"When penniless businessman Mr Bedford retreats to the Kent coast to write a play, he meets by chance the brilliant Dr Cavor, an absent-minded scientist on the brink of developing a material that blocks gravity. Cavor soon succeeds in his experiments, only to tell a stunned Bedford the invention makes possible one of the oldest dreams of humanity: a journey to the moon. With Bedford motivated by money and Cavor by the desire for knowledge, the two...

"Freud's seminal volume of twentieth-century cultural thought grounded in psychoanalytic theory, now with a new introduction by Christopher Hitchens. Written in the decade before Freud's death, Civilization and Its Discontents may be his most famous and most brilliant work. It has been praised, dissected, lambasted, interpreted, and reinterpreted. Originally published in 1930, it seeks to answer several questions fundamental to human society and its...

The Dialogues of Plato (427–347 B.C.) rank with the writings of Aristotle as the most important and influential philosophical works in Western thought. In them Plato cast his teacher Socrates as the central disputant in colloquies that brilliantly probe a vast spectrum of philosophical ideas and issues. None is more exciting and revelatory than the four dialogues — Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo — on

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"On April Fool's Day in 1856, a shape-shifting grifter boards a Mississippi riverboat to expose the pretenses, hypocrisies, and self-delusions of his fellow passengers. Melville's comic allegory addresses themes of sincerity, identity, and morality in its challenge to the optimism and materialism of mid-nineteenth-century America. Misunderstood by the author's contemporaries, the novel is praised today for its stunningly modern techniques"--

"This ... text ... chronicles the affair between Constance Chatterley and the gamekeeper Mellors and includes the author's "A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover," his final thoughts on the male-female relationship in the modern world."

The groundbreaking dystopian novel that inspired 1984 and Brave New World. "The best single work of science fiction yet written." -Ursula K. Le Guin When society has programmed you to sleep . . . How do you wake yourself up? The One State is a world where people are merely numbers, and free will itself is a disease. Most are happy in their role as cogs in a huge machine, controlled by the ever-watchful Benefactor. However,...

One of George Bernard Shaw's best-known plays, Pygmalion is based on ancient Greek mythology. Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which then came to life. The general idea of that myth was a popular subject for Victorian era British playwrights. Shaw's updated and revised version of this ancient Greek legend was first presented in England in 1914. Poking fun of the antiquated British class system, it introduces Henry Higgins, a professor...

"Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching is not only the single most important text in Chinese spirituality, it is probably the most influential spiritual text in human history. In the past, virtually all translations of this text have been produced either by sinologists having little poetic facility in English, or writers having no ability to read the original Chinese. David Hinton's fluency in ancient Chinese and his award-winning poetic ability combine both of...

"Introduces an array of characters, from the sinister to the comic, and moves to a haunting climax in an atmospheric murder mystery that features the seemingly benevolent John Jasper, a secret opium addict, and his relationship with his newly engaged nephew, Edwin Drood." --

When a scientist discovers the secret of invisibility, he holds his countrymen powerless for a time, but in reality is as terrified as they and is eventually driven mad.