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Hettie Rose

Yudha Prast

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Jamie Bohanna

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Adam Symonds

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Ferran Salguero Mateu

Steven Cow-Meat

Kees Snijders

Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde’s story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author’s most popular work. The tale of Dorian Gray’s moral disintegration caused a scandal when it ﬁrst appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novel’s corrupting inﬂuence, he responded that there is, in fact, “a terrible moral in Dorian Gray.” Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde’s homosexual liaisons, which resulted in his imprisonment. Of Dorian Gray’s relationship to autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.

"I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history," Arthur Miller wrote of his classic play about the witch-hunts and trials in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts. Based on historical people and real events, Miller's drama is a searing portrait of a community engulfed by hysteria. In the rigid theocracy of Salem, rumors that women are practicing witchcraft galvanize the town's most basic fears and suspicions; and when a young girl accuses Elizabeth Proctor of being a witch, self-righteous church leaders and townspeople insist that Elizabeth be brought to trial. The ruthlessness of the prosecutors and the eagerness of neighbor to testify against neighbor brilliantly illuminates the destructive power of socially sanctioned violence.Written in 1953, The Crucible is a mirror Miller uses to reflect the anti-communist hysteria inspired by Senator Joseph McCarthy's "witch-hunts" in the United States. Within the text itself, Miller contemplates the parallels, writing, "Political opposition... is given an inhumane overlay, which then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized behavior. A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence."WIth an introduction by Christopher Bigsby.(back cover)

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a foundational work of Western literature and is widely considered to be Friedrich Nietzsche’s masterpiece. It includes the German philosopher’s famous discussion of the phrase ‘God is dead’ as well as his concept of the Superman. Nietzsche delineates his Will to Power theory and devotes pages to critiquing Christian thinking, in particular Christianity’s definition of good and evil.

Japan's most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II.In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.Three books in one volume: The Thieving Magpie, Bird as Prophet, The Birdcatcher. This translation by Jay Rubin is in collaboration with the author.

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 this work was dedicated. Nietzsche outlined a distinction between its two central forces: the Apolline, representing beauty and order, and the Dionysiac, a primal or ecstatic reaction to the sublime. He believed the combination of these states produced the highest forms of music and tragic drama, which not only reveal the truth about suffering in life, but also provide a consolation for it. Impassioned and exhilarating in its conviction, The Birth of Tragedy has become a key text in European culture and in literary criticism.

Nietzsche called The Gay Science "the most personal of all my books." It was here that he first proclaimed the death of God -- to which a large part of the book is devoted -- and his doctrine of the eternal recurrence.Walter Kaufmann's commentary, with its many quotations from previously untranslated letters, brings to life Nietzsche as a human being and illuminates his philosophy. The book contains some of Nietzsche's most sustained discussions of art and morality, knowledge and truth, the intellectual conscience and the origin of logic.Most of the book was written just before Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the last part five years later, after Beyond Good and Evil. We encounter Zarathustra in these pages as well as many of Nietzsche's most interesting philosophical ideas and the largest collection of his own poetry that he himself ever published.Walter Kaufmann's English versions of Nietzsche represent one of the major translation enterprises of our time. He is the first philosopher to have translated Nietzsche's major works, and never before has a single translator given us so much of Nietzsche.

The award-winning poet Anne Carson reinvents a genre in Autobiography of Red, a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is."A profound love story . . . sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender." -- The New York Times Book Review"A deeply odd and immensely engaging book. . . . [Carson] exposes with passionate force the mythic underlying the explosive everyday."  -- The Village VoiceA NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEARNational book Critics Circle Award Finalist

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American ReadSet in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country is a novel of passions--sexual, racial, political, artistic--that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime. In a small set of friends, Baldwin imbues the best and worst intentions of liberal America in the early 1970s.

The most important philosophical work of the 20th century, and a text whose influence will still be felt for some centuries to come, I am willing to reckon. Even if you are one of the many detractors, the fact remains that it is simply an outstanding monument to man's ability to think deeply, freshly, terrifyingly, and poetically about himself. Heidegger's main focus is on Being ; what does it MEAN to be? This is of course an old question, stemming from the days of Aristotle, but Heidegger is foremost a phenomenologist (i.e. 'To the phenomena themselves') and therefore refuses any recourse to anything that is outside the scope of what is immediately apparent in the one thing that human beings often overlook, that is to say, human existence itself. This means that the scope of ambition of Heidegger's project is staggering ; he intends to determine WHAT a human being IS, by HOW it is ; and this means that he not only takes on a nearly 2000-year-old philosophical tradition, but also a nearly 2000-year-old deeply embedded conception of what a human being is (and by extension, what a human being should be). It is a provocative assault, which may account for the polarizing reactions that Heidegger seems to evoke. But this also means that Being and Time is a primordially 'humane' book, for it was Heidegger who truly brought the existentialist consciousness to the fore of our developing consciousness as a species. Make no mistake, this is still hard-core philosophy, but it is a book about the many banalities of the average human life, and thus, about the many hidden profundities of the average human life. Appreciate Heidegger's phenomenal (see what I did there) insight into the human condition, and you will never look at life, time, the world, concern, other people, a hammer, language, reality, and death in the same way again. Now for the mandatory words of warning. This book is DIFFICULT. But it is difficult in the way the ending stages of a hard-fought chess game is difficult ; Being and Time' may be difficult, but it is NOT 'boring'. Stick with it, make the effort, and you will not be disappointed. You may even (as happened to me) slowly neglect the other distractions of your life and set aside a solid block of time to tackle the text (for me, 3 months), and not even be aware of anything like a sacrifice being made. You just feel like you've decided to venture a few steps deeper into the rabbit hole, is all. And with regards to the language, I actually love the language in 'Being and Time', leave alone finding it something to rail against. It has a kind of an austere beauty to it, a kind of 'mathematical poetry' if you will. For those who complain that Heidegger could have said what he wanted to say in 'easier' language, the answer is that, NO he could not have. Since his project was a radical rethinking of the nature of human existence, he needed a radically new vocabulary to describe the stages of his project. The usual words like 'soul', 'consciousness', and even 'human being' are too embedded in the tradition he is attacking, and have too much baggage. Once you appreciate this, and read the text with 'fresh eyes', then you appreciate the hidden intricacies of his language, as well as to the depths he takes these new terms too. And finally, this is most definitely not a book that a casual reader can 'dip into' ; this is hardcore philosophy that was meant to overthrow another philosophical tradition. So, these would (in my opinion) be the absolute prerequisites before any reader wishes to pursue 'Being and Time' ; 1)A general knowledge of philosophy and the history of philosophy, and at least a surface-level knowledge of what the major philosophers of the Western tradition had to say about life, the universe and everything. This is important, because this tradition represents 'substance metaphysics' or 'the metaphysics of presence' which Heidegger attacks throughout the entire text ; (these terms simply mean the positing of some kind of unit of 'stable timelessness' that 'stands behind' or 'hangs over' human existence, be it the 'soul', 'consciousness', 'God', 'Atman', 'Will', 'Forms' or what have you). A good introductory book on philosophy should do the trick, and in my knowledge, Will Durant's 'The Story of Philosophy' is still the best way to go, though of course, any equivalent book which goes over the main 'theme' of Western philosophy should do the trick2)An intuitive understanding of Nietzsche. His influence is present throughout the text of 'Being and Time', because he is the 'bad boy' cousin of Heidegger's who sounded the death knell of traditional philosophy ; a project which Heidegger systematizes, enhances, and pursues. Since Nietzsche is primarily a poet and a cultural critic rather than an actual philosopher (in addition to being a superb writer) a quick crash course of reading his main works (The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, Twilight of the Idols, and if you can stomach the overblown prose, Zarathustra) would do you good here. 3)A good guide to Being and Time ; predictably, for a work of such complexity and importance, several guides have sprung up of varying quality. The one I used was Gelvin's 'Commentary' which is clear, friendly, excited, and straightforward. Everything that you need. 4)A surface understanding of phenomenology ; a Wikipedia search should do the trick, or any such introductory article. If you're seriously gung-ho then 'An Introduction to Phenomenology' by Sokolowski will ground you more than you strictly need to be grounded. And that's it, you're ready to go. This is not a book that you can read once, and I wonder if 'read' is even an appropriate word. For the same reason that you do not 'read' Finnegans Wake, but 'experience' it as if it wasn't a book but a sentient entity which would get insulted if you labelled it as a book, I think the same would go for 'Being and Time'. It is a profound exploration of the most primordial questions a man can ask about anything, and as such, it demands a steady commitment of your time, energy, your curiosity, and the latent profundities that lie within you and which will be awakened as you thumb through the master piece that is 'Being and Time'.

The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the whirlwind of Borges's genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything else in between. Part One: The Garden of Forking Paths Prologue Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940) The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim (1936, not included in the 1941 edition) Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939) The Circular Ruins (1940) The Lottery in Babylon (1941) An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain (1941) The Library of Babel (1941) The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) Part Two: Artifices Prologue Funes the Memorious (1942) The Form of the Sword (1942) Theme of the Traitor and the Hero (1944) Death and the Compass (1942) The Secret Miracle (1943) Three Versions of Judas (1944) The End (1953, 2nd edition only) The Sect of the Phoenix (1952, 2nd edition only) The South (1953, 2nd edition only)

A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters,” written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle…all presented in searing, brilliant prose,” The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.

Often cited as the best work of short fiction ever written, Joyce's story details a New Year's Eve gathering in Dublin that is so evocative and beautiful that it prompts the protagonist's wife to make a shocking revelation to her husband—closing the story with an emotionally powerful epiphany that is considered one of the best in modern literature.

A graceful, contemplative volume, Camera Lucida was first published in 1979. Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Roland Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium. This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books of theory on this subject, along with Susan Sontag's On Photography.

Originally published in 1976, Christopher and His Kind covers the most memorable ten years in the writer's life-from 1929, when Isherwood left England to spend a week in Berlin and decided to stay there indefinitely, to 1939, when he arrived in America. His friends and colleagues during this time included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and E. M. Forster, as well as colorful figures he met in Germany and later fictionalized in his two Berlin novels-who appeared again, fictionalized to an even greater degree, in I Am a Camera and Cabaret. What most impressed the first readers of this memoir, however, was the candor with which he describes his life in gay Berlin of the 1930s and his struggles to save his companion, a German man named Heinz, from the Nazis. An engrossing and dramatic story and a fascinating glimpse into a little-known world, Christopher and His Kind remains one of Isherwood's greatest achievements. A major figure in twentieth-century fiction and the gay rights movement, Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) is the author of Down There on a Visit, Lions and Shadows, A Meeting by the River, The Memorial, Prater Violet, A Single Man, and The World in the Evening, all available from the University of Minnesota Press.

An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family.Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

Near to the Wild Heart is Clarice Lispector's first novel, written from March to November 1942 and published around her twenty-third birthday. The novel, written in a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of the English-language Modernists, centers around the childhood and early adulthood of a character named Joana, who bears strong resemblance to her author: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi", Lispector said, quoting Flaubert, when asked about the similarities. The book, particularly its revolutionary language, brought its young, unknown creator to great prominence in Brazilian letters and earned her the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize.Joana, a young woman very much in the mode of existential contemporaries like Camus and Sartre, ponders the meaning of life, the freedom to be one's self, and the purpose of existence. Near to the Wild Heart does not have a conventional narrative plot. It instead recounts flashes from the life of Joana, between her present, as a young woman, and her early childhood. These focus, like most of Lispector's works, on interior, emotional states of mind.

On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense") is an (initially) unpublished work of Friedrich Nietzsche written in 1873, one year after The Birth of Tragedy. It deals largely with epistemological questions of truth and language, including the formation of concepts. Every word immediately becomes a concept, inasmuch as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases-which means, strictly speaking, never equal-in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. According to Paul F. Glenn, Nietzsche is arguing that "concepts are metaphors which do not correspond to reality." Although all concepts are human inventions (created by common agreement to facilitate ease of communication), human beings forget this fact after inventing them, and come to believe that they are "true" and do correspond to reality. Thus Nietzsche argues that "truth" is actually: A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms-in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. These ideas about truth and its relation to human language have been particularly influential among postmodern theorists, and "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" is one of the works most responsible for Nietzsche's reputation (albeit a contentious one) as "the godfather of postmodernism.

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka, is part of the Barnes &amp; Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes &amp; Noble Classics:All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes &amp; Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.Virtually unknown during his lifetime, Franz Kafka is now one of the world’s most widely read and discussed authors. His nightmarish novels and short stories have come to symbolize modern man’s anxiety and alienation in a bizarre, hostile, and dehumanized world. This vision is most fully realized in Kafka’s masterpiece, “The Metamorphosis,” a story that is both harrowing and amusing, and a landmark of modern literature. Bringing together some of Kafka’s finest work, this collection demonstrates the richness and variety of the author’s artistry. “The Judgment,” which Kafka considered to be his decisive breakthrough, and “The Stoker,” which became the first chapter of his novel Amerika, are here included. These two, along with “The Metamorphosis,” form a suite of stories Kafka referred to as “The Sons,” and they collectively present a devastating portrait of the modern family.Also included are “In the Penal Colony,” a story of a torture machine and its operators and victims, and “A Hunger Artist,” about the absurdity of an artist trying to communicate with a misunderstanding public. Kafka’s lucid, succinct writing chronicles the labyrinthine complexities, the futility-laden horror, and the stifling oppressiveness that permeate his vision of modern life.Jason Baker is a writer of short stories living in Brooklyn, New York.

Featuring his world-famous masterpiece, "Death in Venice," this new collection of Nobel laureate Thomas Mann's stories and novellas reveals his artistic evolution. In this new, widely acclaimed translation that restores the controversial passages that were cut out of the original English version, "Death in Venice" tells about a ruinous quest for love and beauty amid degenerating splendor. Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but lonely author, travels to the Queen of the Adriatic in search of an elusive spiritual fulfillment that turns into his erotic doom. Spellbound by a beautiful Polish boy, he finds himself fettered to this hypnotic city of sun-drenched sensuality and eerie physical decay. Also included in this volume are eleven other stories by Mann: "Tonio Kroger," "Gladius Dei," "The Blood of the Walsungs," "The Will for Happiness," "Little Herr Friedmann," "Tobias Mindernickel," "Little Lizzy," "Tristan," "The Starvelings," "The Wunderkind," and "Harsh Hour." All of the stories collected here display Mann's inimitable use of irony, his subtle characterizations, and superb, complex plots.

The Genealogy of Morals consists of three essays exploring morality and its origins where Nietzsche makes ample use of his training as a philologist. These works contain Nietzsche's most thorough and clear expression of his psychological philosophy. This edition includes Ecce Homo, Nietzsche's review of his life and works, with the exception of The Antichrist. These two books are compiled, translated and annotated by renowned Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann.

A former police detective juggles wrestling with his personal demons and becoming obsessed with a hauntingly beautiful woman.

Events over the course of one traumatic night in Paris unfold in reverse-chronological order as the beautiful Alex is brutally raped and beaten by a stranger in the underpass.

Everything changes for 15-year-old Mia when her mum brings home a new boyfriend.

Pierrot escapes his boring society and travels from Paris to the Mediterranean Sea with Marianne, a girl chased by hit-men from Algeria. They lead an unorthodox life, always on the run.

A guide leads two men through an area known as the Zone to find a room that grants wishes.

A small-time thief steals a car and impulsively murders a motorcycle policeman. Wanted by the authorities, he reunites with a hip American journalism student and attempts to persuade her to run away with him to Italy.

The story of a mistreated donkey and the people around him. A study on saintliness and a sister piece to Bresson's Mouchette.

A group of nuns struggle to establish a convent in the Himalayas, while isolation, extreme weather, altitude, and culture clashes all conspire to drive the well-intentioned missionaries mad.

Two best friends living on the streets of Portland as hustlers embark on a journey of self discovery and find their relationship stumbling along the way.

A handsome sailor is drawn into a vortex of sibling rivalry, murder, and explosive sexuality.

In a strange and isolated chateau, a man becomes acquainted with a woman and insists that they have met before.

A frigid young housewife decides to spend her midweek afternoons as a prostitute.

After realizing that all world is spoiled, Marie and Marie are committed to be spoiled themselves. They rip off older men, feast in lavish meals and do all kinds of mischief. But what is all this leading to?

An naïve young lad navigates the dirty squalid streets of 1973 Glasgow, and the poor youth around him.

A young man romantically pursues his masochistic piano teacher.

Two American newlyweds in Paris experience a love so strong, it almost devours them.

Two sisters confront their sexual attitudes and experiences while on a family holiday.

The life of two women and their families in a small provincial town of Salta, Argentina.

A woman narrates the contemplative writings of a seasoned world traveler, focusing on contemporary Japan.

Playwright Tony Kushner adapted his political epic about the A.I.D.S. crisis during the mid 1980s and centers the story around a group of separate but connected individuals.

The experiences of three close friends living and loving in modern-day San Francisco.

Set in an alternate history where masked vigilantes are treated as outlaws, Watchmen embraces the nostalgia of the original groundbreaking graphic novel of the same name, while attempting to break new ground of its own.

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