In books lauded as brilliant, exhilarating & profound, Roberto Calasso has revealed the unexpected intersections of ancient & modern through topics ranging from Greek & Indian mythology to what a legendary African kingdom can tell us about the French Revolution. In this first translation of his most important essays, Calasso brings his powerful intellect & elegant prose style to bear on the essential thinkers of our time, providing a sweeping analysis of the current state of Western culture.' Forty-nine steps' refers to the Talmudic doctrine that there are forty-nine steps to meaning in every passage of the Torah. Employing this interpretative approach, Calasso offers a 'secret history' of European literature & philosophy in the wake of Nietzsche, Marx & Freud. Calasso analyses how figures ranging from Gustav Flaubert, Gottfried Benn, Karl Kraus & Martin Heidegger to Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht & Theodor Adorno have contributed to, or been emblematic of, the current state of Western thought. This book's theme, writ large, is the power of the fable
- specifically, its persistence in art & literature despite its exclusion from orthodox philosophy. In its breadth & the nature of its concerns, The Forty-nine Steps is a philosophical & literary twin to the widely praised Marriage of Cadmus & Harmony. Combining erudition with engaging prose & original insights, Calasso contributes a daring new interpretation of some of the most challenging writers of the past 150 years.
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A new translation by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler & Olga Meerson.

Platonov's dystopian novel describes the lives of a group

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The shy, young Duke of Sale has never known his parents, Instead, his Grace Adolphus Gillespie Vernon Ware (Gilly for short) has endured twenty-four years of rigorous mollycoddling form his uncle & valet. But his natural diffidence conceals a rebellious spirit. So when Gilly hears of Belinda, the beautiful foundling who appears to be blackmailing his cousin, he absconds with glee. No sooner has he entered this new & dangerous world than he is plunged into a frenzy of intrigue, kidnap & adventure.. . ...

Are you fabulous & very, very single?
Do you secretly suspect that you suck at love?

Author Cindy Lu knew for a long


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Are you fabulous & very, very single?
Do you secretly suspect that you suck at love?

Author Cindy Lu knew for a long


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In April 1204, the armies of Western Christendom wrote another bloodstained chapter in the history of holy war. Two years earlier, aflame with religious zeal, the Fourth Crusade set out to free Jerusalem from the grip of Islam. But after a dramatic series of events, the crusaders turned their weapons against the Christian city of Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine Empire & the greatest metropolis in the known world. The crusaders spared no one in their savagery: they murdered old & young, they raped women & girls
- even nuns
- in their frenzy. They also desecrated churches & plundered treasuries, & much of the city was put to the torch. In celebration of the victory, a prostitute from the crusader army climbed onto the altar of the Hagia Sophia & gyrated to obscene songs; barbarism cloaked in the mantle of religious warfare had swept aside one of the great civilisations of history. Some contemporaries were delighted: God had approved this punishment of the effeminate, treacherous Greeks; others expressed shock & disgust at this perversion of the crusading ideal. History has judged this as the crusade that went wrong & even today the violence & brutality of the western knights provokes deep ill-feeling from many Greek Orthodox towards the Catholic Church. In this remarkable new assessment of the Fourth Crusade, Jonathan Phillips doesn't just follow the fortunes of the leading players, but explores the conflicting motives that drove the expedition to commit the most infamous massacre of the crusading movement & looks at the experience of crusading from the perspective of a knight.

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