Essays.

A Roman emperor's private reflections on power, mortality, and inner freedom.

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Walter Savage Landor's celebrated prose dialogues, in which historical and legendary figures meet across the centuries to argue, reflect, and confide, gathered here with a selectio

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Plato’s great dialogue on justice, education, power, and the shape of an ideal city remains one of the defining books of political thought.

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The first volume of a nineteenth-century study of the women who inspired the poets: portraits of the muses and beloveds celebrated in verse, from the age of the troubadours onward.

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A collection of essays surveying the richness of Jewish literary and cultural history, from the scholarly pen of Gustav Karpeles.

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The gathered notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, a dazzling record of one of history's greatest minds at work.

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A collection of literary and historical essays, ranging across authors, ideas, and eras with the reflective breadth of a cultivated critical mind.

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A collection of short stories about Pennsylvania, originally prepared for publication in the state's leading daily newspapers, offering brief tales drawn from its people, places an

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Jonathan Swift's intimate letters to Esther Johnson, written from London during his years at the heart of politics.

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The famous Anglo-Indian glossary that traces how words like bungalow, shampoo, curry and pyjama passed from India into English, part dictionary, part treasure-house of colonial enc

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The short, incendiary pamphlet by Marx and Engels that reframed history as a struggle between classes.

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A witty gallery of English character sketches from the early seventeenth century, portraying types high and low with sharp observation and dry humour.

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Louise Imogen Guiney's A Little English Gallery gathers graceful literary portraits of Lady Danvers, Henry Vaughan, George Farquhar, Beauclerk and Langton, and William Hazlitt.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson's founding essay of American Transcendentalism, arguing that the natural world is the visible face of spirit.

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A landmark anthology of speeches and orations by Black Americans, gathering the great voices of abolition, uplift, and civil rights in a testament to African American eloquence and

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Francis Bacon's celebrated Essays paired with his Wisdom of the Ancients, gathering some of the shrewdest prose in English.

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Edward MacDowell's lectures on music, delivered at Columbia University, in which the celebrated American composer reflects on the history and meaning of his art with a practitioner

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A gathering of Emerson's essays, the works that carried American Transcendentalism to the world.

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Blaise Pascal's unfinished masterpiece: fragments toward a defence of faith by one of history's great mathematical minds.

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A witty, affectionate celebration of book collecting and the peculiar breed who pursue rare volumes.

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The complete essays of Montaigne, the writer who invented the form: a lifelong, endlessly curious inquiry into himself and, through himself, into what it means to be human.

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Anna Jameson's pioneering nineteenth-century study of Shakespeare's heroines, examining the women of the plays, from Portia and Juliet to Lady Macbeth, as fully realized characters

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Emma Goldman's bracing collection of essays on anarchism, freedom, and the questions of her age.

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José Rizal's searching essay on the future of his colonised homeland.

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William James's spirited defense of the right to believe where evidence runs out, gathered with other essays in his lucid, humane philosophy.

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Jane Austen, barely a teenager, takes a scalpel to the sentimental novel.

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A gathering of the essays, poems and lectures of Voltairine de Cleyre, one of American anarchism's most eloquent voices.

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A historian's studies of the Crusader and Latin states of the medieval eastern Mediterranean, examining the Frankish rulers, islands and principalities of a fascinating borderland.

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge's landmark of literary autobiography and criticism, blending the story of his intellectual life with profound reflections on poetry, imagination, and philos

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A gathering of John Ruskin's lectures and essays on work, wealth, art, and honor.

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A genial Victorian collection of papers on art, archaeology, and antiquity, wandering among old books and old places: essays on how art and everyday life illuminate the past.

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A king's own hand, unguarded and impatient: the surviving letters Henry VIII wrote to Anne Boleyn as desire, dynasty, and the fate of a church all began to gather around a single c

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Plutarch's wide-ranging essays and dialogues on how to live, think, and govern oneself.

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Oscar Wilde’s long prison letter turns suffering, memory, vanity, love, humiliation, and spiritual reckoning into one of the most searching autobiographical works in English.

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A wide-ranging anthology of writing from the American South across more than three centuries, gathering poetry, prose and historical documents to trace the literary voice of a regi

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The private letters of Napoleon Bonaparte to Josephine trace one of history's most famous relationships from passionate ardor to estrangement, offering an intimate view of the empe

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The intimate letters of the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft to her American lover Gilbert Imlay.

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The foundational essays by Hamilton, Madison and Jay, written to defend the proposed United States Constitution.

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Henry David Thoreau's two great works together: the record of his experiment in simple living by Walden Pond, and his ringing argument for conscience over unjust law.

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Jonathan Swift's ferocious 1729 satire, straight-faced and monstrous, coolly proposing that the poor of Ireland sell their children as food.

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Tobias Smollett's comic epistolary masterpiece sends a cantankerous squire and his household on a rollicking tour of eighteenth-century Britain, told through their clashing letters

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Nathaniel Hawthorne's rich short-story collection gathers dark allegories and moral fables from his years in a Concord parsonage, probing sin, obsession and the shadowed corners of

$7.50

Fernando Pessoa's fragmentary masterpiece gathers the musings of a Lisbon clerk into an unclassifiable anti-novel, a shimmering diary of solitude, dream and the strangeness of simp

$18.50

Jamaica Kincaid's blistering book-length essay turns the tourist's gaze back on itself, laying bare the wreckage of colonialism and corruption in her native Antigua with unforgetta

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Maggie Nelson's genre-crossing memoir braids queer love, pregnancy and gender transition with sharp philosophical inquiry, making a fierce, tender case for a life that refuses easy

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Nietzsche’s 'Beyond Good and Evil' is a searing critique of morality, truth, and power that refuses to offer easy answers.

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Emerson’s 'Self-Reliance and Other Essays' is a clarion call to trust your instincts and defy conformity.

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