Prose writings from one of Russia's greatest poets These stories are wonderful in their purity of form, humor, and understatement. This collection also contains a selection of other Pushkin writings, including the fragmentRoslavlev, Egyptian Nights, and the autobiographicalJourney to Arzrum. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers...
Prose writings from one of Russia's greatest poets These stories are wonderful in their purity of form, humor, and understatement. This col...
Somewhere between tales and polemics, these funny, ribald, and inventive pieces show Voltaire doing what he does best: brilliantly challenging received wisdom, religious intolerance, and naive optimism. Traveling through strange environments, Voltaire's protagonists are educated, often by surprise, into the complexities and contradictions of their world. Arriving on Earth from the star Sirius, the gigantic explorer Micromegas discovers a diminutive people with an inflated idea of their own importance in the universe. Babouc in "The World as It Is" learns that humanity is equally capable of...
Somewhere between tales and polemics, these funny, ribald, and inventive pieces show Voltaire doing what he does best: brilliantly challenging receive...
A fascinating insight into the debates and controversies about the position of women in medieval culture, written by France's first professional woman of letters The pioneering Book of the City of Ladies begins when, feeling frustrated and miserable after reading a male writer's tirade against women, Christine de Pizan has a dreamlike vision where three virtues--Reason, Rectitude and Justice--appear to correct this view. They instruct her to build an allegorical city in which womankind can be defended against slander, its walls and towers constructed from examples of female...
A fascinating insight into the debates and controversies about the position of women in medieval culture, written by France's first professional wo...
"It is not enough to have a good mind; it is more important to use it well" Rene Descartes was a central figure in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. In his Discourse on Method he outlined the contrast between mathematics and experimental sciences, and the extent to which each one can achieve certainty. Drawing on his own work in geometry, optics, astronomy and physiology, Descartes developed the hypothetical method that characterizes modern science, and this soon came to replace the traditional techniques derived from Aristotle. Many of Descartes most...
"It is not enough to have a good mind; it is more important to use it well" Rene Descartes was a central figure in the scientific revolutio...
Juvenal's Satires create a fascinating (and immediately familiar) world of whores, fortune-tellers, boozy politicians, slick lawyers, shameless sycophants, ageing flirts and downtrodden teachers Perhaps more than any other writer, Juvenal (c. 55-138 AD) captures the splendour, the squalor and the sheer vibrant energy of everyday Roman life. A member of the traditional land-owning class which was rapidly seeing power slip into the hands of dynamic outsiders, he offers equally savage portraits of decadent aristocrats; women interested only in 'rough trade' like actors and...
Juvenal's Satires create a fascinating (and immediately familiar) world of whores, fortune-tellers, boozy politicians, slick lawyers, shamel...
Schiller was profoundly shaken by the failure of the French Revolution and devoted many of his greatest works to debating the true nature of freedom. Here, in scenes alternating between the palace of Westminster and the prison at Fotheringhay, he shows us a captive heroine rising above her suffering to gain in insight and spiritual depth. The deceitful and indecisive Elizabeth, trapped by the cruel demands of Realpolitik, can achieve worldly victory only at a terrible moral cost.
Schiller's early plays are full of violent actions and language, but he later adopted a far more restrained and...
Schiller was profoundly shaken by the failure of the French Revolution and devoted many of his greatest works to debating the true nature of freedom. ...
Benvenuto Cellini was a celebrated Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith - a passionate craftsman who was admired and resented by the most powerful political and artistic personalities in sixteenth-century Florence, Rome and Paris. He was also a murderer and a braggart, a shameless adventurer who at different times experienced both papal persecution and imprisonment, and the adulation of the royal court. Inn-keepers and prostitutes, kings and cardinals, artists and soldiers rub shoulders in the pages of his notorious autobiography: a vivid portrait of the manners and morals of both the rulers of...
Benvenuto Cellini was a celebrated Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith - a passionate craftsman who was admired and resented by the most powerful polit...
This major source of Chinese mythology (third century BC to second century AD) contains a treasure trove of rare data and colorful fiction about the mythical figures, rituals, medicine, natural history, and ethnic peoples of the ancient world. The Classic of Mountains and Seas explores 204 mythical figures such as the gods Foremost, Fond Care, and Yellow, and goddesses Queen Mother of the West and Girl Lovely, as well as many other figures unknown outside this text. This eclectic Classic also contains crucial information on early medicine (with cures for impotence and...
This major source of Chinese mythology (third century BC to second century AD) contains a treasure trove of rare data and colorful fiction about the m...
This volume of Moliere's dramatic commentaries on society presents The Miser, a misguided hero who obsessively disrupts the lives of those around him. The School for Wives is newly translated for this edition and was fiercely denounced as impious and vulgar. Moliere's response to his detractors became The School for Wives Criticized. Even more alarming to critics was his version of Don Juan. In The Hypochondriac, he produced an outrageous expose of medicine. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the...
This volume of Moliere's dramatic commentaries on society presents The Miser, a misguided hero who obsessively disrupts the lives of those arou...
Sunjata Keita was the founder of one of the greatest empires of Western Africa. These two epic accounts of his life portray a greedy, slow-witted child - said to have crawled until the age of seven - who grew up as prophecy foretold to become a mighty warrior, renowned for his bravery and superhuman strength. They describe how, with the help of his sister, who seduced their arch-enemy Sumanguru into revealing his secret powers, Sunjata defeated the Susu overlords and created the Mali Empire which would last for two centuries. Based on events from the early thirteenth century, these tales of...
Sunjata Keita was the founder of one of the greatest empires of Western Africa. These two epic accounts of his life portray a greedy, slow-witted chil...
