Recommendations based on "The Lord Chandos Letter And Other Writings"

The candid and far-reaching interview with the public intellectual and author of Illness as Metaphor, conducted in 1978 Paris and New York. Over the summer and fall of 1978, Susan Sontag engaged in a series of deeply stimulating, provocative and intimate conversations with Jonathan Cott of Rolling Stone magazine. While the printed interview was extensive, it covered only a third of their twelve hours of discussion. Now, for the first time, the entire transcript of Sontag’s remarkable conversation is available in book form, accompanied by Cott’s preface and recollections. An acclaimed author of novels and essays, a renowned cultural critic and radical anti-war activist, Sontag was at the height of her powers in the late 1970s. Her musings and observations in this interview reveal the breadth and depth of her critical intelligence and curiosities at the time. These hours of conversation offer a revelatory and indispensable look at the self-described "besotted aesthete" and "obsessed moralist."   

Michel de Montaigne was one of the most influential figures of the Renaissance, singlehandedly responsible for popularising the essay as a literary form. This Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Essays is translated from the French and edited with an introduction and notes by M.A. Screech. In 1572 Montaigne retired to his estates in order to devote himself to leisure, reading and reflection. There he wrote his constantly expanding 'assays', inspired by the ideas he found in books contained in his library and from his own experience. He discusses subjects as diverse as war-horses and cannibals, poetry and politics, sex and religion, love and friendship, ecstasy and experience. But, above all, Montaigne studied himself as a way of drawing out his own inner nature and that of men and women in general. The Essays are among the most idiosyncratic and personal works in all literature and provide an engaging insight into a wise Renaissance mind, continuing to give pleasure and enlightenment to modern readers. With its extensive introduction and notes, M.A. Screech's edition of Montaigne is widely regarded as the most distinguished of recent times. Michel de Montaigne (1533-1586) studied law and spent a number of years working as a counsellor before devoting his life to reading, writing and reflection. If you enjoyed The Complete Essays, you might like Francois Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, also available in Penguin Classics. 'Screech's fine version ... must surely serve as the definitive English Montaigne' A.C. Grayling, Financial Times 'A superb edition' Nicholas Wollaston, Observer

This work is a selection from Susan Sontag's early writings about the arts and contemporary culture. First published in 1966, the book quickly became a modern classic and has had enormous influence here and abroad. As well as the title essay, 'On Style' and the famous 'Notes on Camp', the book includes discussion of such figures as Satre, Simone Weil, Genet, Brecht, Beckett, Artaud, and Goddard.

Despite growing interest in her philosophy, Simone de Beauvoir remains widely misunderstood. She is typically portrayed as a mere intellectual follower of her companion, Jean-Paul Sartre. In Philosophical Writings, Beauvoir herself shows that nothing could be further from the truth. Beauvoir's philosophical work suffers from a lack of English-language translation or, worse, mistranslation into heavily condensed popular versions. Philosophical Writings provides an unprecedented collection of complete, scholarly editions of philosophical texts that cover the first twenty-three years of Beauvoir's career, including a number of recently discovered works. Ranging from metaphysical literature to existentialist ethics, Philosophical Writings brings together diverse elements of Beauvoir's work while highlighting continuities in the development of her thought. Each of the translations features detailed notes and a scholarly introduction explaining its larger significance. Revelatory and long overdue, Philosophical Writings adds to the ongoing resurgence of interest in Beauvoir's thought and to her growing influence on today's philosophical curriculum.

This compilation assembles previously published and unpublished essays by Schnittke and supplements them with an interview with cellist and scholar Alexander Ivashkin. The book is illustrated with musical examples, many of them in Schnittke's own hand. In A Schnittke Reader, the composer speaks of his life, his works, other composers, performers, and a broad range of topics in 20th-century music. The volume is rounded out with reflections by some of Schnittke's contemporaries.

Although trained as a philosopher, Simone Weil (1909–43) contributed to a wide range of subjects, resulting in a rich field of interdisciplinary Weil studies. Yet those coming to her work from such disciplines as sociology, history, political science, religious studies, French studies, and women’s studies are often ignorant of or baffled by her philosophical investigations. In Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings, Eric O. Springsted presents a unique collection of Weil’s writings, one concentrating on her explicitly philosophical thinking. The essays are drawn chiefly from the time Weil spent in Marseille in 1940-42, as well as one written from London; most have been out of print for some time; three appear for the first time; all are newly translated. Beyond making important texts available, this selection provides the context for understanding Weil's thought as a whole. This volume is important not only for those with a general interest in Weil; it also specifically presents Weil as a philosopher, chiefly one interested in questions of the nature of value, moral thought, and the relation of faith and reason. What also appears through this judicious selection is an important confirmation that on many issues respecting the nature of philosophy, Weil, Wittgenstein, and Kierkegaard shared a great deal.

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) is widely celebrated as the most original political thinker in Western Marxism and an all-around outstanding intellectual figure. Arrested and imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime in 1926, Gramsci died before fully regaining his freedom. Nevertheless, in his prison notebooks, he recorded thousands of brilliant reflections on an extraordinary range of subjects, establishing an enduring intellectual legacy.Columbia University Press's multivolume Prison Notebooks is the only complete critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's seminal writings in English. The notebooks' integral text gives readers direct access not only to Gramsci's influential ideas but also to the intellectual workshop where those ideas were forged. Extensive notes guide readers through Gramsci's extraordinary series of reflections on an encyclopedic range of topics. Volume 1 opens with an introduction to Gramsci's project, describing the circumstances surrounding the composition of his notebooks and examining his method of inquiry and critical analysis. It is accompanied by a detailed chronology of the author's life. An unparalleled translation of notebooks 1 and 2 follows, which laid the foundations for Gramsci's later writings. Most intriguing are his earliest formulations of the concepts of hegemony, civil society, and passive revolution.

'It was the discovery of the essays celebrating his childhood and youth that altered my perception of Camus, from a thinker to a writer whose intellectual lucidity was a product of the wealth - the sensual immediacy and clarity - that had been heaped on his senses' Geoff DyerAlbert Camus was born in a 'world of poverty and sunshine' in Algeria, which would infuse all of his work. This new collection brings together three volumes of Camus' most intimate autobiographical writings for the first time. The Wrong Side and the Right Side, his first book, describes his family and his early years in a working-class neighbourhood. Nuptials rejoices in the sensuality of sun, landscape and sea, while Summer ranges over the cities of Algiers and Oran, nature and identity. Lyrical and emotional, these pieces enrich our understanding of Camus and his love of life.

Blending intellectual speculation with anecdote and personal reflection, the Renaissance thinker and writer Michel de Montaigne pioneered the modern essay form. This edition contains all of his idiosyncratic and timeless writings on subjects as varied as the virtues of solitude, the power of the imagination, the pleasures of reading, the importance of sleep and why we sometimes laugh and cry at the same things. Montaigne's complete Essays, translated by M. A. Screech, are presented here as a beautifully produced, desirable collector's edition. This oversize volume is printed in two-colour, bound in high-quality rich blue cloth and embellished with gold foil stamped into the design. Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, was born in 1533. He was brought up to speak Latin as his mother tongue and always retained a Latin turn of mind; though he knew Greek, he preferred to use translations. In 1569 he published his French version of the Natural Theology of Raymond Sebond; his Apology is only partly a defence of Sebond and sets sceptical limits to human reasoning about God, man and nature. He retired in 1571 to his lands at Montaigne, devoting himself to reading and reflection and composing his Essays (first version 1580). He loathed the fanaticism and cruelties of the religious wars of the period, but sided with Catholic orthodoxy and legitimate monarchy. He died at Montaigne in 1592 while preparing the final, and richest, edition of his Essays. M. A. Screech is an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is recognised as a world authority on the Renaissance, especially for his studies on Rabelais, Erasmus and Montaigne. His translation of Montaigne was immediately welcomed for its discrete learning and elegance. In recognition of his achievements the French Republic made him a Chevalier dans l'Ordre national du Merite and then a Chevalier dans la Legion d' Honneur.

In the final decade of his life, Camille Pissarro abandoned his experimentation with neo-Impressionist technique and developed new forms of pictorial expression that drew more on the Impressionism of his earlier career. During this period - from 1893 to 1903 - Pissarro besides continuing to explore the landscape genre that had been his main subject matter, also began to grapple with urban scenes, and his paintings of Paris, Rouen, and the busy ports of Dieppe and Le Havre became an important component of his artistic output. At this time, Pissarro, like Monet, started to work on canvases in series, often painting six or seven canvases simultaneously and discarding one temporarily when the light, the traffic, the weather, or his mood altered. He started all of them at the scene, in the manner perfected by the Impressionists, and worked with extraordinary speed and deftness. By 1899, he lived part-time in Paris and, from his combined studio and living space, painted a series that included over forty views of the same motif. Richard Bretell and Joachim Pissarro begin this book on Pissarro's cityscapes by setting the paintings in their broad, art-historical context, tracing the tradition of the image of the city both within and prior to Impressionism and looking also at contemporary treatments of the urban scene by Vuillard, Bonnard, and Toulouse-Lautrec. The authors examine the history of the representation of the city in the literature, poetry, and philosophical writings of the nineteenth century and discuss Pissarro's knowledge of these alternative theories of the city. Using Pissarro's extensive correspondence from this period of his life, they describe the artist's attitudes toward his final works. The book also includes a catalogue of Pissarro's urban series, each one introduced by an overview covering the history of the cityscape pictured and the production, exhibition history, and early critical reception of the series. Full data on each painting follows.