Book picks similar to
The Novices of Sais by Novalis
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Une Semaine de Bonté
Max Ernst - 1934
1891), one of the leading figures of the surrealistic movement and among the most original artists of the 20th century. From old catalog and pulp novel illustrations, Ernst produced this series of 182 bizarre and darkly humorous collage scenes of classic dreams and erotic fantasies which seem mysteriously to lure the unconscious into view: Stern, proper-looking women sprout giant sets of wings, serpents appear in the drawing-room and bed chamber, a baron has the head of a lion, a parlor floor turns to water on which some people can apparently walk while others drown.Une Semaine de Bonté is divided into seven parts, one for each day of the week, with each section illustrating one of Ernst’s “seven deadly elements.” “Oedipus,” “The Court of the Dragon,” and “Three Visible Poems” are among the startling episodes of Ernst's week. The Dada and surrealist epigraphs which introduce each section appear in this edition in both French and English.Une Semaine de Bonté first appeared in 1934 in a series of five pamphlets of fewer than 1,000 copies each, and has never been reprinted before this present edition. Previously available only to a few libraries and collectors, this is a major source and great treat for anyone interested in the surrealists and their work, in collage, visual illusion, dream visions, and the interpretations of dreams.
Lettre à un otage
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - 1944
The acclaimed aviator and adventurer wrote this letter while waiting in Portugal for a passage to the U.S., having just escaped the terrors of war-torn France, and dedicated it to the 40 million Frenchmen, hostages of the Germans. Saint-Exupéry's observations on the aimless existence of his fellow exiles in Lisbon filled with parties, gambling, and spies leads him to examine the nature of existence itself. The particularity of this moment, as the world seemed to be coming to an end, makes for a searing and timeless evocation of the nature of humanity.
Irretrievable
Theodor Fontane - 1891
Christine is a serious soul from a devout background. She is brooding and beautiful and devoted to her husband and their two children. Helmut is lighthearted and pleasure-loving and largely content to defer to his wife’s deeper feelings and better wisdom. They live in a beautiful large house overlooking the sea, which they built themselves, and have been happily married for twenty-three years—only of late a certain tension has crept into their dealings with each other. Little jokes, casual endearments, long-meditated plans: they all hit a raw nerve.How a couple can slowly drift apart, until one day they find themselves in a situation which is nothing they ever wished for but from which they cannot go back, is at the heart of this timeless story of everyday life. Theodor Fontane’s great gift is to tell the story effectively in his characters’ own words, listening to how they talk and fail to talk to each other, watching them turn away from their own true feelings as much as from each other. Irretrievable is a nuanced, affectionate, enormously sophisticated, and profoundly humane reckoning with the blindness of love.
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite
Gregor von Rezzori - 1979
Our hero tells of his childhood: his passion for hunting, his love of the wild landscape of Romania, his ridiculous social snobbery. He leads us through his youth, and between fantastic and colourful stories of Bucharest in the late twenties and early thirties, he dissects his own complicated, at times agonizing, development as a moral creature. We are with him as the Nazis take over Austria; as his own anti-semitism - already such a mixture of belief, caprice, and compromise - is shaken to its core. And later on we meet him as a much older man, one haunted by his own protean character, by the beautiful but tragic web of memories and events that together form his history, and by the greatest love of his life, a beautiful Jewess.
Superabundance
Heinz Helle - 2014
He loves his girlfriend but finds himself attracted to every woman he passes on the street. Totally self-aware yet unable to change his behaviour, he wonders at the ease with which everyone else seems to cope with life. Worse, his brain won't stop its whirring analysis of the world around him, and it's making any human interaction - watching football with friends, drinking with work colleagues, comforting his girlfriend - all but impossible.Superabundance's buzzing narration brings to life the philosophical struggles of everyday existence, and asks: how do we live when our relationships, our actions and even our own minds are filled with such heartbreaking mystery?
Désirée
Annemarie Selinko - 1951
Désirée is enchanted by the young officer, and he asks her to marry him. But he must leave for Paris, where he meets his eventual wife Josephine. A heartbroken Désirée is unsure she'll ever find anyone again. A love story, but so much more, Désirée is the tale of a simple merchant's daughter who ends up with a kind of royalty she never expected: an unforgettable story just waiting to be reborn.
In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays
Anaïs Nin - 1966
Includes several lectures and two interviews.
Blood Brothers
Ernst Haffner - 1932
Told in stark, unsparing detail, Haffner’s story delves into the illicit underworld of Berlin on the eve of Hitler’s rise to power, describing how these blood brothers move from one petty crime to the next, spending their nights in underground bars and makeshift hostels, struggling together to survive the harsh realities of gang life, and finding in one another the legitimacy denied them by society.
Das Boot
Lothar-Günther Buchheim - 1973
Over the coming weeks they must brave the stormy waters of the Atlantic in their mission to seek out and destroy British supply ships. But the tide is beginning to turn against the Germans in the war for the North Atlantic. Their targets now travel in convoys, fiercely guarded by Royal Navy destroyers, and when contact is finally made the hunters rapidly become the hunted. As the U-boat is forced to hide beneath the surface of the sea a cat-and-mouse game begins, where the increasing claustrophobia of the submarine becomes an enemy just as frightening as the depth charges that explode around it. Of the 40,000 men who served on German submarines, 30,000 never returned. Written by a survivor of the U-boat fleet, Das Boot is a psychological drama merciless in its intensity, and a classic novel of World War II.
The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems
Rumi - 2001
Barks's translations capture the inward exploration and intensity that characterize Rumi's poetry, making this unique voice of mysticism and desire contemporary while remaining true to the original poems. In this volume readers will encounter the essence of Sufism's insights into the experience of divine love, wisdom, and the nature of both humanity and God.While Barks's stamp on this collection is clear, it is Rumi's voice that leaps off these pages with a rapturous power that leaves readers breathless. These poems express our deepest yearning for the transcendent connection with the source of the divine: there are passionate outbursts about the torment of longing for the beloved and the sweet delight that comes from union; stories of sexual adventures and of loss; poems of love and fury, sadness and joy; and quiet truths about the beauty and variety of human emotion. For Rumi, soul and body and emotion are not separate but are rather part of the great mystery of mortal life, a riddle whose solution is love. Above all else, Rumi's poetry exposes us to the delight that comes from being fully alive, urging us always to put aside our fears and take the risk of discovering our core self:No one knows what makes the soul wake up so happy! Maybe a dawn breeze has blown the veil from the face of God. These fresh, original translations magnificently convey Rumi's insights into the human heart and its longings with his signature passion and daring, focusing on the ecstatic experience of the inseparability of human and divine love. The match between Rumi's sublime poetry and Coleman Barks's poetic art are unequaled, and here this artistic union is raised to new heights.
Opium: The Diary of His Cure
Jean Cocteau - 1930
It also contains reminiscences of some of Cocteau's closet friends, including Nijinsky and Marcel Proust, and provides revealing insights into the creation of such masterpieces as Orphee and Les Enfants Terribles.
Selected Writings
Paul Valéry - 1950
It concludes with excerpts from his creative writings such as Monsieur Teste and the drama Mon Faust.The list of translators for this volume is distinguished. Among them are Lionel Abel, Léonie Adams, Malcolm Cowly, James Kirkup, C. Day Lewis, Jackson Mathews, Louise Varese, and Vernon Watkins.
Tradition and the Individual Talent: An Essay
T.S. Eliot - 1919
We cannot refer to ?the tradition? or to ?a tradition?; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is ?traditional? or even ?too traditional.? Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing arch?ological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of arch?ology. Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are ?more critical? than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet?s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity."
Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō
Yoshida Kenkō
As Emperor Go-Daigo fended off a challenge from the usurping Hojo family, and Japan stood at the brink of a dark political era, Kenkō held fast to his Buddhist beliefs and took refuge in the pleasures of solitude. Written between 1330 and 1332, Essays in Idleness reflects the congenial priest's thoughts on a variety of subjects. His brief writings, some no more than a few sentences long and ranging in focus from politics and ethics to nature and mythology, mark the crystallization of a distinct Japanese principle: that beauty is to be celebrated, though it will ultimately perish. Through his appreciation of the world around him and his keen understanding of historical events, Kenkō conveys the essence of Buddhist philosophy and its subtle teachings for all readers. Insisting on the uncertainty of this world, Kenkō asks that we waste no time in following the way of Buddha.In this fresh edition, Donald Keene's critically acclaimed translation is joined by a new preface, in which Keene himself looks back at the ripples created by Kenkō's musings, especially for modern readers.