World Literature Editions

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  The Lais of Marie de France

  Composed in French in twelfth-century England, these twelve brief verse narratives center on the joys, sorrows, and complications of love affairs in a context that…

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  The Decameron: Selected Tales

  This edition presents 33 of the 100 tales, with at least two from each of the ten days of storytelling. Boccaccio’s general introduction and conclusion…

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  The Death of Ivan Ilyich

  This edition brings together Tolstoy’s 1886 masterpiece and several shorter works that connect with it in thought-provoking ways. The stories are accompanied by a fascinating…

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  The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman

  The Travels of Hildebrand Bowman (1778) tells the story of a fictional midshipman abandoned in Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand, after a battle with Maori…

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  The Apology and Related Dialogues

  Socrates, one of the first of the great philosophers, left no written works. What survives of his thought are second-hand descriptions of his teachings and…

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  Civilization and Its Discontents

  In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud extends and clarifies his analysis of religion; analyzes human unhappiness in contemporary civilization; ratifies the critical importance of the…

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  The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

  A man awakens to find himself transformed into a giant vermin; a performer starves himself to death as a circus attraction; a fiendish engine of…

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  On Perpetual Peace

  Kant’s landmark essay “On Perpetual Peace” is as timely, relevant, and inspiring today as when it was first written over 200 years ago. In it…

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  Notes from the Underground

  Notes from the Underground is recounted from the perspective of an unnamed narrator who describes himself as sick, spiteful, and unattractive. His thoughts and his…

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  Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

  Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is among the most ambitious and influential philosophical works of the early twentieth century, and in recent years it has again…

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  Meditations on First Philosophy

  Considered a foundational text in modern philosophy, the Meditations on First Philosophy presents numerous powerful arguments that to this day influence debates in epistemology, the…

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  Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Writings

  This is an edition of what are arguably Leibniz’s three most important presentations of his metaphysical system: the Discourse on Metaphysics, from 1686, and The…

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  The Future of an Illusion

  Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, declared that religion is a universal obsessional neurosis in his famous work of 1927, The Future of an Illusion.…

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  Beyond the Pleasure Principle

  Beyond the Pleasure Principle is Freud’s most philosophical and speculative work, exploring profound questions of life and death, pleasure and pain. In it Freud introduces…

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  Candide

  The philosophical problem of evil—that a supposedly good God could allow terrible human suffering—troubled the minds of eighteenth-century thinkers as it troubles us today. Voltaire’s…

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  My Brilliant Career

  Written by a teenager living in the Australian bush in the 1890s and originally published in 1901, Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career is a candid…

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  The Alexandreis

  Walter of Châtillon’s Latin epic on the life of Alexander the Great was a twelfth- and thirteenth-century “best-seller:” scribes produced over two hundred manuscripts. The…

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  The Distaff Gospels

  The Distaff Gospels (Les Évangiles des Quenouilles), a fascinating fifteenth-century collection of more than 250 popular beliefs, constitutes a kind of encyclopedia of late medieval…

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  Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals

  Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, first published in 1785, is still one of the most widely read and influential works of moral philosophy.…

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  Guanya Pau

  The first book of long fiction by an African to be published in English, this novel tells the story of a young woman of the…

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  The Communist Manifesto

  L.M. Findlay’s elegant new translation is a work of textual and historical scholarship. Few books have had as much of an impact on modern history…

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  Bug-Jargal

  Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1826) is one of the most important works of nineteenth-century colonial fiction, and quite possibly the most sustained novelistic treatment of the…

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  Between Two Worlds

  Set in Soweto outside Johannesburg, Between Two Worlds is one of the most important novels of South Africa under apartheid. Originally published under the title…

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  The Story of an African Farm

  The Story of an African Farm (1883) marks an early appearance in fiction of Victorian society’s emerging New Woman. The novel follows the spiritual quests…