Books that make love to your psyche
Discover transformative books that deeply connect with your psyche. Explore our curated list of reads designed to inspire love, growth, and profound self-discovery.
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Ishmael
by Daniel Quinn
One of the most beloved and bestselling novels of spiritual adventure ever published, Ishmael has earned a passionate following. This special twenty-fifth anniversary edition features a new foreword and afterword by the author. âA thoughtful, fearlessly low-key novel about the role of our species on the planet . . . laid out for us with an originality and a clarity that few would deny.ââThe New York Times Book Review Teacher Seeks Pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person. It was just a three-line ad in the personals section, but it launched the adventure of a lifetime. So begins an utterly unique and captivating novel. It is the story of a man who embarks on a highly provocative intellectual adventure with a gorillaâa journey of the mind and spirit that changes forever the way he sees the world and humankindâs place in it. In Ishmael, which received the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship for the best work of fiction offering positive solutions to global problems, Daniel Quinn parses humanityâs origins and its relationship with nature, in search of an answer to this challenging question: How can we save the world from ourselves? Explore Daniel Quinnâs spiritual Ishmael trilogy: ISHMAEL ⢠MY ISHMAEL ⢠THE STORY OF B Praise for Ishmael âAs suspenseful, inventive, and socially urgent as any fiction or nonfiction you are likely to read this or any other year.ââThe Austin Chronicle âBefore weâre halfway through this slim book . . . weâre in [Daniel Quinnâs] grip, we want Ishmael to teach us how to save the planet from ourselves. We want to change our lives.ââThe Washington Post âArthur Koestler, in an essay in which he wondered whether mankind would go the way of the dinosaur, formulated what he called the Dinosaurâs Prayer: âLord, a little more time!â Ishmael does its bit to answer that prayer and may just possibly have bought us all a little more time.ââLos Angeles Times
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My War Gone By, I Miss it So
by Anthony Loyd
Nothing can prepare you for Anthony Loyd's portrait of war. It is the story of the unspeakable terror and the visceral, ecstatic thrill of combat, and the lives and dreams laid to waste by the bloodiest conflict that Europe has witnessed since the Second World War.
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The Dharma Bums
by Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouacâs classic novel about friendship, the search for meaning, and the allure of nature âIn [On the Road] Kerouacâs heroes were sensation seekers; now they are seekers after truth . . . the novel often attains a beautiful dignity.ââChicago Tribune First published in 1958, a year after On the Road put the Beat Generation on the map, The Dharma Bums stands as one of Jack Kerouacâs most powerful and influential novels. The story focuses on two ebullient young Americansâmountaineer, poet, and Zen Buddhist Japhy Ryder, and Ray Smith, a zestful, innocent writerâwhose quest for Truth leads them on a heroic odyssey, from marathon parties and poetry jam sessions in San Franciscoâs Bohemia to solitude and mountain climbing in the High Sierras.
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Mother Night
by Kurt Vonnegut
âVonnegut is George Orwell, Dr. Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer . . . a zany but moral mad scientist.ââTime Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all. âA great artist.ââCincinnati Enquirer âA shaking up in the kaleidoscope of laughter . . . Reading Vonnegut is addictive!ââCommonweal
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Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
Catch-22 is like no other novel. It is one of the funniest books ever written, a keystone work in American literature, and even added a new term to the dictionary. At the heart of Catch-22 resides the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero endlessly inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war. His efforts are perfectly understandable because as he furiously scrambles, thousands of people he hasn't even met are trying to kill him. His problem is Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions that he is committed to flying, he is trapped by the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, the hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule from which the book takes its title: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved. Catch-22 is a microcosm of the twentieth-century world as it might look to some one dangerously sane -- a masterpiece of our time.
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The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test
by Tom Wolfe
Wolfe details his wild cross-country ride with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, offering a vivid portrayal of the hippy subculture in its own joyful, psychedelic, excessive, and terrifying colors.
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Tortilla Flat
by John Steinbeck
Danny, a mule skinner during the First World War, returns to Tortilla Flat to enjoy the carefree and amoral life of the paisano
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Candide
by Francois Voltaire
"All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds" It was the indifferent shrug and callous inertia that this "optimism" concealed which so angered Voltaire, who found the "all for the best" approach a patently inadequate response to suffering, to natural disasters, not to mention the questions of illness and man-made war. Moreover, as the rebel whose satiric genius had earned him not only international acclaim, but two stays in the Bastille, flogging, and exile, Voltaire knew personally what suffering entailed. In Candide he whisks his young hero and friends through a ludicrous variety of tortures, tragedies, and a reversal of fortune, in the company of Pangloss, a "metaphysico-theologo-comolo-nigologist" of unflinching optimism. The result is one of the glories of eighteenth-century satire. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Nine Stories
by J.D. Salinger
The "original, first-rate, serious, and beautiful" short fiction (New York Times Book Review) that introduced J. D. Salinger to American readers in the years after World War II, including "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and the first appearance of Salinger's fictional Glass family. Nine exceptional stories from one of the great literary voices of the twentieth century. Witty, urbane, and frequently affecting, Nine Stories sits alongside Salinger's very best work--a treasure that will passed down for many generations to come. The stories: A Perfect Day for Bananafish Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut Just Before the War with the Eskimos The Laughing Man Down at the Dinghy For Esm --with Love and Squalor Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period Teddy
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The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
A group of expatriates travel from Paris to the Pamplona bullfights.
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
by Ken Kesey
An international bestseller and the basis for the hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one of the defining works of the 1960s. In this classic novel, Ken Keseyâs hero is Randle Patrick McMurphy, a boisterous, brawling, fun-loving rebel who swaggers into the world of a mental hospital and takes over. A lusty, life-affirming fighter, McMurphy rallies the other patients around him by challenging the dictatorship of Nurse Ratched. He promotes gambling in the ward, smuggles in wine and women, and openly defies the rules at every turn. But this defiance, which starts as a sport, soon develops into a grim struggle, an all-out war between two relentless opponents: Nurse Ratched, backed by the full power of authority, and McMurphy, who has only his own indomitable will. What happens when Nurse Ratched uses her ultimate weapon against McMurphy provides the storyâs shocking climax. âBRILLIANT!ââTime âA SMASHING ACHIEVEMENT...A TRULY ORIGINAL NOVEL!ââMark Schorer âMr. Kesey has created a world that is convincing, alive and glowing within its own boundaries...His is a large, robust talent, and he has written a large, robust book.ââSaturday Review
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The Divine Comedy
by Dante Alighieri
The Divine Comedy, translated by Allen Mandelbaum, begins in a shadowed forest on Good Friday in the year 1300. It proceeds on a journey that, in its intense recreation of the depths and the heights of human experience, has become the key with which Western civilization has sought to unlock the mystery of its own identity. Mandelbaum's astonishingly Dantean translation, which captures so much of the life of the original, renders whole for us the masterpiece of that genius whom our greatest poets have recognized as a central model for all poets. This Everyman's edition-containing in one volume all three cantos, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso-includes an introduction by Nobel Prize--winning poet Eugenio Montale, a chronology, notes, and a bibliography. Also included are forty-two drawings selected from Botticelli's marvelous late-fifteenth-century series of illustrations. (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
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The Selfish Gene
by Richard Dawkins
Science need not be dull and bogged down by jargon, as Richard Dawkins proves in this entertaining look at evolution. The themes he takes up are the concepts of altruistic and selfish behaviour; the genetical definition of selfish interest; the evolution of aggressive behaviour; kinshiptheory; sex ratio theory; reciprocal altruism; deceit; and the natural selection of sex differences. 'Should be read, can be read by almost anyone. It describes with great skill a new face of the theory of evolution.' W.D. Hamilton, Science
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All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
The masterpiece of the German experience during World War I, considered by many the greatest war novel of all timeâwith an Oscarâwinning film adaptation now streaming on Netflix. â[Erich Maria Remarque] is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank.ââThe New York Times Book Review I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. . . . This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army during World War I. They become soldiers with youthful enthusiasm. But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught breaks in pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches. Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another . . . if only he can come out of the war alive.
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