The Dispossessed

The Dispossessed

Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

Publisher: Turtleback Books

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780785764038

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A brilliant physicist attempts to salvage his planet of anarchy.


The Stranger

The Stranger

Author: Albert Camus

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2012-08-08

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 0307827666

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

With the intrigue of a psychological thriller, Camus's masterpiece gives us the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach. Behind the intrigue, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd" and describes the condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life. First published in 1946; now in translation by Matthew Ward.


Man, Play, and Games

Man, Play, and Games

Author: Roger Caillois

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780252070334

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

According to Roger Caillois, play is an occasion of pure waste. In spite of this - or because of it - play constitutes an essential element of human social and spiritual development. In this study, the author defines play as a free and voluntary activity that occurs in a pure space, isolated and protected from the rest of life.


Committed Writings

Committed Writings

Author: Albert Camus

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2020-08-04

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 0525567208

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Nobel Prize winner's most influential and enduring political writings, newly curated and introduced by acclaimed Camus scholar Alice Kaplan. Albert Camus (1913-1960) is unsurpassed among writers for a body of work that animates the wonder and absurdity of existence. Committed Writings brings together, for the first time, thematically-linked essays from across Camus's writing career that reflect the scope of his political thought. This pivotal collection embodies Camus's radical and unwavering commitment to upholding human rights, resisting fascism, and creating art in the service of justice.


The Enigma of Reason

The Enigma of Reason

Author: Hugo Mercier

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2017-04-17

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 0674368304

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“Brilliant...Timely and necessary.” —Financial Times “Especially timely as we struggle to make sense of how it is that individuals and communities persist in holding beliefs that have been thoroughly discredited.” —Darren Frey, Science If reason is what makes us human, why do we behave so irrationally? And if it is so useful, why didn’t it evolve in other animals? This groundbreaking account of the evolution of reason by two renowned cognitive scientists seeks to solve this double enigma. Reason, they argue, helps us justify our beliefs, convince others, and evaluate arguments. It makes it easier to cooperate and communicate and to live together in groups. Provocative, entertaining, and undeniably relevant, The Enigma of Reason will make many reasonable people rethink their beliefs. “Reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant...Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?...Cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber [argue that] reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems...[but] to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker “Turns reason’s weaknesses into strengths, arguing that its supposed flaws are actually design features that work remarkably well.” —Financial Times “The best thing I have read about human reasoning. It is extremely well written, interesting, and very enjoyable to read.” —Gilbert Harman, Princeton University


Beyond Bach

Beyond Bach

Author: Andrew Talle

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2017-04-07

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 0252099346

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Reverence for J. S. Bach's music and its towering presence in our cultural memory have long affected how people hear his works. In his own time, however, Bach stood as just another figure among a number of composers, many of them more popular with the music-loving public. Eschewing the great composer style of music history, Andrew Talle takes us on a journey that looks at how ordinary people made music in Bach's Germany. Talle focuses in particular on the culture of keyboard playing as lived in public and private. As he ranges through a wealth of documents, instruments, diaries, account ledgers, and works of art, Talle brings a fascinating cast of characters to life. These individuals--amateur and professional performers, patrons, instrument builders, and listeners--inhabited a lost world, and Talle's deft expertise teases out the diverse roles music played in their lives and in their relationships with one another. At the same time, his nuanced re-creation of keyboard playing's social milieu illuminates the era's reception of Bach's immortal works.


Murder as a Fine Art

Murder as a Fine Art

Author: David Morrell

Publisher: Mulholland Books

Published: 2013-05-07

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 0316216771

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A brilliant historical mystery series begins: in gaslit Victorian London, writer Thomas De Quincey must become a detective to clear his own name. Thomas De Quincey, infamous for his memoir Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, is the major suspect in a series of ferocious mass murders identical to ones that terrorized London forty-three years earlier. The blueprint for the killings seems to be De Quincey's essay On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. Desperate to clear his name but crippled by opium addiction, De Quincey is aided by his devoted daughter Emily and a pair of determined Scotland Yard detectives. In Murder as a Fine Art, David Morrell plucks De Quincey, Victorian London, and the Ratcliffe Highway murders from history. Fogbound streets become a battleground between a literary star and a brilliant murderer, whose lives are linked by secrets long buried but never forgotten.


Haiti Unbound

Haiti Unbound

Author: Kaiama L. Glover

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1846314992

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Haiti has long been relegated to the margins of the so-called New World. Marked by exceptionalism, the voices of some of its most important writers have consequently been muted by the geopolitical realities of the nation's fraught history. In Haiti Unbound, Kaiama L. Glover offers a close look at the works of three such writers: the Haitian Spiralists Frankétienne, Jean-Claude Fignolé, and René Philoctète. While Spiralism has been acknowledged as a crucial contribution to the French-speaking Caribbean literary tradition, it has not been given the sustained attention of a full-length study. Glover's book represents the first effort to consider the works of the three Spiralist authors both individually and collectively, filling an important gap in postcolonial Francophone and Caribbean studies.


Camus

Camus

Author: Ray Davison

Publisher: University of Exeter Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 9780859895323

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This is the first full-length study in English of Camus's life-long fascination with the works of the Russian writer Feodor Dostoevsky. The purpose of the book is to demonstrate the ways in which Dostoevsky's thought and fiction served to stimulate and crystallize Camus's own thinking. Davison lucidly identifies the lines of divergence and counter-arguments which Camus produced as answers to the challenge of Dostoevsky's Christian/Tzarist vision of life. The traditional methods of comparative literary criticism are jettisoned in favour of the more exciting claim that Camus's literary and philosophical texts can be read as precise and detailed replies to some of Dostoevsky's central beliefs about immortality, religion and politics. The study ranges freely over the entirety of the works of both major writers.