Martin Geeson
The Idiot (Part 01 and 02)
The extraordinary child-adult Prince Myshkin, confined for several years in a Swiss sanatorium suffering from severe epilepsy, returns to Ru…
The Diary of a Superfluous Man
Turgenev's shy hero, Tchulkaturin, is a representative example of a Russian archetype - the "superfluous man", a sort of Hamlet no…
First Love
The title of the novella is almost an adequate summary in itself. The "boy-meets-girl-then-loses-her" story is universal but not, …
Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia
In this enchanting fable (subtitled The Choice of Life), Rasselas and his retinue burrow their way out of the totalitarian paradise of the H…
Confessions, volumes 1 and 2
“Thus I have acted; these were my thoughts; such was I.”Rousseau’s lengthy and sometimes anguished dossier on the Self is one of the most re…
The Soul of Man
“(T)he past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.”Published originally …
Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions
Consumers of biography are familiar with the division between memoirs of the living or recently dead written by those who "knew" t…
Phaedrus
“For there is no light of justice or temperance, or any of the higher ideas which are precious to souls, in the earthly copies of them: they…
An Essay on Man
Pope’s Essay on Man, a masterpiece of concise summary in itself, can fairly be summed up as an optimistic enquiry into mankind’s place in th…
Confessions, volumes 3 and 4
“The smallest, the most trifling pleasure that is conveniently within my reach, tempts me more than all the joys of paradise.”Here again is …
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
“Thou hast the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle, and mighty Opium!”Though apparently presenting the reader with a collage of poignant memori…
Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson
“Extreme busyness…is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal …
Against The Grain, or Against Nature
Against The Grain is a provocative exploration of aestheticism and the complexities of modern existence, penned by Joris-Karl Huysmans. This…
Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality
“Who can help laughing when an ordinary journalist seriously proposes to limit the subject-matter at the disposal of the artist?”“We are dom…
Confessions, volumes 5 and 6
"She was more to me than a sister, a mother, a friend, or even than a mistress, and for this very reason she was not a mistress; in a w…
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
After the bizarre textual antics of "Tristram Shandy", this book would seem to require a literary health warning. Sure enough, it …
The Story of My Misfortunes (or: Historia Calamitatum)
Autobiographies from remote historical periods can be especially fascinating.Modes of self-presentation vary greatly across the centuries, a…
Bel Ami, or The History of a Scoundrel
“He had faith in his good fortune, in that power of attraction which he felt within him - a power so irresistible that all women yielded to …
Farewell
In his startling and tragic novella Farewell (‘Adieu’), Balzac adds to the 19th century’s literature of the hysterical woman: sequestered, c…
Samson Agonistes
“The Sun to me is darkAnd silent as the Moon,When she deserts the nightHid in her vacant interlunar cave.”Milton composes his last extended …