"This radiant and thrilling debut follows a passionate love affair between two noblewomen who wish to free themselves from their repressive society, whatever the cost. In 17th century Paris, everyone has something to hide. The noblemen and women and writers consort with fortune tellers in the dark confines of their salons, servants practice witchcraft and black magic, and the titled poison family members to obtain inheritance. But for the Baroness...

Marcel Gauchet is Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He is the editor of Le Débat, France's most influential intellectual journal, and the author of numerous books. This current book was published in France as Le Désenchantement du monde. Marcel Gauchet has launched one of the most ambitious and controversial works of speculative history recently to appear, based on the contention that Christianity is "the religion...

The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad First published in 1906, The Mirror of the Sea was the first of Joseph Conrad's two autobiographical memoirs. Discussing it, he called the book "a very intimate revelation. . . . I have attempted here to lay bare with the unreserve of a last hour's confession the terms of my relation with the sea, which beginning mysteriously, like any great passion the inscrutable Gods send to mortals, went on unreasoning and...

"The Invention of Science goes back five hundred years in time to chronicle this crucial transformation, exploring the factors that led to its birth and the people who made it happen. Wootton argues that the Scientific Revolution was actually five separate yet concurrent events that developed independently, but came to intersect and create a new worldview. Here are the brilliant iconoclasts--Galileo, Copernicus, Brahe, Newton, and many more curious...

From Rachel M. Wilson, author of Don't Touch, comes an eerie and utterly compelling short story about best friends Leslie and Evy, whose friendship changes when the enigmatic Marsh brothers move to town. Nina LaCour, author of Everything Leads to You, Hold Still, and The Disenchantments, called Rachel M. Wilson's debut novel, Don't Touch, "a tender love story about the beauty and the risk of showing someone who you really are," while Tim Wynne-Jones,...

The short stories from In the Country of the Young feature characters struggling to find hope and connection-or just escape-through art, work, and love. The title story, a moving account of an angst-ridden seventeen-year-old nearly overwhelmed by his family's aspirations for him, is a paean to the brief moment when the promise of youth and selfhood are untarnished by the disenchantments of life. In "Foxx Hunting," a widower travels to LA to find...

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview: #1 Marxism is a critique of capitalism, the most comprehensive and rigorous critique of its kind. It is also the only such critique that has ever been successful in transforming large sectors of the globe. As long as capitalism exists, therefore, Marxism must as well. #2 The Western system underwent some vital changes in the mid-1970s, when the world suddenly went into...

Christianity is in crisis in the West. The Inkling friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, analyzed why. He developed an account of our spiritual predicament that is radical and illuminating. Barfield realized that the human experience of life shifts fundamentally over periods of cultural time. Our perception of nature, the cosmos and the divine changes dramatically across history. Mark Vernon uses this startling insight to tell the...

Forensic science provides information and data behind the circumstances of a particular death, but it is culture that provides death with meaning. With this in mind, Rite, Flesh, and Stone proposes cultural matters of death as its structuring principle, operating as frames of the expression of mortality within a distinct set of coordinates. The chapters offer original approaches to how human remains are handled in the embodied rituals and social performances...