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Year Of Classics

DISCOURSE ON METHOD & MEDITATIONS TR. CRESS

DISCOURSE ON METHOD & MEDITATIONS TR. CRESS

By: Descartes, René
$15.00
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This edition contains Donald Cress's completely revised translation of the Meditations (from the corrected Latin edition) and recent corrections to Discourse on Method, bringing this version even closer to Descartes's original, while maintaining the clear and accessible style of a classic teaching edition.

HOJOKI

HOJOKI

By: Chomei, Kamo No
$16.99
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Discover the tranquil wisdom of Chomei's 13th-century masterpiece, Hojoki, as it unveils the beauty of imperfection and the serenity of a simple life amidst the chaos of existence.

Hojoki is an introspective poem written in the 13th century by the enigmatic Japanese hermit Kamo no Chomei, who as a young man served in the capital as official court poet but later in life withdrew from society.

Composed in a time of devastating fires, floods, earthquakes, droughts and famines, Chomei's masterpiece reflects on the impermanence of things, expressing life's mysterious beauty and the profound wisdom to be found in nature.

Chomei paints a vivid picture of the chaos and suffering of the human condition. Amidst this turmoil, he discovers an oasis of calm in a simple mountain hut, where he contemplates the virtues of nature and the wabi sabi beauty of imperfection in all things.

In their friends,
People like to find affluence and a ready smile.

Compassion and honesty,
Not so much.

So why not make friends with music and nature instead:
The moon; the flowers?

********

I know my needs,
And I know the world.

I want for nothing,
And do not labor to acquire things.

Quietude is all I desire:
To be free from worry is happiness enough.

This new translation by Matthew Stavros, presented alongside the original Classical Japanese, perfectly captures the profound serenity of Chomei's writings. His poignant verses serve as timely reminders that amidst the uncertainty of this world, true contentment can often be found in the simple life, in embracing fleeting moments, and in seeking solace in nature's beauty.

JAZZ

JAZZ

By: Morrison, Toni
$17.00
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From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner, a passionate, profound story of love and obsession that brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life. With a foreword by the author.

"As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved.... Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem's jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear." --Glamour

In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe's wife, Violet, attacks the girl's corpse. This novel "transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious" (People).

"The author conjures up worlds with complete authority and makes no secret of her angst at the injustices dealt to Black women." --The New York Times Book Review

ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM

ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM

By: Applebaum, Anne
$19.99
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Hannah Arendt's definitive work on totalitarianism--an essential component of any study of twentieth-century political history--now with a new introduction by Anne Applebaum.

In recent years, The Origins of Totalitarianism has become essential reading as we grapple with the rise of autocrats and tyrannical thought across the globe.

The book begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I.

Hannah Arendt then explores the institutions and operations of totalitarian movements, focusing on the two genuine forms of totalitarian government in our time, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which she adroitly recognizes were two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left. From this vantage point, she discusses the evolution of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the nontotalitarian world, the use of terror, and the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination.

This edition includes an introduction by Anne Applebaum--a leading voice on authoritarianism and Russian history--who fears that "once again, we are living in a world that Arendt would recognize."

PHILOCTETES

PHILOCTETES

By: Sophocles
$12.00
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First published in Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff's Sophocles: Four Tragedies, this riveting translation by Peter Meineck of Sophocles' Philoctetes features a new Introduction by Paul Woodruff.

"Peter Meineck has given us a superbly vivid rendering of the play, informed throughout by his practical experience in the theater. His is a Philoctetes that is supremely alive, from start to finish. . . . [I]deal for classroom use . . . accompanied by a new and thoughtful introduction from philosopher and classicist Paul Woodruff. Woodruff anchors the play in the complex web of fears and anxieties of 409 BCE, as both Sophocles' life and Athens' imperial heyday drew to a close. . . . [A]n exceptionally fine work of translation and scholarship that will go far toward demolishing dismissals of the play as inaccessible or unengaging for the modern reader. Sophocles, Meineck and Woodruff eloquently remind us, speaks to every age, not least our own."
--Thomas R. Keith, Loyola University Chicago in CJ-Online

POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON

POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON

By: Dickinson, Emily
$30.00
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Emily Dickinson, poet of the interior life, imagined words/swords, hurling barbed syllables/piercing. Nothing about her adult appearance or habitation revealed such a militant soul. Only poems, written quietly in a room of her own, often hand-stitched in small volumes, then hidden in a drawer, revealed her true self. She did not live in time but in universals--an acute, sensitive nature reaching out boldly from self-referral to a wider, imagined world.

Dickinson died without fame; only a few poems were published in her lifetime. Her legacy was later rescued from her desk--an astonishing body of work, much of which has since appeared in piecemeal editions, sometimes with words altered by editors or publishers according to the fashion of the day.

Now Ralph Franklin, the foremost scholar of Dickinson's manuscripts, has prepared an authoritative one-volume edition of all extant poems by Emily Dickinson--1,789 poems in all, the largest number ever assembled. This reading edition derives from his three-volume work, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition (1998), which contains approximately 2,500 sources for the poems. In this one-volume edition, Franklin offers a single reading of each poem--usually the latest version of the entire poem--rendered with Dickinson's spelling, punctuation, and capitalization intact. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition is a milestone in American literary scholarship and an indispensable addition to the personal library of poetry lovers everywhere.

POEMS OF EXILE: TRISTIA AND THE BLACK SEA LETTERS TR GREEN

POEMS OF EXILE: TRISTIA AND THE BLACK SEA LETTERS TR GREEN

By: Ovid
$34.95
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In the year A.D. 8, Emperor Augustus sentenced the elegant, brilliant, and sophisticated Roman poet Ovid to exile--permanently, as it turned out--at Tomis, modern Constantza, on the Romanian coast of the Black Sea. The real reason for the emperor's action has never come to light, and all of Ovid's subsequent efforts to secure either a reprieve or, at the very least, a transfer to a less dangerous place of exile failed. Two millennia later, the agonized, witty, vivid, nostalgic, and often slyly malicious poems he wrote at Tomis remain as fresh as the day they were written, a testament for exiles everywhere, in all ages.

The two books of the Poems of Exile, the Lamentations (Tristia) and the Black Sea Letters (Epistulae ex Ponto), chronicle Ovid's impressions of Tomis--its appalling winters, bleak terrain, and sporadic raids by barbarous nomads--as well as his aching memories and ongoing appeals to his friends and his patient wife to intercede on his behalf. While pretending to have lost his old literary skills and even to be forgetting his Latin, in the Poems of Exile Ovid in fact displays all his virtuoso poetic talent, now concentrated on one objective: ending the exile. But his rhetorical message falls on obdurately deaf ears, and his appeals slowly lose hope. A superb literary artist to the end, Ovid offers an authentic, unforgettable panorama of the death-in-life he endured at Tomis.
RICHARD III

RICHARD III

By: Shakespeare, William
$9.99
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The authoritative edition of Richard III from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers.In Richard III, Shakespeare invites us on a moral holiday. The play draws us to identify with Richard and his fantasy of total control of self and domination of others. Not yet king at the start of the play, Richard presents himself as an enterprising villain as he successfully plans to dispose of his brother Clarence. Richard achieves similar success in conquering the woman he chooses to marry. He carves a way to the throne through assassination and executions. This edition includes: -The exact text of the printed book for easy cross-reference -Hundreds of hypertext links for instant navigation -Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play -Newly revised explanatory notes conveniently linked to the text of the play -Scene-by-scene plot summaries -A key to the play's famous lines and phrases -An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language -An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play -Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library's vast holdings of rare books -An annotated guide to further reading Essay by Phyllis Rackin The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, is home to the world's largest collection of Shakespeare's printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit Folger.edu.
THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA TR KAUFMANN

THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA TR KAUFMANN

By: Nietzsche, Friedrich
$18.00
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Friedrich Nietzsche's most accessible and influential philosophical work, misquoted, misrepresented, brilliantly original and enormously influential

Nietzsche was one of the most revolutionary and subversive thinkers in Western philosophy, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra remains his most famous and influential work. It describes how the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains to tell the world that God is dead and that the Superman, the human embodiment of divinity, is his successor. Nietzsche's utterance 'God is dead', his insistence that the meaning of life is to be found in purely human terms, and his doctrine of the Superman and the will to power were all later seized upon and unrecognisably twisted by, among others, Nazi intellectuals. With blazing intensity and poetic brilliance, Nietzsche argues that the meaning of existence is not to be found in religious pieties or meek submission to authority, but in an all-powerful life force: passionate, chaotic and free.