In this scathing book, the author produced a landmark study of affluent American society that exposes, with brilliant ruthlessness, the habits of production and waste that link invidious business tactics and barbaric social behavior. Veblen's analysis of the evolutionary process sees greed as the overriding motive in the modern economy, and with an impartial gaze he examines the human cost paid when social institutions exploit the consumption of unessential...

"This new translation brings Virgil's masterpiece newly to life for English-language readers. It's the first in centuries crafted by a translator who is first and foremost a poet, and it is a glorious thing. David Ferry has long been known as perhaps our greatest contemporary translator of Latin poetry, his translations of Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics having established themselves as much-admired standards. He brings to the Aeneid the same genius,...

Can you forgive her? is the first of the six Palliser novels. Here Trollope examines parliamentary election and marriage, politics and privacy. As he dissects the Victorian upper class, issues and people shed their pretenses under his patient, ironic probe. Alice Vavasor cannot decide whether to marry her ambitious but violent cousin George or the upright and gentlemanly John Grey?and so finds herself accepting and rejecting each of them in turn....

His beloved wife having died in childbirth Phineas Finn finds Irish society and his job as a poorhouse inspector dull and unsatisfying particularly after the excitement of his former career as a Member of Parliament Back in England the Whigs are determined to overturn the Tory majority in the Parliament of the United Kingdom Since Finn had once been considered the most promising of the younger set he is encouraged to run for office again Bribery romance...

One of America’s greatest women writers, Willa Cather established her talent and her reputation with this extraordinary novel—the first of her books set on the Nebraska frontier. A tale of the prairie land encountered by America’s Swedish, Czech, Bohemian, and French immigrants, as well as a story of how the land challenged them, changed them, and, in some cases, defeated them, Cather’s novel is a uniquely American epic.
Alexandra...

Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition.' In 1757 the 27-year-old Edmund Burke argued that our aesthetic responses are experienced as pure emotional arousal, unencumbered by intellectual considerations. In so doing he overturned the Platonic tradition in aesthetics that had prevailed from antiquity until the eighteenth century, and replaced metaphysics with psychology and even physiology as the basis for the subject. Burke's

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First published in 1516, Saint Thomas More's Utopia is one of the most important works of European humanism. Through the voice of the mysterious traveler Raphael Hythloday, More describes a pagan, communist city-state governed by reason. Addressing such issues as religious pluralism, women's rights, state-sponsored education, colonialism, and justified warfare, Utopia seems remarkably contemporary nearly five centuries after it was written, and it...

"When Pauline Quenu is taken to the seaside to live with her relatives, her love of life contrasts with the pessimism which infects the family. This is the twelfth novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, remarkable for it's depictions of intense emotions and physical and mental suffering "--

Lord Jim tells the story of a young, idealistic Englishman who is disgraced by a single act of cowardice while serving as an officer on the Patna, a merchant-ship sailing from an eastern port. His life is blighted; an isolated scandal assumes horrifying proportions. An older man, Marlow, befriends Jim, and helps to establish him in Patusan, a remote Malay settlement. There he achieves a kind of peace, but his courage is put to the test once more.

Tells the story of David Balfour, a young man of the Lowlands, the southern part of Scotland. David's father, Alexander Balfour, has recently died, and his mother died some time before, so he is now an orphan.--SparkNotes.