Kant's only aesthetic work apart from the Critique of Judgment, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime gives the reader a sense of the personality and character of its author as he sifts through the range of human responses to the concept of beauty and human manifestations of the beautiful and sublime. Kant was fif...more
Most famous for Faust, Goethe also wrote travelogues, autobiographical sketches, essays, letters, and proverbs in rhyme and prose. This collection offers examples of each genre, from poems and ballads to thoughts on travel in Italy and the works of Shakespeare and Byron. Selected by Thomas Mann.
Denmark's foremost philosopher and religious writer, Søren Kierkegaard (1833-1855) maintained a journal throughout his adult life that amounted to more than 7,000 pages of alternative drafts of published works, biographical events, musings, and outpourings. A precursor of the Existential movement and a major influence on modern Protestant theology...more
In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps--a community devoted exclusively to sickness--as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intel...more
The recent discovery of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is reminiscent of the discovery of Kafka at mid-century. Like Kafka, Pessoa left his work in disarray, much of it to be published only posthumously. And Pessoa has fast become a literary icon of postmodernism, as Kafka is of modernism. Pessoa is best known for his unique prac...more
"Strait is the Gate", first published in 1909 in France as "La Porte etroite", is a novel about the failure of love in the face of the narrowness of the moral philosophy of Protestantism. --- André Gide (1869 - 1951) was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career spanned from the symbolist movement to the ad...more
Georges Perec produced some of the most entertaining and spirited essays of his age. His literary output was amazingly varied in form and style and this generous selection of Perec's non-fictional work also demonstrates his characteristic lightness of touch, wry humour and accessibility.
"Ere it had yet stopped, the door of one carriage flew open, and from it, in a white travelling dress, in a toque a-twinkle with fine diamonds, a lithe and radiant creature slipped nimbly down to the platform."
No Chucks Received
Buy from Amazon
