Barnes Noble: 2826 books

The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard brought Anatole France immediate fame. The protagonist, a skeptical, elderly scholar, gets caught up in an adventure when he attempts to locate an ancient literary document. Faced with an impossible situation, he is forced to act outside of the law. This suspenseful tale was written with the grace and style for which France is well known.

In De Anima, Aristotle seeks to uncover what separates the living from the dead. He steers a course between two extremes, with all of reality as nothing more than atoms on one side and the mind as independent from the body on the other side. Ultimately, he invents a third kind of position that views mental phenomena to be thoroughly dependent on, though not reducible to, physical events.

Aristotle's Politics is one of the earliest, and at the same time one of the most thorough and balanced, accounts of politics. It provides extended analyses of the origin and function of the state; the proper distribution of political power among the branches of government; a classification of the...

The Book of Carlotta (1905) was Bennett’s third serious novel with a female protagonist. It follows the adventures of the unconventional Carlotta, living on her own as a writer—without a chaperone!  Even so, she is confronted with a dilemma: Will she be able to reconcile her ambition with the “wondrous...

Mr. Prohack is Arnold Bennett’s 1922 comic novel about a delightfully conscientious civil servant who comes into a windfall of  £100,000 and enters upon the busy idle life of the leisure class. 

Published in 1873, The Religion of Humanity takes a scientific approach to the study of theology. Evolving from Transcendentalism to Hegelianism to what Frothingham calls Rationalism, this radical 19th century view of religion was greatly influenced by Darwin’s theories of evolution.  

This insightful biography, published in 1884, looks at the panorama of Emerson’s life, from his boyhood, family, and education to his travels, marriages, lectures, and essays. Ideal for any student of Emerson and his circle, this is an illuminating look at an American icon.

Subtitled, “A Plea for Bibliomania,” Tredwell’s monograph was prepared upon the invitation of the Rembrandt Club in Brooklyn, New York, to tell of his experiences in the “seductive” art of privately illustrating books. The paper was read on December 8, 1880, but was so popular the club printed it in book form.

This 1884 volume in the American Men of Letters series presents the biography of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, better known as Margaret Fuller, a proto-feminist and leading transcendentalist.  Drawing on her letters and papers, Higginson takes pains to show her as a woman of action as well as intellect.

This 1882 volume is both a biography and a deeply personal account of the author's relationship with Emerson and Emerson's philosophical ideas.  Following the death of his son Emerson (named after the philosopher), Conway struggles with the teachings of the man who had meant so much to him.

The author called Emerson “my guide, philosopher, and friend, for more than thirty years,” starting with their first meeting at an Emerson lecture, and continuing through their work at a New England school for girls and their anti-slavery activism. Here is the public and private story of one of America’s...

This pioneering history, published in 1915, championed the study of American literature.  In its preface, Pattee boldly writes, "One can say of the period . . . that the great mass of its writings could have been produced nowhere else but in the United States." Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Walt Whitman, southern poets, and the main themes of American literature—all are deservedly mentioned here.

For more than fifty-five years Ralph Waldo Emerson kept a journal, recording his thoughts on books, authors, and religion, among other subjects. In this engrossing volume editor Perry Bliss presents the best from these journals, carefully selecting passages to create both a revealing portrait of this formidable thinker and a social and historical record of the era in which he lived. 

Posthumously published in 1866, and edited by biographer Henry S. Salt, this volume brings together the great American philosopher’s passionate abolitionist lectures and writings, including “Civil Disobedience,” “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” “The Last Days of John Brown,” “Paradise (to be) Regained,” and “Life without Principle.”