Subject: Biography & Non-Fiction Prose

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  Beyond Good and Evil Friedrich Nietzsche

  A scathing and powerful critique of philosophy, religion and science. Here Nietzsche presents us with problems and challenges that are as troubling as they are inspiring, while at the same time outlining the virtues, ideas, and practices which will characterise the philosophy of the future. Relentless, energetic... read more »

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  Boyhood Leo Tolstoy

  In the 1850s Tolstoy also began his literary career with an autobiographical trilogy: Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth. This, the second novel in the trilogy, tells of the early part of his life, when he was living happily with his family in the countryside. It also portrays his first love affair with Sonya and the... read more »

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  Mankind in the Making H. G. Wells

  Certain wholesale aspects of man-making with a skin of infinite delicacy that life will harden very speedily, with a discomforted writhing little body, with a weak and wailing outcry that stirs the heart, the creature comes protesting into the world, and unless death win a victory, we and chance and the forces of... read more »

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  Orthodoxy G. K. Chesterton

  This book is meant to be a companion to "Heretics," and to put the positive side in addition to the negative. Many critics complained of the book called "Heretics" because it merely criticised current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy. This book is an attempt to answer the challenge. It is... read more »

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  Rights of Man Thomas Paine

  The authorities in power in England during Thomas Paine’s lifetime saw him as an agent provocateur who used his seditious eloquence to support the emancipation of slaves and women, the demands of working people, and the rebels of the French and American Revolutions. History, on the other hand, has come to regard... read more »

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  Robert Browning G. K. Chesterton

  Chesterton declares that it is fashionable to boast that one cannot understand Browning but he reveals in this fascinating literary biography how Browning 'combines the greatest brain with the simplest temperament'. This is a multi-faceted biography and critique of Browning's work. Chesterton takes us from his early... read more »

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  Siddhartha Hermann Hesse

  In the novel, Siddhartha, a young man, leaves his family for a contemplative life, then, restless, discards it for one of the flesh. He conceives a son, but bored and sickened by lust and greed, moves on again. Near despair, Siddhartha comes to a river where he hears a unique sound. This sound signals the true... read more »

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  The Antichrist Friedrich Nietzsche

  This work is both an unrestrained attack on Christianity and a further exposition of Nietzsche's will-to-power philosophy so dramatically presented in Zarathustra. Christianity, says Nietzsche, represents 'everything weak, low, and botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism towards all the self-preservative... read more »

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  The Book of Tea Kakuzō Okakura

  At the turn of the 20th century, in Boston, a small esoteric book about tea was written with the intention of being read aloud in the famous salon of Isabella Gardner. It was authored by Okakura Kakuzo, a Japanese philosopher, art expert, and curator. Little known at the time, Kakuzo would emerge as one of the great... read more »

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  The Devils of Loudun Aldous Huxley

  In 1634 Urbain Grandier, a handsome and dissolute priest of the parish of Loudun was tried, tortured and burnt at the stake. He had been found guilty of conspiring with the devil to seduce an entire convent of nuns in what was the most sensational case of mass possession and sexual hysteria in history. Grandier... read more »

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  The Prince Niccolò Machiavelli

  When Lorenzo de' Medici seized control of the Florentine Republic in 1512, he summarily fired the Secretary to the Second Chancery of the Signoria and set in motion a fundamental change in the way we think about politics. The person who held the aforementioned office with the tongue-twisting title was none other... read more »

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  Thus Spake Zarathustra Friedrich Nietzsche

  Nietzsche's most controversial, and probably his most important work. The concepts that "God is Dead" and "Eternal Recurrence" with their attendant ramifications are major features of this work. Highly original and inventive, part literature, part philosophy, it parodies both, in its stylistic resemblance to the New... read more »