Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory

Politics & Social Sciences

MARCUSE, Herbert

Philosophy

Actuel Editions

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony

Literature & Fiction

Richardson, Henry Handel

Literary

"Stefan Zweig's brilliant novel, Beware of Pity, is an original and powerful work."-The New York Times 
The great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was a master anatomist of the deceitful heart, and Beware of Pity, the only novel he published during his lifetime, uncovers the seed of selfishness within even the finest of feelings. Beware of Pity is an almost unbearably tense and powerful tale of unrequited love and the danger of pity. 
In 1913, Hofmiller, an Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer stationed at the edge of the empire, is invited to a party at the home of a rich local landowner, a world away from the dreary routine of the barracks. The surroundings are glamorous, wine flows freely, and the exhilarated young Hofmiller asks his host's lovely daughter for a dance, only to discover that sickness has left her painfully crippled. It is a minor blunder that will destroy his life, as pity and guilt gradually implicate him in a well-meaning but tragically wrongheaded plot to restore the unhappy invalid to health. 
Stefan Zweig's only novel is a devastating depiction of the torment of the betrayal of both honour and love, realised against the background of the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 
'The novel I'll really remember reading this year is Stefan Zweig's frighteningly gripping Beware of Pity, first published in 1939 ... an intoxicating, morally shaking read about human responsibilities and a real reminder of what fiction can do best' -Times Literary Supplement 
About the author 
Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was an Austrian novelist, poet, playwright and biographer. Born into an Austrian--Jewish family in 1881, he became a leading figure in Vienna's cultural world and was famed for his gripping novellas and biographies. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most popular writers in the world: extremely popular in the United States, South America and Europe - he remains so in continental Europe - however, he was largely ignored by the British public. 
Zweig is best known for his novellas (notably The Burning Secret, The Royal Game, Amok, and Letter from an Unknown Woman; novels (Beware of Pity, Confusion, and the post-humously published The Post Office Girl); and his vivid psychological biographical essays on famous writers and thinkers such as Erasmus, Tolstoy, Balzac, Stendhal, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Freud and Mesmer. 
In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, Zweig fled from Salzburg to London, then to New York, and finally to Brazil. Zweig's memoir, The World of Yesterday, was completed in 1942, one day before Zweig and his second wife were found dead, following an apparent double suicide.

Beware of Pity

Zweig,Stefan

The Burning Secret

Teen & Young Adult

"The Magic Mountain is simply one of the greatest novels ever written." - The Guardian 
With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps - a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an "ordinary young man" who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas. 
"Mann was a master of this genre, in private life as in his fiction." - The London Review of Books 
"In Mann's work the historic and contemporary retains its outsideness. He is a Wagnerian spellbinder, a mythmaker, but the myth always refers back to the real world." - The New York Review of Books 
"Mann's sense of vulnerability modifies his temptation to abstraction; his awareness of the tawdry and shameful humanizes his concentration on the very act of art. He is saved by the perverse, by the knowledge that comes from having looked at the lost. For this his greatness, threatened by its own energy, still inspires awe and love." - The New York Times 
"The Magic Mountain taught me that big ideas have vitality, that intellectual life could make for great storytelling, and that the map of an age could be found in the personalities of the people who lived it, lessons that I carried into the writing of history. But the truth is, I have returned again and again to The Magic Mountain because the characters who inhabit it are such delightful company." - The American Scholar 
"[The Magic Mountain] is one of those works that changed the shape and possibilities of European literature. It is a masterwork, unlike any other. It is also, if we learn to read it on its own terms, a delight, comic and profound, a new form of language, a new way of seeing." - A. S. Byatt 
"Long acclaimed as a masterly synthesis of the intellectual history of early 20th-century Europe and for its prescient scrutiny of elements in the German national character that had, and would again, find expression in the calamitous form of the world war." - Kirkus 
"Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love" - Jonathan Coe 
"A monumental writer" - Sunday Telegraph 
"The greatest German novelist of the 20th century" - Spectator 
"Mann is Germany's outstanding modern classic, a decadent representative of the tradition of Goethe and Schiller. With his famous irony, he was up there with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, holding together the modern world with a love of art and imagination to compensate for the emptiness left by social and religious collapse." - Independent 
"Mann's real masterpiece is his sprawling snowbound epic of 1924, The Magic Mountain ... The entire work is suffused with a sly and gentle humour, making it an absolute delight to read ... A book I return to every couple of years, The Magic Mountain is simply one of the greatest novels ever written." - The Guardian

The Magic Mountain

Humor & Entertainment

MANN, THOMAS

Humor

'Italy's first modernist ... a marvellous writer, unjustly neglected. Svevo is a master.' - The New Yorker 
The cult classic discovered and championed by James Joyce, Confessions of Zeno is a miracle of psychological realism from one of the most important figures in modern Italian literary history. A hymn to self-delusion and procrastination, long hailed as a seminal work of modernism in the tradition of Joyce, Musil, Proust and Kafka. 
When the vain, obsessive and guilt-ridden Zeno seeks help for his neuroses, his psychoanalyst suggests he writes his memoirs as a form of therapy. Zeno's account is an alternative reality, a series of elliptical episodes dealing with the death of his father, his career, his marriage and affairs, and, above all, his passion for smoking and his spectacular failure to resist the promise of that last cigarette. Zeno's adventures rise to antic heights in this pioneering psychoanalytic novel, as his restlessly self-preserving commentary inevitably embroiders the truth. Absorbing and devilishly entertaining, Confessions of Zeno is at once a comedy of errors, a sly testimonial to the joys of procrastination, and a surpassingly lucid vision of human nature by one of the most important Italian literary figures of the twentieth century.\nPraise: 
'One of the indispensable 20th-century novels ... A revolutionary book, and arguably (in fact, probably) the finest of all Italian novels.' - Kirkus Reviews 
'Hilarious ... Effortlessly inventive and eerily prescient.' - The Atlantic Monthly 
'One of the great comic novels of the twentieth century ... [Svevo is] perhaps the most significant Italian modernist novelist.' - The Times Literary Supplement 
'There are moments where his realism seems, by the sheer strangeness and rawness of what lies exposed under its microscopic focus, only a hair's breadth away from the austere fabulism of Kafka.' - The Guardian 
'Svevo's masterpiece.' - Los Angeles Times\nAbout the author: 
Italo Svevo, one of Italy's great Modernists, was unrecognized in his own country until James Joyce befriended the writer and championed his work. His three novels, A Life, As a Man Grows Older and Confessions of Zeno, are all recognised as masterpieces of Italian literature.

Confessions of Zeno: The cult classic discovered and championed by James Joyce

Schmitz, Ettore

SVEVO, Italo

Humor & Satire

"Still outlawed by regimes around the world, Animal Farm has always been political dynamite." - 
The Guardian\nAnimal Farm - the history of a revolution that went wrong - is George Orwell's brilliant satire on the corrupting influence of power. 
When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But gradually a cunning, ruthless elite among them, masterminded by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, starts to take control. Soon the other animals discover that they are not all as equal as they thought, and find themselves hopelessly ensnared as one form of tyranny is replaced with another.\nAll animals are equal - but some are more equal than others 
'It is the history of a revolution that went wrong - and of the excellent excuses that were forthcoming at every step for the perversion of the original doctrine.'-George Orwell

Animal Farm

George, Orwell

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