A compelling argument for the necessity for art in life, Nietzsche's first book is fuelled by his enthusiasms for Greek tragedy, for the philosophy of Schopenhauer and for the music of Wagner, to whom…
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
The Cheese and the Worms is a study of the popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of one man, a miller brought to trial during the Inquisition. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial…
The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History
When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730's held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously funny that they…
Heart of Darkness, a novel by Joseph Conrad, was originally a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899. It is a story within a story, following a character named Charlie Marlow, who recounts …
During the course of a single night, Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest, who is a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a mediocre poet, relives some of the crucial events of his l…
The Conquest of America is a fascinating study of cultural confrontation in the New World, with implications far beyond sixteenth-century America. The book offers an original interpretation of the Spa…
The Apology of Socrates is Plato's version of the speech given by Socrates as he unsuccessfully defended himself in 399BCE against the charges of "corrupting the young, and by not believing in the god…
A wonderfully entertaining coming-of-age story, Northanger Abbey is often referred to as Jane Austen's "Gothic parody." Decrepit castles, locked rooms, mysterious chests, cryptic notes, and tyrannical…
