ZEIT-Bibliothek der 100 Bücher by Die Zeit
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The Bible by Christian Church
The Authorized King James Version is an English translation of the Christian Bible begun in 1604 and completed in 1611 by the Church of England. Printed by the King's Printer, Robert Barker, the fi...
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The Odyssey by Homer
The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work traditionally ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the m...
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The Aeneid by Virgil
The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem written by Virgil in the late 1st century BC (29–19 BC) that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who traveled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the...
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Germania by Cornelius Tacitus
The Germania of Tacitus is the most extensive account of the ancient Germans written during the Roman period, but has been relatively neglected in the scholarship of the English-speaking world: the...
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Daphnis and Chloe by Longus
Longus s "Daphnis and Chloe" (second or early third century CE), in which an idealized pastoral environment provides the setting as a boy and girl discover their sexuality, is one of the great work...
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Confessions by Augustine
Confessions is the name of an autobiographical work, consisting of 13 books, by St. Augustine of Hippo, written between AD 397 and AD 398. Modern English translations of it are sometimes published ...
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One Thousand and One Nights by India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt
One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Ni...
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Parzival by Wolfram Eschenbach
Composed in the early thirteenth century, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival is the re-creation and completion of the story left unfinished by its initiator Chrétien de Troyes. It follows Parzival f...
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Tristan by Gottfried von Strassburg
Gottfried's work is regarded, alongside Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and the Nibelungenlied, as one of the great narrative masterpieces of the German Middle Ages.
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The Nibelungenlied by Anonymous
Thought to have been first written down in the 12th century by an author who is still unknown, the Nibelungenlied, translated from Middle High German as the Song of the Nibelungs, is an epic German...
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The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Belonging in the immortal company of the great works of literature, Dante Alighieri's poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the ...
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Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
In the early summer of the year 1348, as a terrible plague ravages the city, ten charming young Florentines take refuge in country villas to tell each other stories — a hundred stories of love, adv...
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Utopia by Thomas More
Controversial, contradictory, and mysterious, Utopia by Sir Thomas More has engaged scholars and intrigued readers since its initial publication in the 16th century. More's imagining of Utopia pres...
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Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel (in French, La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel) is a connected series of five novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It is the story of t...
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Essays by Michel de Montaigne
Essays is the title given to a collection of 107 essays written by Michel de Montaigne that was first published in 1580. Montaigne essentially invented the literary form of essay, a short subjectiv...
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Simplicius Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen
Simplicius Simplicissimus (German: Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch) is a picaresque novel of the lower Baroque style, written in 1668 by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen and prob...
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Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
A shipwreck’s sole escapee, Robinson Crusoe endures 28 years of solitude on a Caribbean island and manages not only to survive but also to prevail. A warm humanity, evocative details of his struggl...
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Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
From the preeminent prose satirist in the English language, a great classic recounting the four remarkable journeys of ship's surgeon Lemuel Gulliver. For children it remains an enchanting fantasy;...
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Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr. Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neig...
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Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
As its title suggests, the book is ostensibly Tristram's narration of his life story. But it is one of the central jokes of the novel that he cannot explain anything simply, that he must make expla...
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The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Sorrows of Young Werther is an epistolary and loosely autobiographical novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, first published in 1774; a revised edition of the novel was published in 1787. Werthe...
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Jacques the Fatalist and His Master by Denis Diderot
The main subject of the book is the relationship between the valet Jacques and his master (who is never named). The two are traveling to a destination the narrator leaves insistently vague, and to ...
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Hyperion by Friedrich Holderlin
Hyperion is a novel of stirring lyricism, philosophical sublimity, and enduring influence. It stands among Hölderlin’s most extraordinary achievements. A Greek hermit recounts the pivotal phases of...
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Elective Affinities by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Elective Affinities (German: Die Wahlverwandtschaften), also translated under the title Kindred by Choice, is the third novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, published in 1809. The title is taken fr...
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Stories by Heinrich von Kleist
New and insightful interpretations of the controversial stories of Heinrich von Kleist.
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Schatzkästlein des Rheinischen Hausfreundes by Johann Peter Hebel
The treasure of the Rhine house friend is a collection of stories and calendar stories, Johann Peter Hebel compiled and published in 1811 in Tübingen by Cotta.
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Household Tales by Brothers Grimm
Children's and Household Tales (German: Kinder- und Hausmärchen) is a collection of German origin fairy tales first published in 1812 by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the Brothers Grimm. The collection ...
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The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr by E. T. A. Hoffmann
Tomcat Murr is a loveable, self-taught animal who has written his own autobiography. But a printer's error causes his story to be accidentally mixed and spliced with a book about the composer Johan...
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History of My Life by Giacomo Casanova
The colorful memoirs of the legendary eighteenth-century lover recall not only his amorous exploits, but also his diverse careers as a gambler, businessman, diplomat, entertainer, politician, con a...
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Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts by Joseph von Eichendorff
The life of a ne'er-do is a novella by Joseph von Eichendorff . It was 1 822 / 1,823 completed and first published in 1826. The work is the highlight of musical prose and as an example of the late ...
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The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black), subtitled Chronique du XIXe siécle ("Chronicle of the 19th century"), is an historical psychological novel in two volumes by Stendhal, published in 1830...
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Lenz by Georg Buchner
Lenz, Georg Büchner’s visionary exploration of an 18th-century playwright’s descent into madness, has been called the inception of European modernist prose. Elias Canetti considered this short nove...
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Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac
Illusions perdues was written by the French writer Honoré de Balzac between 1837 and 1843. It consists of three parts, starting in the provinces, thereafter moving to Paris, and finally returning t...
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The Adventures of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
At the heart of Charles Dickens's second novel, first published in 1838, is a story as much about crime and poverty as it is about justice and charity. Orphaned at birth, Oliver Twist grows up unde...
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Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, Russian writer, was first published in 1842, and is one of the most prominent works of 19th-century Russian literature. Gogol himself saw it as an "epic poem in prose",...
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Either Or by Soren Kierkegaard
Published in two volumes in 1843, Either/Or (original Danish title: Enten ‒ Eller) is an influential book written by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, exploring the aesthetic and ethical "p...
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Germany, a Winter Tale by Heinrich Heine
This historic bilingual edition presents Heine's German text in a version dating from 1887 and a translation by Edgar Alfred Bowring from the same year. The original work, published in 1844, was ba...
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The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery...
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Moby Dick by Herman Melville
First published in 1851, Melville's masterpiece is, in Elizabeth Hardwick's words, "the greatest novel in American literature." The saga of Captain Ahab and his monomaniacal pursuit of the white wh...
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The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx
Marx's study of the events leading to the coup d'etat of "Napolean the Little" on December 2, 1851, written within a few weeks of the coup, is one of the first works by Marx in which he states his ...
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Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Anderson
a Danish author and poet noted for his children's stories. These include "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", "The Snow Queen", "The Little Mermaid", "Thumbelina", "The Little Match Girl", and the "The Ugl...
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Green Henry by Gottfried Keller
'Green Henry' is a representation of Gottfried Keller's ideals and philosophy that documents the emergence of an artist and the development of a man. Partly autobiographical, the narrative recounts...
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Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
For daring to peer into the heart of an adulteress and enumerate its contents with profound dispassion, the author of Madame Bovary was tried for "offenses against morality and religion." What shoc...
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Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
Oblomov is the best known novel by Russian writer Ivan Goncharov, first published in 1859. Oblomov is also the central character of the novel, often seen as the ultimate incarnation of the superflu...
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Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Les Misérables is a novel by French author Victor Hugo and is widely considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century. It follows the lives and interactions of several French characters ov...
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
In 1862 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a shy Oxford mathematician with a stammer, created a story about a little girl tumbling down a rabbit hole. Thus began the immortal adventures of Alice, perhaps th...
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Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
Fathers and Sons is an 1862 novel by Ivan Turgenev, his best known work. The fathers and children of the novel refers to the growing divide between the two generations of Russians, and the chara...
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War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Epic in scale, War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events leading up to Napoleon's invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of fi...
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Human, All Too Human by Friedrich Nietzsche
Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (German: Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: Ein Buch für freie Geister) is a book by 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, originally published i...
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Germinal by Émile Zola
Germinal is the thirteenth novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Often considered Zola's masterpiece and one of the most significant novels in the French tradition, the no...
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The Son of a Servant by August Strindberg
The Son of a Servant (Swe: Tjänstekvinnans son) is the autobiographical novel of August Strindberg in four parts, published between 1886 and 1909.
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Hunger by Knut Hamsun
Hunger is a novel by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun and was published in its final form in 1890. Parts of it had been published anonymously in the Danish magazine Ny Jord in 1888. The novel is ha...
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The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Celebrated novel traces the moral degeneration of a handsome young Londoner from an innocent fop into a cruel and reckless pursuer of pleasure and, ultimately, a murderer. As Dorian Gray sinks into...
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Ulysses by James Joyce
Ulysses chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. The title parallels and alludes to Odysseus (Latinised into Ulysses), the hero of Homer's Odyss...
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Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos
Considered by many to be John Dos Passos's greatest work, Manhattan Transfer is an "expressionistic picture of New York" (New York Times) in the 1920s that reveals the lives of wealthy power broker...
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The Castle by Franz Kafka
The Castle is a novel by Franz Kafka. In it a protagonist, known only as K., struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities of a castle who govern the village where he wants to work as a la...
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Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
Steppenwolf (orig. German Der Steppenwolf) is the tenth novel by German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse. Originally published in Germany in 1927, it was first translated into English in 1929. Combining ...
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The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian short-story writer, playwright and physician, considered to be one of the greatest short-story writers in the history of world literature. His career as a dram...
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Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Buddenbrooks was Thomas Mann's first novel, published in 1901 when he was twenty-six years old. It portrays the downfall (already announced in the subtitle, Decline of a family) of a wealthy mer...
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The Stechlin by Theodor Fontane
First English translation of the final work of Theodor Fontane, one of Germany's most significant novelists.
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The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil
'between the life we live and the life we feel...there is the invisible border, like a narrow gate' Set in a boarding school in a remote area of the Habsburg Empire at the turn of the last century,...
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The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke
This is the definitive, widely acclaimed translation of the major prose work of one of our century's greatest poets -- "a masterpiece like no other" (Elizabeth Hardwick) -- Rilke's only novel, extr...
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The Loyal Subject by Heinrich Mann
Published in 1918, Der Untertan by Heinrich Mann (1871-1950) - previously issued in the United States only in parts under the title "Man of Straw" - is a satirical novel that connects the tradition...
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In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Swann's Way, the first part of A la recherche de temps perdu, Marcel Proust's seven-part cycle, was published in 1913. In it, Proust introduces the themes that run through the entire work. The narr...
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The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hašek
The Good Soldier Švejk is the abbreviated title of an unfinished satirical novel by Jaroslav Hašek. It was illustrated by Josef Lada and George Grosz after Hašek's death. The original Czech title o...
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Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
The story concerns a small-time criminal, Franz Biberkopf, fresh from prison, who is drawn into the underworld. When his criminal mentor murders the prostitute whom Biberkopf has been relying on as...
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Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud
Psychosocial developmentConsciousPreconsciousUnconsciousPsychic apparatusId, ego, and super-egoLibidoDriveTransferenceCountertransferenceEgo defensesResistanceProjection
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My Life by Leon Trotsky
The only Bolshevik leader to write his memoirs, Leon Trotsky published this remarkable book in 1930, the first year of a perilous, decade-long exile that ended with his assassination in Mexico. Exp...
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Light in August by William Faulkner
Lght in August is an exploration of racial conflict in the society of the Southern United States.
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The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka by Franz Kafka
The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka is a compilation of all Kafka's short stories. With the exception of Kafka's three novels (The Trial, The Castle and Amerika), this collection includes all of Ka...
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Journals: 1889-1913 by André Gide
Beginning with a single entry for the year 1889, when he was twenty, and continuing throughout his life, the Journals of Andre Gide constitute an enlightening, moving, and endlessly fascinating chr...
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The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers
Written in 1939, first published in 1942, a national bestseller and a 1943 BOMC Main Selection, The Seventh Cross presented to a still doubtful, naive America a first-hand account of life in Hitler...
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The Stranger by Albert Camus
Since it was first published in English, in 1946, Albert Camus's extraordinary first novel, The Stranger (L'Etranger), has had a profound impact on millions of American readers. Through this story ...
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The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll by Heinrich Böll
The definitive short story collection by the Nobel Laureate and master of the form These diverse, psychologically rich, and morally profound stories explore the consequences of war on individuals a...
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Querelle by Jean Genet
Jean Genet was one of the world’s greatest contemporary dramatists, and his last play, The Screens, is his crowning achievement. It strikes a powerful, closing chord to the formidable theatrical wo...
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The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway's most enduring works. Told in language of great simplicity and power, it is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordea...
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I'm Not Stiller by Max Frisch
Max Rudolf Frisch (May 15, 1911 – April 4, 1991) was a Swiss architect, playwright and novelist, regarded as highly representative of German literature after World War II. In his creative works Fri...
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Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss
A milestone in the study of culture from the father of structural anthropology. This watershed work records Claude Lévi-Strauss's search for "a human society reduced to its most basic expression." ...
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Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett
Krapp's Last Tape was first performed by Patrick Magee at the Royal Court Theatre in October 1958, and has since been played by a host of distinguished actors including Albert Finney and Max Wall. ...
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The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
Acclaimed as the greatest German novel written since the end of World War II, The Tin Drum is the autobiography of thirty-year-old Oskar Matzerath, who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and...
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Words by Jean Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre was brought up at his grandfather's home. This book recalls his illusion-ridden childhood, lived within the confines of French provincialism in the years before World War I, and co...
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Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson
A translation of the first two volumes of Uwe Johnson's Jahrestage.
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Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Alonso Quixano, a retired country gentleman in his fifties, lives in an unnamed section of La Mancha with his niece and a housekeeper. He has become obsessed with books of chivalry, and believes th...
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The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Possessed is an 1872 novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Though titled The Possessed in the initial English translation, Dostoevsky scholars and later translations favour the titles The Devils or Demon...
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Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer
One of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer (1788-1860) believed that human action is determined not by reason but by 'will' - the blind and irrational desire for physi...
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