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Description
Sartor Resartus was a strange and new book when it was first published in 1833, and in many ways it remains a strange and new book today. The bulk of the novel takes the form of the a commentary on the life and works of the fictional Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, a sort of renaissance-man German philosopher who develops a “Philosophy of Clothes.” The commentary is composed by a fictional English commentator, known only as the “Editor”; the Editor claims to have translated many of Teufelsdröckh’s ideas and quotes from German. As the commentary progresses, the Editor receives a bag of paper scraps on which are written various autobiographical fragments from Teufelsdröckh’s life. The Editor’s attempts to organize and interpret these scraps forms the second part of the novel.
The work is multi-faceted: sometimes a parody, sometimes a comedy, sometimes a satire, and sometimes seriously philosophical. Some critics consider it an early existentialist text. At the very least its unique structure and use of meta-narrative is hugely influential to modern literature; Borges was said to have memorized entire pages, and modern texts like Nabokov’s Pale Fire borrow liberally from the concept of a meta-narrative organized on scraps of paper.
Description
Scaramouche tells the tale of André-Louis Moreau, a young lawyer in Brittany. When his friend is killed by an unremorseful landowner, Moreau swears revenge and begins a life of adventure on the run. His travels lead him to joining a traveling theater troupe, becoming a master swordsman, and even to revolution.
While the story of Scaramouche is fiction, Sabatini was always very careful to portray history as accurately as he could in his novels. Thus, the backdrop of the French Revolution is vibrant, immediate, and carefully described. In general Sabatini’s prose is sharp and entertaining.
Scaramouche was incredibly popular in its day, and was Sabatini’s most famous novel. The first line is written on Sabatini’s grave.
Description
The Magnificent Ambersons, winner of the 1919 Pulitzer prize, is considered by many to be Booth Tarkington’s finest novel and an American classic. The story is set in the Midwest, where George, the spoiled and oblivious scion of an old-money family, must cope with their waning fortunes and the rise of industry barons in the automobile age.
George’s antiheroic struggles with modernity encapsulate a greater theme of change and renewal—specifically, the very American notion of a small community exploding into a dark and dirty city virtually overnight by virtue of industrial “progress.” Tarkington’s nuanced portrayal of the often-unlikable Amberson family and his paradoxical framing of progress as a destroyer of family, community, and environment, make The Magnificent Ambersons a fascinating and forward-thinking novel—certainly one with a permanent place in the American social canon. Despite the often heavy themes, Tarkington’s prose remains uniquely witty, charming, and brisk.
The novel is the second in Tarkington’s Growth trilogy of novels, and has been adapted several times for radio, film, and television, including a 1942 Orson Welles adaptation that many consider one of the finest American films ever made.
Description
Widely regarded as one of the most important figures in Indian (and more specifically Bengali) literary history, Rabindranath Tagore was the first Indian—indeed, the first person outside Europe—to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, largely in recognition of his “spiritual offering of songs,” Gitanjali.
Tagore himself translated the poems from the original Bengali, taking many liberties in the process. His English translation is rightly recognized as a work distinct from the Bengali original, consisting of major revisions, many elisions, and many poems originally published in other collections.
Tagore’s lyrical simplicity, vivid imagery, and themes of nature, spirituality, death, and transcendence combine to produce a truly unique, powerfully moving work of thoughtful beauty. For many who read it, Tagore’s words in Song XCVI ring true: “What I have seen is unsurpassable. I have tasted of the hidden honey of this lotus that expands on the ocean of light, and thus I am blessed.”
Description
The first anthology of short stories by Jack London, Lost Face tells seven stories about the Klondike gold rush. In “Lost Face,” the fur thief Subienkow faces gruesome torture and execution by a tribe of Indians, armed with only his wits. “Trust” is a story about the dangers of the Yukon River. Jack London’s best known short story, “To Build a Fire,” tells the story of a nameless man and his dog attempting to survive in the frozen Northern Territory. In “That Spot,” the eponymous Spot is a very unusual Yukon sled dog. “Flush of Gold” is a love story set against the harsh backdrop of the Yukon. “The Passing of Marcus O’Brien” deals the tale of the fair-but-tough Judge Marcus O’Brien in the settlement of Red Cow. “The Wit of Porportuk” tells the tale of El-Soo and Porportuk, two Indians among the white settlers.
Description
In The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Selma Lagerlöf tells the story of Nils Holgersson, a young boy who is transformed into an elf after a set of misdeeds. Escaping with his family’s farm goose he joins up with a flock of wild geese and travels with them across Sweden as they return to their annual nesting grounds in Lapland.
The story was originally written as a commission for the Swedish National Teachers’ Association to write a geography book for children and has become a firm favourite in the country. It’s been adapted for screen many times, translated into over 30 languages and, until recently, was the artwork on the 20 krona banknote.
Although originally published in English in two volumes—the second starting at “The Story of Karr and Grayskin”—here they are presented as a single combined story.
Description
The Cosmic Computer is a 1963 science fiction novel by H. Beam Piper based on his short story “Graveyard of Dreams,” which was published in the February 1958 issue of Galaxy Magazine.
The action largely takes place on the planet Poictesme, which is full of abandoned military installations and equipment—hence the novel’s original name, Junkyard Planet. Young Conn Maxwell returns from Earth with long-awaited news about Merlin, a military computer with god-like abilities long rumored to be hidden somewhere on Poictesme. Though convinced that the story is just a myth, Conn and his father use the purported search for Merlin to drive the revitalization of the planet’s economy. In the process, they discover far more than they expected.
As was typical for science fiction novels of the pulp era, there is little character development and women play a minor role, with romance given only a token treatment. The emphasis is on the conflicts over the spoils of the planet and the fiercely competitive search for the titular “cosmic computer.”
Description
August Strindberg’s novel The Red Room centers on the civil servant Arvid Falk as he tries to find meaning in his life through the pursuit of writing. He’s accompanied by a crew of painters, sculptors and philosophers each on their own journey for the truth, who meet in the “Red Room” of a local restaurant.
Drawing heavily on August’s own experiences, The Red Room was published in Sweden in 1879. Its reception was less than complimentary in Sweden—a major newspaper called it “dirt”—but it fared better in the rest of Scandinavia and soon was recognised in his home country. Since then it has been translated into multiple languages, including the 1913 English translation by Ellise Schleussner presented here.
Description
The Riddle of the Sands is one of the earliest examples of the spy novel genre, and became hugely popular shortly after its publication. Childers carefully interweaves fiction with real-world places, events, and politics, making for an extremely convincing story of invasion—so convincing that some (perhaps erroneously) credit the novel with spurring the creation of new English naval bases. The framing device, where Childers pretends to be an editor presenting a factual account, only adds to the believability of the story.
The novel begins with Carruthers, an official in the Foreign Office, accepting an invitation from his friend Davies for what he assumes is a pleasure trip on a sailboat in the Baltic sea. As the two embark on their journey, it quickly becomes apparent that not everything is at it seems on the German coast.
Riddle helped energize the spy novel genre, providing a template for countless authors to come, including Ian Fleming and John le Carré, and has been adapted numerous times for film, television and radio.
Description
The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 leveled the city of Lisbon and surrounding areas, and killed perhaps as many as 100,000 people. It came at a decisive time in the history of western thought: the melding of Faith, Philosophy, and Science into a post-enlightenment rational view of the universe. In some sense mankind had just begun to believe he had the universe figured out when the universe struck back with a tragedy so terrible in scale it could not be fit into any box of understanding. It was not predicted. It could not have been prevented. It was not rational. And it certainly could not have been the will of a benevolent God.
Lisbon was only one moment in a much larger context—industrialization was upending a pre-historic way of life, science was upending nature, and the first great republics in America and France were about to upend previously unchallenged forms of government. It was the awe, inspiration, and uncertainty of all this change that gave rise, ultimately, to Romanticism in art, literature, and music.
J. W. von Goethe is, by some accounts, the father of the romantic period in literature, or at least the proto-romantic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) period. And The Sorrows of Young Werther was its genesis. It was Goethe’s first major work, an immediate sensation upon publication, and made Goethe a household name.
While Voltaire parodied rationalism in Candide, Goethe transcended it with the semi-autobiographical story of Werther, a young man governed more by his emotions than his reason, whose only employment is his delight in the romantic ideals of the pastoral lives he finds in the rural town of Walheim. There he also finds Charlotte, and in her an idealized but unobtainable old-world domesticity. Werther’s internal dialog about his growing obsession with Charlotte, and his inability to cope rationally with the fact that she is engaged to—and in love with—another man, form the bulk of the book in the form of a series of ever more intense letters to a friend.
Werther’s descent into sorrow has captivated readers for centuries, helped by Goethe’s intensely beautiful prose (translated here by R. D. Boylan), enchanting imagery, and obvious reverence for nature and a dying past.