Artisan: 415 books

Abelard and Heloise – The Love Letters details one of the worlds most celebrated and tragic love affairs. Through their letters we follow the path of their 12th-century romance, from its ecstatic beginnings when Heloise became Abelard’s pupil, through the suffering of public scandal and...

  With the publication of Utopia, Thomas More provided a scathing analysis of the shortcomings of his own society, a realistic suggestion for an alternative mode of social organization, and a satire on unrealistic idealism. Over the centuries, Utopia has become an immensely influential...

The Precipice is a Russian novel by Ivan Goncharov, published in 1869, a decade after his masterwork, "Oblomov." In it, Goncharov seeks to counter the ideas of the new generation of skeptics, nihilists, and dreamers, and presents the conflicts among the different levels of Russian...

“At first he thought she had suffocated herself. Grabbing her by the shoulders, he turned her over, still clutching the pillow to hide her face to stop herself from screaming...” Guy De Maupassant, a protégé of Gustave Flaubert, is considered one of the fathers of the modern short story...

“He even predicted how the miracle would come about; it would be like a lightning stroke, an awakening, an exaltation of the entire being, whilst the evil, that horrid, diabolical weight which stifled the poor girl would once more ascend and fly away as though emerging by her mouth…” Lourdes...

Paul Ferrol’s wife was a woman of violent temper, who parted him from Elinor, his first love. When she is murdered, suspicion rests upon Franks, a laborer on the estate; but Ferrol gets him off, and sends him to Canada with his wife. Soon after, Ferrol marries his first love. They have one daughter,...

A wealthy patrician, popular commander, and patriotic Roman citizen, Faustus was on a path to glory. Narrowly escaping a devastating ambush, he is attacked and bitten by a werewolf. On his quest to stop the lycanthrophy, he loses his wealth, family connections and military rank. Through his...

From the foreword by Philip Dossick: “There is a sacred thread that ties the prophets of peace together: Wovoka. Mahatma Gandhi. Martin Luther King. Nelson Mandela. Abraham Lincoln. This thread cannot be broken. It will never be broken. Add to these the names of Franz Boas, the pioneering...

From the foreword by Philip Dossick: “The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution was proposed on January 31, 1865. In part, it reads as follows: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall...

When a plane with twelve passengers crashes into a small tropical island on its way to Australia, ten of the twelve people on the plane die. Who will live and who will die? It changes in each installment. We will start by introducing to each of the passengers, and then we get into the fun… Two...

How do you conquer the problem of scaling software development to hundreds or thousands of simultaneous workers using thousands or hundreds of thousands of project artifacts during the course of development of a software product? In A Virtual Environment Framework for Software Engineering,...

In one of the most significant of Dostoyevsky’s existential classics, White Nights, his unnamed protagonist is a sensitive resident of a very Westernized St. Petersburg of the mid-nineteenth century. He describes himself as a "dreamer" and a loner. Indeed he is a young recluse...

In 1891, French painter Paul Gauguin sailed to the island of Tahiti, to what he hoped would be an unspoiled paradise. He kept a journal chronicling his thoughts and impressions of that time. Noa Noa—the most widely known of Gauguin's writings—is reproduced here from a rare early...

In Sir Walter Scott’s classic tale, The Black Dwarf (Sir Edward Mauley, a hermit regarded by the locals as being in league with the Devil) becomes entangled in an intricate tale of love, revenge, betrayal, and a threatened forced marriage. Set in the immediate aftermath of the Union between...