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.

«Qu'est-ce qui relance sans fin la littérature ? Qu'est-ce qui fait écrire les hommes ? Les autres hommes, leur mère, les étoiles, ou les vieilles choses énormes, Dieu, la langue ? Les puissances le savent. Les puissances de l'air sont ce peu de vent à travers les feuillages. La nuit tourne. La lune se lève, il n'y a personne contre cette meule. Rimbaud dans le grenier parmi les feuillets s'est tourné contre le mur et dort comme un plomb.»

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.

Discover the untold story behind one of the most sensational chapters in the history of the House of Windsor

In A Royal Duty, Paul Burrell reveals new truths about Princess Diana - and presents for the first time as faithful an account of her thoughts as we can ever hope to read.

He was the favourite footman who formed a unique relationship with the Queen.

He was the butler who the Princess of Wales called 'my rock' and 'the only man I can trust'.

He was accused of theft, then acquitted following the historic intervention of the monarch.

He was the Princess most intimate confidante - and is the only person able to separate the myth from the truth of the Diana years.

Now, at last, Paul Burrell cuts through the gossip and the lies and takes us closer to the complex heart of the Royal Family than ever before.

The epic of Thesus, the boy-king of Eleusis, ritually preordained to die after one year of marriage to the sacred queen, but who defies God's decree and claims his inheritance - the throne of Athens.

Like Tobacco Road, this novel chronicles the final decline of a poor white family in rural Georgia. Exhorted by their patriarch Ty Ty, the Waldens ruin their land by digging it up in search of gold. Complex sexual entanglements and betrayals lead to a murder within the family that completes its dissolution. Juxtaposed against the Waldens' obsessive search is the story of Ty Ty's son-in-law, a cotton mill worker in a nearby town who is killed during a strike.

First published in 1933, God's Little Acre was censured by the Georgia Literary Commission, banned in Boston, and once led the all-time best-seller list, with more than ten million copies in print.

In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to play mah jong, remember the past, and gossip into the night. United in unspeakable loss and new hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club.  With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the memories that display these women’s strength, worries, and determination. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of the matriarchal ties that they believe have stymied their ability to face the uncertainties of the future.

The restrictions of a wartime childhood in London and subsequent post-war shortages have done little to enrich Timothy's early youth. But everything changes when Timothy's glamorous older sister, Kath, invites him to spend the summer at Heidelberg.

Twenty-two-year-old Galen is a New Age believer on a warpath towards transcendence. He lives with his emotionally dependent mother in a secluded house, surviving on old family money that his Aunt Helen and cousin Jennifer are determined to get their hands on. Galen doesn't know who his father is, his abusive grandfather is dead, and his grandmother is losing her memory. When the family takes a trip to an old cabin in the Sierras, tensions crescendo. Caught in a compromising position, Galen will discover the shocking truth of just how far he will go to attain what it is he craves.