Philosophical Literature

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...

The most dangerous novel Hermann Hesse ever wrote — and the one he almost didn't survive. This new translation restores its full strangeness. Harry Haller is fifty years old, brilliant, and convinced he is two beings at war inside a single body: a cultivated man of letters and a wild wolf of the steppes, irreconcilable, exhausting each other. One night, instead of ending his life, he follows a stranger into a magic theater where the price of admission is your sanity — and where the self turns out to be not two things, but a thousand. Published in 1927, Steppenwolf is Hesse's most ...

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is Friedrich Nietzsche's magnum opus and one of the most enigmatic and powerful texts in Western philosophy. Subtitled A Book for All and None, this philosophical novel chronicles the journey of Zarathustra, a prophet-like figure who descends from his mountain solitude to deliver his transformative teachings to humanity. Blending prose and poetry, myth and aphorism, Nietzsche crafts a compelling narrative that explores profound themes such as the "death of God," the "eternal recurrence," and the emergence of the Übermensch, or "Overman." Far from a traditional ...

This annotated edition of Demons includes: • The suppressed chapter "At Tikhon's" — Stavrogin's confession, restored • A 14,000-word critical study, "The Arithmetic of the Absolute" • The real crime behind the novel: the Nechaev murder of 1869 • On the Gadarene swine — how the epigraph is the argument • A full life of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) A provincial Russian town, a cell of revolutionaries, and a murder meant to bind them in blood. In 1869 a student named Ivanov was killed by his own revolutionary circle, on the orders of a charismatic young agitator, to weld the ...

Three centuries after he wrote it, Jonathan Swift remains the most dangerous writer in the English language. This Erato Press edition gathers his essential work in a single annotated volume — the complete Gulliver's Travels alongside the masterpieces that made satire a weapon rather than a joke. Lemuel Gulliver sails for the Indies and returns a stranger to his own species. He is a giant among the six-inch courtiers of Lilliput, a plaything among the giants of Brobdingnag, a baffled tourist on the flying island of Laputa, and at last a broken man among the rational horses of the ...

This annotated edition of Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich includes: • An original critical afterword, "Dying in the Third Person" • The philosophy: the syllogism of Caius and the fear of death • Tolstoy's own crisis, from A Confession to this novella • A biography of Tolstoy; the authorized Maude translation A volume in CLASSICS OF WORLD LITERATURE from Erato Press. "His life had been most simple and most ordinary — and therefore most terrible." A respected judge, a pleasant apartment, the right friends, a career climbed rung by careful rung — and then a small pain in his ...

There were plans for an official welcome. It was to take place the following Sunday. But those who came to the rectory on Father Pennant's second day were the ones who could not resist seeing him sooner. Here was the man to whom they would confess the darkest things. It was important to feel him out. Mrs. Young, for instance, after she had watched him eat a piece of her macaroni pie, quietly asked what he thought of adultery. André Alexis brings a modern sensibility and a new liveliness to an age-old genre, the pastoral.

It was The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) that confirmed Thomas Mann as a Nobel prizewinner for literature and rightly so, for it is undoubtedly one of the great novels of the 20th century. Its unusual story - it opens with a young man visiting a friend in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss...

"There's joy in self-described "satellite nerd" James Bridle's British-accented voice as he narrates this audiobook about consciousness and the search for planetary intelligence." - AudioFile Magazine This audiobook is read by the author. Artist, technologist, and philosopher James Bridle’s...

David Hume (1711-1776) was the most important philosopher ever to write in English as well as a master stylist. This volume contains his major philosophical works. A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), published while Hume was still in his twenties, consists of three books on the understanding, the passions, and morals.

There are three things you need to know about Ashley Winston: 1) She has six brothers and they all have beards, 2) She is a reader, and 3) She knows how to knit. Former beauty queen, Ashley Winston’s preferred coping strategy is escapism. She escaped her Tennessee small town, loathsome father, and six brothers eight years ago. Now she escapes life daily via her Amazon kindle one-click addiction. However, when a family tragedy forces her to return home, Ashley can’t escape the notice of Drew Runous

Swann's Way, published in 1913, is the first volume of Marcel Proust's monumental work In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu). This novel, widely regarded as one of the greatest literary achievements of the 20th century, delves into themes of memory, time, love, and the fleeting nature of existence. Proust's introspective and richly detailed narrative invites readers into a world where every moment, emotion, and thought is meticulously examined. Swann's Way is divided into three parts, each exploring different facets of life and memory. The novel begins with the narrator's ...

This complete collection brings together the full scope of Nietzsche's radical and transformative philosophy in a single, meticulously curated work.

Denis Diderot's Rameau's Nephew (Le Neveu de Rameau) stands as one of the most provocative and psychologically penetrating works of 18th-century French literature. Written around 1761-1774 but not published until after Diderot's death, this philosophical dialogue presents a fascinating encounter between two contrasting worldviews through the conversation between a rational philosopher (representing Diderot himself) and the eccentric, amoral nephew of the famous composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. The work takes the form of a dramatic dialogue set in a Parisian café, where the narrator ...

A raw, startling, genre-defying novel of friendship, sex, and love in the new millennium—a compulsive read that's like "spending a day with your new best friend" (Bookforum) This program is read by the author. Reeling from a failed marriage, Sheila, a twentysomething playwright, finds herself...

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Written in 1890 by Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a haunting philosophical novel about vanity, corruption, and the consequences of hidden sin. Dorian Gray, a handsome young man in Victorian London, sells his soul so that his portrait ages...

A haunting fable of art, family, and fate from the author of the Outline trilogy. A woman invites a famous artist to use her guesthouse in the remote coastal landscape where she lives with her family. Powerfully drawn to his paintings, she believes his vision might penetrate the mystery at the...

Four works, four territories, one relentless intelligence. A mysterious stranger boards a storm-threatened ferry from Cadzand to Ostend and is welcomed only by the poor — and then a writer sits alone in a ruined Parisian church and asks what it means, in the modern world, to believe the legend he has just told. A fabric salesman in Paris practices the most demanding of arts: knowing what a customer wants before she does, and supplying it with a precision that leaves her certain the choice was entirely her own. A French soldier lost in the Sahara discovers a sleeping panther in a desert ...

Lélia cannot love. Not because she has never tried — she has, with the totality that her nature demands — but because she has passed through the aspiration for the absolute and found, on the other side of it, only the permanent confirmation of its impossibility. She cannot be reached by Sténio, the young poet who loves her with a completeness that is destroying him. She cannot be consoled by Trenmor, the former gambler who has survived his own degradation and found in renunciation a stoic peace. She cannot be saved by Magnus, the fanatical priest whose religious obsession with her ...

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...