Engelstalig

"A gorgeous, volcanic eruption . . . a work of extraordinary imagination" (The New Yorker), The Gormenghast Novels collects Mervyn Peake's classic fantasy trilogy.



"The true fantasy classic of our time." --Washington Post



A doomed lord, an emergent hero, an array of bizarre creatures, and an ancient royal family plagued by madness and intrigue--these are the denizens of ancient, sprawling, tumbledown Gormenghast Castle.



Within its vast halls and serpentine corridors, the members of the Groan dynasty and their master, Lord Sepulchrave, grow increasingly out of touch with a changing world as they pass their days in unending devotion to meaningless rituals and arcane traditions. Meanwhile, an ambitious kitchen boy named Steerpike rises by devious means to the post of Master of the Ritual while he maneuvers to bring down the Groans.



In these extraordinary novels, Peake has created a world where all is like a dream: lush, fantastical, vivid; a symbol of dark struggle. Accompanying the text are Peake's own drawings, illustrating the whole assembly of strange creatures that inhabit Gormenghast.



Breathtaking in its power and drenched in dark atmosphere, humor, and intrigue, The Gormenghast Novels is a classic, one of the great works of 20th-century British literature. This edition includes introductory essays by Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, and famed humorist Quentin Crisp.



The Gormenghat Novels (which includes Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone) has been included in Fantasy: The 100 Best Books, Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels, and 100 Must Read Fantasy Novels as one of the greatest fantasy works of the 20th century. Literary critic Harold Bloom has praised the series as the best fantasy novels of the 20th century and it is often compared to J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings.



"His inventiveness, his ingenuity, and his humor are astonishing." --San Francisco Chronicle

A "dreamlike and compelling” tour de force (Chicago Tribune)—an astonishingly imaginative detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets from Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria during World War II.

Now with a new introduction by the author.

In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.

The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took seventy years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions. But hidden within the rituals of its creation is a fascinating and mysterious story - a story of two remarkable men whose strange twenty-year relationship lies at the core of this historic undertaking. Professor James Murray, an astonishingly learned former schoolmaster and bank clerk, was the distinguished editor of the OED project. Dr. William Chester Minor, an American surgeon from New Haven, Connecticut, who had served in the Civil War, was one of thousands of contributors who submitted illustrative quotations of words to be used in the dictionary. But Minor was no ordinary contributor. He was remarkably prolific, sending thousands of neat, handwritten quotations from his home in the small village of Crowthorne, fifty miles from Oxford. On numerous occasions Murray invited Minor to visit Oxford and celebrate his work, but Murray's offer was regularly - and mysteriously - refused. Thus the two men, for two decades, maintained a close relationship only through correspondence. Finally, in 1896, after Minor had sent nearly ten thousand definitions to the dictionary but had still never traveled from his home, a puzzled Murray set out to visit him. It was then that Murray finally learned the truth about Minor - that, in addition to being a masterful wordsmith, Minor was also a murderer, clinically insane - and locked up in Broadmoor, England's harshest asylum for criminal lunatics.

This book by the renowned American Buddhist nun offers short, stand-alone readings designed to help us cultivate compassion and awareness amid the challenges of daily living. Comfortable with Uncertainty does not assume prior knowledge of Buddhist thought or practice, making it a perfect introduction to Pema Chodron's teaching on lovingkindness, meditation, mindfulness, "nowness," letting go, and working with fear and other painful emotions. More than a collection of thoughts for the day, Comfortable with Uncertainty offers a progressive program of spiritual study, leading the reader through essential concepts, themes, and practices on the Buddhist path.

Niccolo Machiavelli's brutally uncompromising manual of statecraft, The Prince is translated and edited with an introduction by Tim Parks in Penguin Classics. As a diplomat in turbulent fifteenth-century Florence, Niccolo Machiavelli knew how quickly political fortunes could rise and fall. The Prince, his tough-minded, pragmatic handbook on how power really works, made his name notorious and has remained controversial ever since. How can a leader be strong and decisive, yet still inspire loyalty in his followers? When is it necessary to break the rules? Is it better to be feared than loved? Examining regimes and their rulers the world over and throughout history, from Roman Emperors to renaissance Popes, from Hannibal to Cesare di Borgia, Machievalli answers all these questions in a work of realpolitik that still has shrewd political lessons for today. Tim Parks's acclaimed contemporary translation renders Machiavelli's no-nonsense original as alarming and enlightening as when it was first written. His introduction discusses Machiavelli's life and reputation, and explores the historical background to the work. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) was born in Florence, and served the Florentine republic as a secretary and second chancellor, as ambassador and foreign policy-maker. When the Medici family returned to power in 1512 he was suspected of conspiracy, imprisoned and tortured and forced to retire from public life. His most famous work, The Prince, was written in an attempt to gain favour with the Medicis and return to politics.

A great American writer's confrontation with a great European critic - a personal and intellectual awakening. A hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and prophetic writers in Europe: a relentless critic of the popular media's manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumerism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though his followers included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Thankfully, Jonathan Franzen is one of them. In this book, Franzen not only presents and annotates his definitive new translations of Kraus, with supplementary notes from the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann. In Franzen Kraus has found his match: a novelist unafraid to voice unpopular opinions strongly, a critic capable of untangling Kraus's often dense arguments. Painstakingly wrought, strikingly original in form, this is a feast of thought, passion and literature.

David Leavitt has earned high praise for his portrayal of human sexuality and the complexity of intimate relationships. Now, with While England Sleeps, he moves beyond precisely observed domestic drama to create an historical novel of greater resonance and breadth than anything he has written before. Set against the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe, While England Sleeps tells the story of a love affair between Brian Botsford, an upper-class young writer, and Edward Phelan, an idealistic, self-educated employee of the London Underground and a Communist Party member. Though by far the better educated of the two, Brian is also more callow, convinced that his homosexuality is something he will outgrow. Edward, on the other hand, possesses "an unproblematic capacity to accept" both Brian and the unorthodox nature of their love for each other - until one day, at the urging of his wealthy Aunt Constance, Brian agrees to be set up with a "suitable" young woman named Philippa Archibald ... and soon enough Edward is pushed to a point of crisis. Fleeing, he volunteers to fight Franco in Spain, where he ends up in prison. And Brian, responsible for Edward's plight, must pursue him across Europe, and into the violent chaos of war.

William Miller embarks on an alluring journey into the world of disgust, showing how it brings order and meaning to our lives even as it horrifies and revolts us. Our notion of the self, intimately dependent as it is on our response to the excretions and secretions of our bodies, depends on it. Cultural identities have frequent recourse to its boundary-policing powers. Love depends on overcoming it, while the pleasure of sex comes in large measure from the titillating violation of disgust prohibitions. Imagine aesthetics without disgust for tastelessness and vulgarity; imagine morality without disgust for evil, hypocrisy, stupidity, and cruelty.

Miller details our anxious relation to basic life processes: eating, excreting, fornicating, decaying, and dying. But disgust pushes beyond the flesh to vivify the larger social order with the idiom it commandeers from the sights, smells, tastes, feels, and sounds of fleshly physicality. Disgust and contempt, Miller argues, play crucial political roles in creating and maintaining social hierarchy. Democracy depends less on respect for persons than on an equal distribution of contempt. Disgust, however, signals dangerous division. The high's belief that the low actually smell bad, or are sources of pollution, seriously threatens democracy.

Miller argues that disgust is deeply grounded in our ambivalence to life: it distresses us that the fair is so fragile, so easily reduced to foulness, and that the foul may seem more than passing fair in certain slants of light. When we are disgusted, we are attempting to set bounds, to keep chaos at bay. Of course we fail. But, as Miller points out, our failure is hardly an occasion for despair, for disgust also helps to animate the world, and to make it a dangerous, magical, and exciting place.

A controversial call to put honor at the center of morality
To the modern mind, the idea of honor is outdated, sexist, and barbaric. It evokes Hamilton and Burr and pistols at dawn, not visions of a well-organized society. But for philosopher Tamler Sommers, a sense of honor is essential to living moral lives. In Why Honor Matters, Sommers argues that our collective rejection of honor has come at great cost. Reliant only on Enlightenment liberalism, the United States has become the home of the cowardly, the shameless, the selfish, and the alienated. Properly channeled, honor encourages virtues like courage, integrity, and solidarity, and gives a sense of living for something larger than oneself. Sommers shows how honor can help us address some of society's most challenging problems, including education, policing, and mass incarceration. Counterintuitive and provocative, Why Honor Matters makes a convincing case for honor as a cornerstone of our modern society.

How did life invent itself? Where did DNA come from? How did consciousness develop? Comparing gene sequences, examining atomic structures of proteins, and looking into the geochemistry of rocks have helped explain evolution in more detail than ever before. The author of this book reconstructs the history of life by describing the ten greatest inventions of evolution (including DNA, photosynthesis, sex, and sight), based on their historical impact, role in organisms today, and relevance to current controversies. Who would have guessed that eyes started off as light-sensitive spots used to calibrate photosynthesis in algae? Or that DNA’s building blocks form spontaneously in hydrothermal vents?

An American Jew wonders: Who are the Germans? Can we generalize and identify a specifically German character? Tuvia Tenenbom, an American playwright and journalist and a contributor to the German newspaper Die Zeit, tries to find out. He embarks on an extended tour of Germany, with a thoroughness that enables him to take in small, historic towns as well as the biggest cities. He interviews politicians and business and media elites--and students, waitresses, and ordinary people he meets along the way. Recurring themes of various comments offered by his interlocutors, even by the occasional tour.

Aristotle's probing inquiry into some of the fundamental problems of philosophy, The Metaphysics is one of the classical Greek foundation-stones of western thought

The Metaphysics presents Aristotle's mature rejection of both the Platonic theory that what we perceive is just a pale reflection of reality and the hard-headed view that all processes are ultimately material. He argued instead that the reality or substance of things lies in their concrete forms, and in so doing he probed some of the deepest questions of philosophy: What is existence? How is change possible? And are there certain things that must exist for anything else to exist at all? The seminal notions discussed in The Metaphysics - of 'substance' and associated concepts of matter and form, essence and accident, potentiality and actuality - have had a profound and enduring influence, and laid the foundations for one of the central branches of Western philosophy.

In this edition Hugh Lawson-Tancred's lucid translation is accompanied by a stimulating introduction in which he highlights the central themes of one of philosophy's supreme masterpieces. 

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Buddhism, Booze, and the Four Noble Truths

Poison, Shadow and Farewell is the concluding part in Javier Marías spy trilogy masterwork, Your Face Tomorrow.Jacques Deza is back in London and once again working for the secret intelligence agency run by Bernard Tupra. Deza finds himself forced to watch Tupra's collection of incriminating videotapes of important public figures. The recordings document unconventional private lives - and horrific acts. The scenes enter him like a poison, contaminating everything good, yet he is powerless to counteract them. Set against a background of brutality, Poison, Shadow and Farewell asks whether violence can ever be justified and completes the extraordinary journey that has led us on a descent into hell and a re-emergence, not entirely unscathed, into life.

Amateur sleuth Isabel Dalhousie is a philosopher who also uses her training to solve unusual mysteries. Isabel is Editor of the Review of Applied Ethics - which addresses such questions as 'Truth telling in sexual relationships' - and she also hosts The Sunday Philosophy Club at her house in Edinburgh. Behind the city's Georgian facades its moral compasses are spinning with greed, dishonesty and murderous intent. Instinct tells Isabel that the young man who tumbled to his death in front of her eyes at a concert in the Usher Hall didn't fall. He was pushed. The Sunday Philosophy Club marks new territory - but familiar moral ground - from the author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. With Isabel Dalhousie Alexander McCall Smith introduces a new and pneumatic female sleuth to tackle murder, mayhem - and the mysteries of life. As her hero WH Auden maintained, classic detective fiction stems from a desire for an uncorrupted Eden which the detective, as an agent of God, can return to us. But then Isabel, being a philosopher, has a thing or two to say about God as well.

With its powerful echoes of a family and its fate, Heart Earth is the fitting companion to Ivan Doig's classic memoir, This House of Sky. Against the backdrop of World War Two and the American land before and since, this remarkably told saga of the Doigs and their journey from a defense housing project in boomtime Arizona to the high country of their Montana origins builds with the drama only real life can hold. Here we see an adventurous mother miraculously back again in the evocative lines of her wartime letters after "all else of her. . . has been only farthest childscapes, half-rememberings thinned by so many years since"; a resonant father who gives off the "tense hum of a wire in the wind" as he strives, in memorably go-getting fashion, to make his family secure against chronic odds; and a child, "touchy and thorough, doctrinaire and dreamy, " who early learns to infiltrate the drama-filled world of grown-ups by "standing back and prowling with the ears." "In that last winter of the war, she knew to use pointblank ink, " begins this unusual blend of heartfelt memoir and narrative skills. As ever in the writing of Ivan Doig, the most innocent sentence has the trap of poetry. Heart Earth is the most imaginative - and moving - book yet from the writer, The Washington Post has said, "whose work makes readers recall why they love to read, reminds writers why they ever wanted to write in the first place."

Who was Robin Hood? Throughout history the figures of the hooded man of Sherwood forest and his band of outlaws have transfixed readers and viewers; but where does the myth come from? The story appeared out of the legend of the Green man but found its location during the reign of Richard II, the Lionheart, who was away from England fighting in the crusades. In his absence his brother John lay waste to the country. But does this tell the full story? Was Robin a bandit prince ahead of a troop of brigands? Who was the Sherrif and was he in fact the legitimate law in the land fighting vigilantes?

Vienna, 1815, as the political aristocrats of Europe assembled to determine the fate of the continent after the wars of the last twenty years, the news arrives that Napoleon has returned to France. Bonaparte (the revolutionary turned emperor and 'disturber of the world's peace') had been defeated and exiled to Elba, but now he is fast advancing on Paris, gathering troops and taking cities without firing a single shot. Europe's peace is not to last. This story brilliantly re-lives the rise and fall of Bonaparte's empire, and brings to life the characters who shaped it: Wellington, the Iron Duke, Napoleon's great love, Josephine, the duplicitous Tallyrand, his erstwhile foreign secretary, and, of course, Napoleon himself. Showing where the mistakes were made and how the path to war became inexorable, it culminates in a virtuoso description of the Battle of Waterloo itself. Displaying his customary blend of historian's and novelist's eye, Stephen Coote paints a vivid portrait of the legendary emperor and military genius, whose energy, courage and tenacity won (and lost) him a vast empire.

In the history of the modern world, there have been few characters more sinister, sadistic, and deeply demented than Baron Ungern-Sternberg. An anti-Semitic fanatic whose penchant for Eastern mysticism and hatred of communists foreshadowed the Nazi scourge that would soon overtake Europe, Ungern- Sternberg conquered Mongolia in 1919 with a ragtag force of White Russians, Siberians, Japanese, and native Mongolians. In The Bloody White Baron, historian and travel writer James Palmer vividly re-creates Ungern-Sternberg's spiral into ever-darker obsessions, while also providing a rare look at the religion and culture of the unfortunate Mongolians he briefly ruled.

Documents the efforts of an esteemed French Jesuit priest to confront the struggle between science and religion upon his 1929 discovery of the Peking Man pre-human skull that represented a missing link between erect hunting apes and the human race's Cro-Magnon ancestors, a finding he was ordered to deny as scientific evidence refuting biblical teachings. Reprint.

A eulogy for the lost art of traveling and an evaluation of the British writers who authored travel books.

When junior college professor Alfred Clayton is asked to record his impressions of the Ford Administration, he recalls a turbulent piece of personal history as well. In a decade of sexual liberation, Clayton was facing a doomed marriage and the passionate beginnings of a futile affair with an unattainable Perfect Wife. But one memory begets another: Clayton's unfinished book on James Buchanan. In John Updike's fifteenth novel, he masterfully alternates between the two men, two lives, two American centuries--one Victorian, the other modern--shining an irreverent, witty, and sometimes caustic light on the contrasting views of social fictions and sexual politics.

With the same electrical intensity of language and insight that he brought to Waiting for the Barbarians and The Master of Petersburg, J.M. Coetzee reinvents the story of Robinson Crusoe-and in so doing, directs our attention to the seduction and tyranny of storytelling itself In 1720 the eminent man of letters Daniel Foe is approached by Susan Barton, lately a castaway on a desert island. She wants him to tell her story, and that of the enigmatic man who has become her rescuer, companion, master and sometimes lover: Cruso. Cruso is dead, and his manservant, Friday, is incapable of speech. As she tries to relate the truth about him, the ambitious Barton cannot help turning Cruso into her invention. For as narrated by Foe-as by Coetzee himself-the stories we thought we knew acquire depths that are at once treacherous, elegant, and unexpectedly moving.

A comprehensive text of the doctrine of Eckankar. In it, the author outlines the fundamental steps for preparing one's spiritual consciousness and explores six specific techniques for Soul Travel.