Categories → #literature
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A Tale of Two CitiesCharles Dickens’s belief in renaissance is borne out in this epic novel - as cities are overthrown and transformed, as cynics become selfless heroes, and as a “recall to life” becomes not only possible but necessary, for the individual and for society.
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Hard TimesPublished serially in 1854 and packed with page-turning cliff-hangers, Hard Times explores representatives of English society - the disappearing aristocracy, the growing middle class, indigent laborers, and nomadic circus people - as they navigate the ways of Victorian England during the Industrial Revolution.
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Notes from the Undergroundn 1864, just prior to the years in which he wrote his greatest novels — Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) penned the darkly fascinating Notes from the Underground. Its nameless hero is a profoundly alienated individual in whose brooding self-analysis there is a search for the true and the good in a world of relative values and few absolutes.
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Paradise LostJohn Milton's Paradise Lost is one of the greatest epic poems in the English language. It tells the story of the Fall of Man, a tale of immense drama and excitement, of rebellion and treachery, of innocence pitted against corruption, in which God and Satan fight a bitter battle for control of mankind's destiny.
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The Beautiful and DamnedA bitter critique of the empty pleasures of post–World War I Café Society, The Beautiful and Damned endures not only as a cautionary tale but as a social artifact of the decadent Roaring Twenties
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Beyond Good and EvilThrough nearly three hundred transformative aphorisms, Nietzsche presents a worldview in which neither truth nor morality are absolutes, and where good and evil are not opposites but counterparts that stem from the same desires.