English Books

A comparative study of myth, ritual, magic, kingship, fertility, sacrifice, and religion.

A brief spiritual classic on prayer, simplicity, inner attention to God, and everyday life.

William James’s landmark psychology text on consciousness, habit, attention, emotion, will, and self.

Locke’s practical educational treatise on habit, character, discipline, health, reason, and formation.

A major economic reform text on land, rent, inequality, wages, poverty, and the single tax.

Veblen’s sharp analysis of conspicuous consumption, status, leisure, wealth, taste, and institutions.

Milton’s famous prose defense of unlicensed printing, free inquiry, truth, conscience, and public debate.

Mill’s political treatise on representation, liberty, participation, institutions, voting, and civic character.

Locke’s classic argument for religious toleration, civil government, conscience, churches, and liberty.

A nineteenth-century military history of battles that shaped empire, politics, Europe, and world history.

Mary Shelley’s prophetic novel of plague, friendship, political collapse, memory, and the end of humanity.

An epistolary novel of virtue, power, class, persuasion, and the contested voice of Pamela Andrews.

A stark Bowery story of poverty, family violence, illusion, social judgment, and urban naturalism.

A naturalist San Francisco novel of greed, marriage, obsession, money, violence, and decline.

A social novel of inheritance, guardianship, manners, marriage, money, and Cecilia Beverley’s independence.

Gibbon’s monumental history of Rome’s transformation, emperors, Christianity, war, politics, and empire.

Ruskin’s major defense of Turner and a sweeping study of landscape, truth, nature, imagination, and art.

Essays on Renaissance art, beauty, style, Leonardo, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and aesthetic experience.

A Victorian art classic on sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory, and obedience in architecture.

George Eliot’s Florence novel of Romola, Tito Melema, Savonarola, marriage, conscience, and Renaissance politics.

George Eliot’s late novel of Gwendolen Harleth, Daniel Deronda, identity, duty, marriage, and Jewish renewal.

Edna Pontellier’s search for selfhood, desire, art, motherhood, and freedom in Creole Louisiana.

A political Gothic novel of pursuit, secrecy, class power, surveillance, and the machinery of justice.

A witty epistolary novel about a young woman entering London society, manners, courtship, and female reputation.