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Greetings Hannah, I am a Californian of Polish descent that became interested in the literature of my ancestral homeland a few years ago. I have since read a number of Polish authors in English...

Schopenhauer's philosophy, that posits an obnoxious striving will behind all nature, was the inspiration for all the major Germanic philosophies that came after him. Nietzsche, Marx and Freud are...

Shevek since you admit that Leguin is sympathetic to anarchism and that Annares is fashioned upon anarchist theories, you cannot also claim that Annares may not be interpreted as an example of what...

Shevek, here is what Leguin says in the brief forward to her short story "The Day Before the Revolution" which is about a day in the life of Odo the anarchist for whom the settlers of Annares named...

Shevek, Leguin does portray Anarres as somewhat troubled due to food shortages and a reluctance to be honest with its youth about what life is really like on their former homeworld, but she makes no...

You really should read Ursula Leguin's Hugo Award winning novel "The Dispossessed". It is about a planet settled by anarcho-syndicalists who'd left their homeworld 150 earlier, and a daring...

You really should read Ursula Leguin's Hugo Award winning novel "The Dispossessed". It is about a planet settled by anarcho-syndicalists who'd left their homeworld 150 earlier, and a daring...

Regarding the abuse of horses there is Doestoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, or maybe it's The Idiot, wherein the peasant driver of an overloaded cart decides to whip its horse to death if he can't...

Another one of Lawrence's books that enraged the censors is the novella entitled "The Man Who Died". He had to publish it in France under the title "The Escaped ****". It tells the tale of Jesus,...

I recommend you start with Lawrence's most ambitious novel "The Plumed Serpent". Its plot comprises nothing less than the political takeover, and re-paganization, of Mexico by a group of Nietzschean...

Once upon taking off a wetsuit I found a live sandcrab had been trapped in one of its legs. I next went to the library and, like the OP I decided to try some John Fante at Bukowski's...

WICKES, you've asked an interesting question about the relation of Nietzsche's philosphy to "The Picture of Dorian Gray". The reverence Lord Harry expresses for the Hellenic and his disdain for...

Read "Death on the Installment" plan next. It is Celine's prequel to the story told in "Journey to the End of the Night" and it is easily as good a novel as Journey. I actually enjoyed it even more...

The best testament to Borges' greatness I have ever read is from Witold Gombrowicz. Just arrived in Argentina when WW2 started, he stayed for 25 years, he met Borges personally and he was merciless...

This novella by Tolstoy was inspired by the writer's real life experience. He heard a performance of Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata and he was so aroused that he then had sex with his wife despite...

Slavador Dali's autobiography "The Secret Life of Salvador Dali" is a great work of surrealism. He is, amazingly, a better writer than a painter. The anecdotes he tells in that book are so weird...

I think the most amazing literary feat of The Magic Mountain is the "pencil echo" incident. I was just stunned at how clever that was. So too the colonialist magnate's suicide device was just so...

Lem's novel "Return From The Stars" is absolutely brilliant. The massive velocities involved in space travel turn astronauts into freakishly over-muscled hulks, as well as dilating time for them so...

The Picture of Dorian Gray was inspired by Joris Karl Huysmanns' novel Au Rebours (Against the Grain or Against Nature). The small green volume that Dorian's friend and mentor gives him in the course...

Rabindranath Tagore

Villiers d'Isle Adam is one of my favorite writers. His play Axel has my favorite line in all of French drama "Vivre? Les serviteurs feront cela pour nous." !!!!!! There is nothing cooler than that!...

Stanislaw Lem wrote the Cyberiad several decades ago.

Borges has a story about a poet with the ability to see the entire world, via the magical Aleph, and who chose to focus his verses on...

I recommend The Razor's Edge by Sommerset Maughm. It is a masterful third person account of a young man named Larry who, after having been confronted with death in the form of an young Irish airman...

Claiming that Hiedegger was expressing platitudes shows that you have failed to grasp the meaning of his destruction of Western metaphysics. His style of writing may be difficult, and his use of...

Hey Jack, Parmenides is the first Western thinker to clearly set out the parameters of the metaphysics of Being and that is why I recommended the threadstarter start with him. If you want to confuse...