Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on the 16th October 1854 in Dublin Ireland. The son of Dublin intellectuals Oscar proved himself an outstanding classicist at Dublin, then at Oxford. With his education complete Wilde moved to London and its fashionable cultural and social circles. With his biting wit, flamboyant dress, and glittering conversation, Wilde became one of the most well-known personalities of his day. His only novel, The Picture...

"The Art of Spiritual Harmony" is a seminal work by the pioneering abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky. This influential book delves into the profound connection between art and spirituality, presenting Kandinsky's revolutionary ideas on the role of art in expressing the innermost emotions and transcending the material world. Kandinsky, a master of color and form, articulates his belief that art should go beyond mere representation and tap into deeper...

G.K. Chesterton's surreal masterpiece is a psychological thriller that centers on seven anarchists in turn-of-the-century London who call themselves by the names of the days of the week. Chesterton explores the meanings of their disguised identities in what is a fascinating mystery and, ultimately, a spellbinding allegory. As Jonathan Lethem remarks in his Introduction, The real characters are the ideas. Chesterton's nutty agenda is really quite simple:...

A quietly devastating portrayal of a family in emotional crisis. Edward (Tom Hiddleston) is preparing to leave for a year of voluntary service in Africa. His mother Patricia and his sister Cynthia decide to gather the family together, on a remote island, as a farewell trip to say goodbye to Edward. Hired cook Rose and painting teacher Christopher, though bought in to help, only serve to bring the family's anxieties into sharper focus. When Edward's...

First serialized in 1924 and published as a complete novel in 1925, "The Painted Veil" is the powerful novel of transgression and redemption by popular and prolific British author W. Somerset Maugham. "The Painted Veil" tells the story of the lovely and superficial Kitty Garstin and her unhappy marriage to Walter Fane, a quiet and honorable man. Kitty agrees to marry Walter not because she loves him, but because she fears being upstaged by her younger...

In Fur, Fortune, and Empire, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin chronicles the rise and fall of the fur trade of old, when the rallying cry was "get the furs while they last." Beavers, sea otters, and buffalos were slaughtered, used for their precious pelts that were tailored into extravagant hats, coats, and sleigh blankets. To read Fur, Fortune, and Empire then is to understand how North America was explored, exploited, and settled, while its native...

Henry VIII - William Shakespeare - King Henry VIII has one of the fullest theatrical histories of any play in the Shakespeare canon, yet has been consistently misrepresented, both in performance and in criticism. This edition offers a new perspective on this ironic, multi-layered, collaborative play, revealing it as a complex meditation on the progress of Reformation which sees English life since Henry VIII's day as a series of bewildering changes...

I have gathered into this volume several short fictions of the type I have already found it convenient to refer to as "international"-though I freely recognise, before the array of my productions, of whatever length and whatever brevity, the general applicability of that term.