Classics

Sara, the American wife of a French aristocrat, has had two encounters with her compatriot Cedric Killian, one a youthful idyll in North Carolina and the other during the First World War, when he was a soldier about to go to battle. When, years later and...

Published a year after The Great Gatsby, this short-story collection showcases many of the celebrated novel’s themes, as well as its unique writing style. Two of the most famous tales, the beautifully elegiac ‘The Rich Boy’ and...

Inspired by Fitzgerald’s own courtship of his future wife Zelda, ‘The Last of the Belles’ centres on the Southern beauty Ailie Calhoun from Tarleton, Georgia, who finds herself the object of attention of all the officers at a nearby...

Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's first novel, is the story of Hazel Motes who, released from the armed services, returns to the evangelical Deep South. There he begins a private battle against the religiosity of the community and in particular against Asa...

Here are the essential ideas of psychoanalytic theory, including Freud's explanations of such concepts as the Id, Ego and Super-Ego, the Death Instinct and Pleasure Principle, along with classic case studies like that of the Wolf Man. Adam Phillips's...

The tormenting of the body by the troubled mind, hysteria is among the most pervasive of human disorders - yet at the same time it is the most elusive. Freud's recognition that hysteria stemmed from traumas in the patient's past transformed the way we...

These works were written against a background of war and racism. Freud sought the sources of conflict in the deepest memories of humankind, finding clear continuities between our 'primitive' past and 'civilized' modernity. In Totem and Taboo he explores...

Adapted by the BBC in a lavish new television series for Christmas 2018, Les Misérables is a timeless story; a plot-driven epic of one man’s search for redemption and of lives swept up, made and broken in the tumultuous social and political...

F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, which brilliantly satirizes a doomed and glamorous marriage, anticipated the master stroke—The Great Gatsby—that would follow, and marks a key moment in the writer’s career. Would-be Jazz Age...

A self-portrait of a great writer 's rise and fall, intensely personal and etched with Fitzgerald's signature blend of romance and realism. The Crack-Up tells the story of Fitzgerald's sudden descent at the age of thirty-nine from glamorous success to...

A lively new translation of Rousseau's best-known work, accompanied by additional political writings."Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" are the famous opening words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract, a work of political...

Mencius was one of the great philosophers of ancient China, second only in influence to Confucius, whose teachings he defended and expanded. The Mencius, in which he recounts his dialogues with kings, dukes and military men, as well as other...

The philosophies of an ancient Chinese master.Very little is known about Master Mo, or the school he founded. However, the book containing his philosophical ideas has survived centuries of neglect and is today recognised as a fundamental work of ancient...

Is that thought politically correct or is it puritanical? Roth's campus novel — what he called a satire of sanctimony — is set in 1998 and speaks to an America caught in the throes of change.NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE...

Considering all I’ve sacrificed, is it too much to ask for one little cat in return?' Shinako has been ousted from her marriage by her husband Shozo and his younger lover Fukuko. She’s lost everything: her home, status, and respectability...

'Provocative, compassionate and beautiful' - Joy Harjo, US Poet Laureate. A moving story of a Maori community's fight for survival, from one of New Zealand's most prominent and celebrated authors. On the remote coast of New Zealand, at the curve that...

Taking the form of a dialogue between Socrates, Gorgias, Polus and Callicles, GORGIAS debates perennial questions about the nature of government and those who aspire to public office. Are high moral standards essential or should we give our preference to...

Phaedrus is widely recognized as one of Plato's most profound and beautiful works. It takes the form of a dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus and its ostensible subject is love, especially homoerotic love. This new translation is accompanied by an...

Berkeley's idealism started a revolution in philosophy. As one of the great empiricist thinkers he not only influenced British philosophers from Hume to Russell and the logical positivists in the twentieth-century, he also set the scene for the...

One of the greatest philosophers, Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753) was the founder of the influential doctrine of Immaterialism - the belief that there is no reality outside the mind, and that the existence of material objects depends upon their being...