One of the world's leading writers and intellectuals reflects on the most pressing social, political, and cultural issues of the day. "One of the most influential thinkers of our time."--"Los Angeles Times." Most famous for his complex, erudite novels, semiotician and literary theorist Eco (The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, etc.) devotes these essays primarily to the quest for tolerance in an intolerant world and to the intellectual responsibility...

"This book is a new translation of Tolstoy's most important short fiction. Here are eleven stories from the mature author, some autobiographical, others moral parables, and all imaginative, transcendent, and evocatively drawn. They include The Prisoner of the Caucasus, inspired by Tolstoy's experiences as a soldier in the Chechen War, and one of only two of his works that Tolstoy himself considered "good art"; Hadji Murat, the novella Harold Bloom...

Legends of the Jews is a most remarkable and comprehensive compilation of stories connected to the Hebrew Bible. It is an indispensable reference on that body of literature known as Midrash, the imaginative retelling and elaboration on Bible stories in which mythological tales about demons and magic co-exist with moralistic stories about the piety of the patriarchs.

A collection of three modern plays by the master of the absurd and member of the French Academy. Rhinoceros: A boozing young man in love with his co-worker finds that everyone around him, even his pompous and condescending best friend, is changing into a rhinoceros. Originally an absurdist play by Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros tells the story of a French town plagued by rhinoceroses. The leader: A satire on mass adulation of political leaders. We open...

"Lucretius was a Roman philosopher and poet of the first century BC whose only known work is The Nature of Things (c.50 BC), a didactic poem in six books that expounds his philosophical beliefs. He followed Epicurean ideas, believing the world to be made up of tiny atoms moving in a void and viewing life in terms of pleasure and pain, representing good and bad. The Nature of Things was to have a huge influence on poets such as Virgil (whose Georgics...

"Oedipus, the former ruler of Thebes, has died. Now, when his young daughter Antigone defies her uncle, Kreon, the new ruler, because he has prohibited the burial of her dead brother, she and he enact a primal conflict between young and old, woman and man, individual and ruler, family and state, courageous and self-sacrificing reverence for the gods of the earth and perhaps self-serving allegiance to the gods of the sky." "Echoing through Western...

A comprehensive collection of ecstatic poetry that delights with its energy and passion, The Essential Rumi brings the vibrant, living words of famed thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Jelalludin Rumi to contemporary readers.

Presents a bilingual collection of the young author's poems in English and Belarusian on facing pages, examining themes of violence, victimhood, beauty, pop culture, and difficult circumstances.

"On the shores of this river, all the birds that fly, drink, perch on branches, and disturb siestas with the demonic squawking of the possessed-all those birds were once women. Welcome to Argentina and the fascinating, frightening, fantastical imagination of Mariana Enriquez. In twelve spellbinding new stories, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out when they encounter terror, the surreal, and the supernatural....