Bawdy tales of pimps, cuckolds, lovers and clever women from the fourteenth-century Florentine masterpiece The Decameron
Ranging across Scandinavia, England and Ireland, a Viking-age epic of two poets in doomed pursuit of Helga the Fair
These delightful miniature tales of macabre hauntings, monsters and magic tricks are Classic China's greatest stories.
Swift's ferocious, landmark eighteenth-century political satire on how to solve a famine in Ireland
Moving, elegiac verse set in rural landscapes, penned by the grief-stricken Hardy after his wife's death.
A seventeenth-century Spanish priest's shrewd maxims on using guile and pragmatism to succeed in a dangerous world
Moonlight, spring blossom, a woman's hair - a medieval Japanese monk reflects on idle moments and life's fleeting joy.
The visionary nineteenth-century American poet celebrates nature and the human spirit in these verses from Leaves of Grass
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful …