Friedrich Nietzsche (Author)
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Michael Tanner (Introducer)
One of the most iconoclastic philosophers of all time, Nietzsche dramatically rejected notions of good and evil, truth and God. Beyond Good and Evil demonstrates that the world is steeped in false piety and infected with a 'slave morality'. With wit and subversive energy, Nietzsche demands that the individual impose their own 'will to power' upon the world.
Viktor E Frankl (Author)
The moving true story of psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl's time as a prisoner in Auschwitz and what we can learn from his experience.
OVER 16 MILLION COPIES SOLD
'A book to read, to cherish, to debate, and one that will ultimately keep the memories of the victims alive' John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
'Every human being should read this book' Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why
In 1942, just months after marrying his wife, Viktor Frankl and his family were sent, first to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and then to Auschwitz.
A prominent Viennese psychiatrist before the war, Frankl was uniquely able to observe the way that he and other inmates coped with the experience of being in in the notorious concentration camp.
During his time in the camps, he noticed that those who comforted others and gave away their last piece of bread often survived the longest. He saw that the kind of person a prisoner became depended, not just the influence of the camp, but on an inner decision. Those who let go of their moral and spiritual selves eventually fell victim to the camp’s degrading effects; those who resisted were able to turn their suffering into a kind of inner triumph.
For Frankl, his experience was proof that everything can be taken from us except the ability to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances. From this, he came to believe that our deepest desire is to search for meaning and purpose.
One of the seminal pieces of literature to emerge from World War 2, this powerful and inspiring book offers us all a way to transcend suffering and find meaning in the art of living.
Praise for Man’s Search for Meaning:
‘Remarkable...It changed my life and became a part of all that I live and all that I teach.’ Susan Jeffers, bestselling author of Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway
‘An enduring work of survival literature.’ New York Times
‘Every human being should read it.’ Simon Sinek, bestselling author of Start With Why
‘One of the moral heroes of the 20th century…His works are essential reading for those who seek to understand the human condition.’ Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks
‘If you read but one book this year, Dr Frankl's book should be that one.’ Los Angeles Times
George Orwell (Author)
Volume 5 of The Complete Works of George Orwell
Victor Gollancz personally commissioned Orwell to write about the distressed north of England in January 1936. After Orwell handed in his typescript a little before Christmas Day 1936, he immediately left to fight in Spain. Shortly afterwards the book was selected for publication by the Left Book Club. This meant a print run of 47,340 copies instead of 2,150, so bringing Orwell to a much wider audience. The first part of Orwell's account, Gollancz wrote in Left News in April 1937, ‘has done, perhaps in a greater degree than any previous book, what the [Left Book] Club is meant to do – it has provoked thought and discussion of the keenest kind’. All copies of the original Left Book Club and first public editions of The Road to Wigan Pier were sold. This edition reproduces the illustrations selected for that first edition, corrects the text and prints Victor Gollancz’s Foreword as an Appendix. (See Volume Ten for Orwell’s Wigan Pier Diary and the research materials he wrote and collected in order to write The Road to Wigan Pier.)
Aldous Huxley (Author)
WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY MARGARET ATWOOD AND DAVID BRADSHAW
Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free. A visit to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations where the old, imperfect life still continues, may be the cure for his distress...
Huxley's ingenious fantasy of the future sheds a blazing light on the present and is considered to be his most enduring masterpiece.
**One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**
Tom Wolfe (Author)
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Jarvis Cocker (Introducer)
Tom Wolfe's genre-defining magical mystery tour through the 1960s published in Vintage Classics for the first time to mark its fiftieth anniversary.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JARVIS COCKER
In the summer of 1964, author Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters set out on an awesome social experiment like no other. Blazing across America in their day-glo schoolbus, doped up and deep ‘in the pudding’, the Pranksters’ arrival on the scene – anarchic, exuberant and LSD-infused – would turn on an entire counter-culture, and provide Tom Wolfe with the perfect free-wheeling subject for this, his pioneering masterpiece of New Journalism.
'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is not simply the best book on the hippies, it is the essential book...the pushing, ballooning heart of the matter' New York Times
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Author)
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Ronald Wilks (Translator)
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Robert Louis Jackson (Introducer)
'Notes from Underground' (1864) is a study of a single character, 'the real man of the Russian majority', and a revelation of Dostoyevsky's own deepest beliefs. One of his best critics has said of the first part that it forms his 'most utterly naked pages. Never afterwards was he so fully and openly to reveal the inmost recesses, unmeant for display, of his heart.' 'The Double' (1846) is the nightmarish story of Mr Golyadkin, a man who is haunted or possessed by his own double. Is 'Mr Golyadkinjunior' really a double or simply a fearful side of his own nature? This uncertainty is what gives urgency and horror to a tale which may be read as a classic study of human breakdown.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Author)
'The best translation of Crime and Punishment currently available... An especially faithful re-creation...with a coiled-spring kinetic energy... Don't miss it' Washington Post
Consumed by the idea of his own special destiny, immured in poverty and deprivation, Rashkolnikov is drawn to commit a terrible crime. In the aftermath, Rashkolnikov is dogged by madness, guilt and a calculating detective, and a feverish cat-and-mouse game unfolds. The only hope for redemption, if Rashkolnikov can but recognise it, lies in the virtuous and faithful Sonya.
TRANSLATED BY RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY
The Vintage Classics Russians series - sumptuous editions of the greatest books to come out of Russia during the most tumultuous period in its history.
Christopher R Browning (Author)
Ordinary Men has been admired all over the world and is now published in the UK for the first time. It takes as its basis the detailed records of one squad from the Nazis' extermination groups and explores in detail its composition, its actions, andthe methods by which it was trained to perform acts of genocide on an industrial scale. He introduces us to cheerful, friendly, ordinary men who killed without hesitation or apparent remorse for years on end, in docile obedience to an authority theyhappily accepted as legitimate. It is a valuable corrective to the idea of German uniqueness and offers a much more chilling picture of human beings as avidly suggestible and desperate for an organising purpose in their lives, however disgusting.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Author)
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Jordan Peterson (Introducer)
Solzhenitsyn spent eleven years in labour camps and in exile.
This book is his masterwork, based on his own experiences as well as the testimony of some 200 survivors. A vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, it chronicles the story of those who dared to oppose Stalin, and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. A thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power, this edition of The Gulag Archipelago was abridged into one volume at the request of the author.
'Helped to bring down an empire. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated' Doris Lessing, Sunday Telegraph
'Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece...helped create the world we live in today' Anne Applebaum
WITH AN AFTERWORD BY JORDAN B. PETERSON
THE OFFICIALLY APPROVED ABRIDGEMENT OF THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO VOLUMES I, II & III
Emily Brontë (Author)
Rediscover Emily Bronte's powerful tale of love, violence and obsession.
'May you not rest, as long as I am living. You said I killed you - haunt me, then'
Wuthering Heights is the tale of two families both joined and riven by love and hate. Cathy is a beautiful and wilful young woman torn between her soft-hearted husband and Heathcliff, the passionate and resentful man who has loved her since childhood. The power of their bond creates a maelstrom of cruelty and violence which will leave one of them dead and cast a shadow over the lives of their children.
Emily Brontë's novel remains a stunningly original and shocking exploration of obsessive passion.
VINTAGE CLASSICS BRONTE SERIES - beautiful editions, three iconic stories, three extraordinary women.
