English Books

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

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

Keynes’s influential critique of the Versailles settlement, reparations, Europe’s economy, and postwar instability.

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

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

Boswell’s landmark biography of Samuel Johnson, conversation, literary London, character, wit, and memory.

Bacon’s utopian fiction of Salomon’s House, knowledge, experiment, science, travel, and social order.

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.

A Puritan devotional classic on heavenly rest, meditation, repentance, hope, and disciplined Christian life.

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

A classic study of conversion, mysticism, saintliness, melancholy, pragmatism, and individual religious life.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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