The celebrated Victorian author of Middlemarch explores the turbulent world of Florence during the Italian Renaissance in this sweeping historical novel. Florence, 1492. Lorenzo de Medici has just died, leaving governance of the Florentine Republic to his son Piero, an unskilled ruler. Meanwhile, Tito Melema, a shipwrecked stranger, finds love with a young woman named Romola, the devoted daughter of a blind scholar. Though her brother has a vision...

Using a series of die-cut windows, the book invites the reader to admire and study twenty of the most important masterpieces of the Renaissance including Botticelli's The Birth of Venus and van Eyck's The Arnolfini Marriage from a variety of angles and viewpoints.

In this book the author transports readers to the dawn of the Renaissance and chronicles the life of an intrepid book lover who rescued the Roman philosophical text On the Nature of Things from certain oblivion. In this work he has crafted both a work of history and a story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred...

First appearing as an anonymous serial in "Harper's Magazine" in 1895, "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc" was Mark Twain's final novel and was published as a complete work under his name in 1896. The novel is a stark departure from Twain's usual comic and satirical writings, which is why Twain insisted it initially be published anonymously so that the public would take it seriously. The work is told from the perspective of a fictionalized version...

In Italy in 1491, Mangus the magician and his apprentice are summoned to the castle of Duke Claudio to determine if his daughter is indeed being haunted by a ghost.

"Brimming with rich descriptions of a beautiful country….The News From Paraguay evolves from a quirky, elegant tale of an unconventional love affair into a sweeping epic." - Fort Worth Star-Telegram Lily Tuck's impressive novel offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of 19th century Paraguay, a largely untouched wilderness where European and American figures mix with the Spanish aristocracy of the capital and the indigenous peoples from the surrounding...

Immanuel's Kant's groundbreaking work, considered to be among the most influential philosophical texts in the Western canon Familiar to philosophy students through the centuries, The Critique of Pure Reason is in many ways Kant's magnum opus. First published in 1781, it seeks to define what can be known by reason alone without evidence from experience. Kant begins by defining a posteriori knowledge, which is gained through the senses, versus a priori...

A romance set on the highways of old EnglandOn a cool crisp night in the Epping Forest, a stagecoach was moving amongst the shadows of a full silver moon."the moonlight gives the forest a magical glow", said Mary Gregory a passenger in the coach. The other passenger was her brother, Magistrate Sir Thomas Gregory, but he thought it felt less magical but more eerie and dangerous. He was seeing highwaymen and footpads in every shadow. The driver was...

This book challenges the general assumption that William Shakespeare was the sole author of Hamlet. It is maintained that the plot line and the characters were drawn up by someone else. This someone is thought to have been a person of high rank, a feudal prince, in the Elizabethan society. Being a nobleman whose constant presence at Court was expected, he must have been familiar with life, gossip and intrigues of the Court. Furthermore, he had knowledge...

"If a successful novelist is one who tells us something new about the human spirit and a successful novel transports us to another world, then Gao and Soul Mountain have succeeded spectacularly." - Washington Post Book World An extraordinary work of immense wisdom and profound beauty by the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature In 1983 Chinese playwright, critic, fiction writer, and painter Gao Xingjian was diagnosed with lung cancer and faced...