A classic encyclopedia of symbols by Catalan polymath Joan Cirlot that illuminates the symbolic underpinnings of myth, modern psychology, literature, and art.From the Egyptians on, no form of learn
A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining. When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger: these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Labatut's book thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life to the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear. At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Benjamin Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the
The Chyrsalids is set in the future after a devastating global nuclear war. David, the young hero of the novel, lives in a tight-knit community of religious and genetic fundamentalists, always on the
Daphne du Maurier wrote some of the most compelling and creepy novels of the twentieth century. Less known, though no less powerful, are her short stories, in which she gave free rein to her imaginati
While still a teenager, Patrick Leigh Fermor made his way across Europe, as recounted in his classic memoirs, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. During World War II, he fought with l
Fiona McConville is a child of the Western Isles whose family left the fishing life and their home on the small islet of Ron Mor for the Scottish mainland when Fiona was six. But city life d
In Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner tells of an aging spinster's struggle to break way from her controlling family—a classic story that she treats with cool feminist intelligence, while adding a
The Milk of Dreams contains nine stories of the wondrous and strange that the famed surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington wrote and illustrated for her own children, here translated from th
The first-ever collection of essays from across Elizabeth Hardwick's illustrious writing career, including works not seen in print for decades.Elizabeth Hardwick wrote during the golden age of the Ame
“The Wedding of Zein” unfolds in the same village on the upper Nile where Tayeb Salih’s tragic masterpiece Season of Migration to the North is set. Here, however, the story that emerges through the ov
Novels in Three Lines collects more than a thousand items that appeared anonymously in the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906 - true stories of murder, mayhem, and everyday life presented with a ruthle
Things Victor loves: pizza with anchovies, grape soda, B movies aired at midnight, the evening news. And with his parents off at a resort and his older sister shirking her babysitting duties, Victor h
"This letter is your death sentence. To avenge what you have done you will die." But what has Manno the pharmacist done? Nothing that he can think of. He takes the letter for a joke. The next day he
