Of course, very few people go through the gate and abandon the beautiful phenomenon of the outside world for the interior reality that they intuit... A visitor to a zoo discovers…
Rabindranath Tagore was one of the greatest authors of his generation. In these two short stories – ‘The Broken Nest’ and ‘Dead or Alive’ – he is at his devastating best, charting…
'What does love fear? Limitation.' Johannes stealthily pursues Cordelia through the streets of Copenhagen, and through an intricate, manipulative courtship contrives to possess…
I am not a man, I am dynamiteWeeks before his final mental breakdown, Nietzsche set out to compose his autobiography, and Ecce Homo is the result. A summary of his life’s work as…
'My dear friend, he said, life is strange and strange things happen in life' It is a hot July Sunday in Lisbon and our narrator has an appointment to meet someone by the quayside.…
Journey into space with Polish scifi master Stanislaw Lem. The whimsical time-loops of Ijon Tichy’s cosmic adventure ‘The Seventh Voyage’ are reminiscent of Douglas Adams, while…
Composed in Iceland in the 13th Century, The Prose Edda is the most renowned of all works of Scandanavian literature, taking readers on a voyage through an enthralling world of…
'But how sweet a fruit the 'suppose' must be, that people will sup and sup on it! A juicy fruit, like a lychee but without the pit, sparkling and light green- a fruit that hides…
‘I must die. But must I die bawling?’ What does it mean to live a virtuous life? How can we rise above pain and anguish? In these teachings from Book 1 of his Discourses, ancient…
‘Why should I bother to invent things? My life has been far more exciting and wonderful than any fairy-tale’ In the heart of the English countryside, surrounded by irritatingly…
I went down, I climbed back up into the light of the jaguar sun – into the sea of the green sap of the leaves. The world spun, I plunged down, my throat cut by the knife of the…
‘It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate’Told…
Collecting two of his most celebrated works – Rescue, written in Warsaw in the shadow of Nazi occupation, and A Treatise on Poetry – a momentous history of Poland, told in four…
The Time Machine is the great, gleeful anarchist novel of the 1890s. It is both a thrilling adventure story and a satire on religion, evolution and human hopes. With this book,…
“All art,” Oscar Wilde once announced, “is quite useless.” Selected here are some of his finest prose works on the subject of art – useless, illuminating, artificial, uplifting,…