains as relevant today as it was in the 18th century, offering a timeless exploration of human folly, resilience, and the search for meaning. The story follows Candide, a naïve young man raised in...

If we were as tiny as ants to another being, what would they make of our philosophies? The great satirist Voltaire imagines alien visitors who have opinions. Bedtime stories are narrated by the world's most celebrated voices and written with no beginning, middle, or end so you don't stay up to hear what happens next. They're interesting enough to give your mind something to focus on, but delivered in a way that encourages sleep.

Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Ben Lloyd-Hughes, best known for Divergent, Me Before You and The Inbetweeners. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Michael Wood. Brought up in the household of a powerful Baron, Candide is an open-minded young man...

Zadig is a young Babylonian philosopher — wise, honest, virtuous, and entirely unprepared for the consequences of being all three. His first love abandons him for a man less decent than himself. His second proves faithless. His scientific observations land him in prison, where he learns that being right is not the same as being safe. He rises to become prime minister of Babylon and falls in love with the queen, which is exactly the kind of wisdom that forces a man to become a fugitive. In succession he is a slave, a wanderer through Egypt and Arabia, a traveler who reasons his way through...

This second volume of Voltaire's collected works presents four masterful tales from the mature phase of his literary career, written during the 1760s and 1770s when the philosopher had achieved both international fame and the hard-won wisdom of age. These works—"The Naive One," "The Man with Forty Crowns," "The Princess of Babylon," and "The Story of Jenni"—showcase Voltaire at his most sophisticated, wielding his considerable narrative powers to address the pressing social, economic, and religious questions of his time with renewed urgency and refined artistry. "The Naive One" stands ...

The book that changed the consciousness of a country - and the world. Landmark, groundbreaking, classic - these adjectives barely describe the earthshaking and long-lasting effects of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. This is the book that defined "the problem that has no name", that launched the Second Wave of the feminist movement, and has been awakening women and men with its insights into social relations, which still remain fresh, ever since.

"Dans une de ces planètes qui tournent autour de l'étoile nommée Sirius, il y avait un jeune homme de beaucoup d'esprit, que j'ai eu l'honneur de connaître dans le dernier voyage qu'il fit sur notre petite fourmilière ; il s'appelait Micromégas, nom qui convient fort à tous les grands. Il avait huit lieues de haut : j'entends, par huit lieues, vingt-quatre mille pas géométriques de cinq pieds chacun."

March 10, 1762: In Toulouse, Jean Calas—a sixty-eight-year-old Protestant merchant—is broken on the wheel for allegedly murdering his son to prevent Catholic conversion. The evidence: none. The verdict: determined by religious hatred. Voltaire transforms this atrocity into history's first modern human rights campaign. His Treatise on Tolerance, published 1763, secures Calas's posthumous exoneration while constructing one of the Enlightenment's most powerful arguments for religious freedom. Using the Calas case as lens, Voltaire demonstrates through historical evidence how intolerance ...

What if the greatest equation ever written was not one that explained the universe, but one that questioned existence itself? Elias Voltaire was a man who believed that everything could be calculated—every force, every motion, even human thought itself. But in his final moments, as he crossed the threshold of life and death, he found himself in a realm that defied all mathematical logic. Instead of nothingness, he encountered an infinite field of information, a vast and ever-changing ocean where knowledge flowed endlessly—yet he himself was dissolving into it. With no body, no form, and...

Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Roy McMillan, narrator of Underland by Robert MacFarlane, The Second Sleep by Robert Harris and Love is Blind by William Boyd. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Haydn Mason and is translated by translated by Theo...

The French Classics Collection brings together 18 of the greatest works of fiction ever written in French - here collected into one audiobook and all translated into English. Featuring grand epics of love, loss, and survival, as in Les Miserables, to tales of adventure in Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, and romances such as Madame Bovary, alongside many more grand stories from 17th, 18th, and 19th century France, this collection will whisk you away into other worlds with some of the greatest characters in literature within some of the greatest novels ever written.

Voltaire's razor-sharp satire on philosophical optimism, Candide, is coupled here with another of the author's most celebrated works, Zadig. Both challenge the moral and philosophical orthodoxies of the day with humor and sly wit, while parodying the clichéd formulas of so many contemporary novels.

These two classic coming-of-age stories by Voltaire parody the romanticism of his day with the ruthless wit that has made him the undisputed master of social commentary. Candide, which is alternately titled Optimism, is a merciless satire and expos├ of the ideas and institutions men live by...

Vividly written, The Infidel and the Professor is a compelling account of a great friendship of two towering Enlightenment thinkers that had great consequences for modern thought. David Hume is widely regarded as the most important philosopher ever to write in English, but during his lifetime, he was attacked as "the Great Infidel" for his skeptical religious views and deemed unfit to teach the young. In contrast, Adam Smith was a revered professor of moral philosophy and is now often hailed as the founding father of capitalism.