A Burnt-Out Case follows Querry, a celebrated European architect of churches who has lost all feeling: for his work, for women, for God and for himself. Travelling as far as the river boats will take him, he arrives at a leproserie deep in the Belgian Congo run by a community of missionary fathers and by Dr Colin, an atheist physician devoted to his patients.
Theme
Art / Creation
77 works in the library take up art / creation, from The Homeric Hymns to Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire.
Works
A Child's Garden of Verses (1885) is Robert Louis Stevenson's book of poems spoken in a child's voice: rising by yellow candle-light in winter, watching rain fall on field and sea, playing at pirates, noticing a shadow, and blessing the world's abundance in the two lines of Happy Thought. Written while Stevenson often lived under the discipline of illness, the poems remember gardens, nurseries, and indoor days with affection rather than irony.
A Mathematician's Apology is a short book of twenty-nine numbered sections in which the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy, at sixty-two and conscious that his creative powers had faded, sets out to justify a life spent on pure mathematics. Cambridge University Press published it in 1940.
A Midsummer Night's Dream begins in Athens with a legal crisis: Egeus demands that Hermia marry Demetrius, while Hermia loves Lysander and faces punishment under Theseus's law. The lovers flee into the wood, followed by Demetrius and Helena, and the play transfers civic conflict into a night world governed by Oberon, Titania, Puck, and the flower whose juice alters desire.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man follows Stephen Dedalus, a boy from a Catholic Dublin family, from his earliest memories to the eve of his departure from Ireland at about twenty. Its five chapters are written in a style that grows with him, from the nursery language of the opening, in which his father tells him a story about a moocow and baby tuckoo, to the abstract arguments and private diary of the last chapter.
Adam of the Road follows eleven-year-old Adam Quartermayne through a year of wandering in the England of Edward I, beginning in June 1294. Adam is boarding at the abbey school of St. Albans, learning his letters with his friend Perkin, a ploughman's son who longs to study at Oxford, while his red spaniel Nick lodges with an old woman, Dame Malkin, because dogs are not allowed at school.
Bliss and Other Stories, Katherine Mansfield's second collection, gathers fourteen stories written between about 1915 and 1920. It opens with Prelude, her longest work, and moves between New Zealand childhood, Bohemian London, Paris cafés and the hotels of the French Riviera.
Judith Herrin's Byzantium is a portrait of the Eastern Roman Empire from the founding of Constantinople in 330 to its fall to the Ottomans in 1453, written for readers who know little about it. In the introduction she explains that the book began when two builders who passed her office every day asked her what Byzantium actually was; rather than answer with a continuous chronicle, she wrote twenty-eight short chapters, each built around a theme, monument, event or person, that can be read in sequence or on their own.
Cædmon's Hymn is a nine-line poem in praise of God the Creator and the oldest surviving English poem whose maker is known by name. It survives because Bede told its story in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, finished in 731.
Cold Comfort Farm is a comic novel parodying the overwrought rural fiction of the early twentieth century, the 'loam and lovechild' school associated with writers such as Mary Webb and D. H. Lawrence. It is set in a slightly futuristic England of video-phones and air taxis.
Parker's Complete Poems gathers the light verse that made her one of the best-selling poets of the 1920s and 1930s. The core of the volume is her three collections, Enough Rope (1926), Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931), which were combined in Not So Deep as a Well (1936), together with uncollected and early verse published in magazines from the 1910s onward.
Death in Venice follows the last weeks of Gustav von Aschenbach, a celebrated German writer in his fifties, ennobled on his fiftieth birthday, whose prose epic on Frederick the Great and other works have made him a model of disciplined art. Thomas Mann published the novella in 1912, and it is told in five chapters by a narrator who comments on Aschenbach with a mixture of sympathy and irony.
Francis of Assisi reaches modern popular culture through birds, wolves, poverty, brown robes, garden statues, animal blessings, Christmas cribs, and an almost ecological tenderness. The early sources are more demanding.
Ecce Homo is Nietzsche's late self-interpretation, part autobiography, part literary self-defense, part philosophical performance. Its chapter headings are famously outrageous: why he is so wise, clever, and a destiny; why he writes such good books.
David Hume's Essays, Moral and Political first appeared anonymously in Edinburgh in two volumes in 1741 and 1742, after his Treatise of Human Nature had, in his own phrase, fallen dead-born from the press. Written in the manner of Addison's Spectator for a polite reading public, they brought the philosophy of the Treatise to bear on British politics, religion, taste and manners.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a frame narrative told through the letters of Robert Walton, an English explorer whose ship is trapped in Arctic ice. Walton rescues a dying stranger, Victor Frankenstein, who has been pursuing a gigantic figure across the frozen sea, and who tells his story as a warning to a man whose ambition resembles his own.
God's Grandeur is an Italian sonnet that Hopkins wrote in February and March 1877 at St Beuno's College in North Wales, where he was studying theology in the final months before his ordination as a Jesuit priest. Like most of his poems it went unpublished in his lifetime; Robert Bridges printed it in 1918, almost thirty years after the poet's death.
Hard Times, subtitled For These Times, is Dickens's shortest and most concentrated novel, set in Coketown, a smoky northern mill town of red brick, black canals, and identical streets. Thomas Gradgrind, a retired hardware merchant and later a member of Parliament, runs a model school and his own household on a single principle: children must be taught Facts and nothing else.
Humboldt's Gift is narrated by Charlie Citrine, a successful middle-aged Chicago writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize and made a fortune from a Broadway hit about the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron von Trenck, which was also made into a film. Now in his fifties, Charlie is distracted, spiritually restless and steadily losing his money.
The Kalevala is the national epic of Finland, compiled by the physician and folklorist Elias Lönnrot from oral songs he and others gathered in Finnish and Russian Karelia. Its fifty runes, or cantos, follow the deeds of the people of Kalevala, chiefly the old singer and sage Väinämöinen, the smith Ilmarinen and the reckless Lemminkäinen, and their long rivalry with Louhi, mistress of the cold northern land of Pohjola.
Lectures on Calvinism are the six Stone Lectures that the Dutch theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper delivered at Princeton Theological Seminary in October 1898, during a visit to the United States. Kuyper's aim was to present Calvinism not as a narrow church party or a set of doctrines about predestination but as a complete life-system, a view of the world able to shape every area of human life, comparable in scope to paganism, Islam, Roman Catholicism and the modernism that he saw spreading from the French Revolution of 1789.
Lepanto is G. K. Chesterton's ballad of the naval battle fought on 7 October 1571 in the Gulf of Patras, off western Greece, where the galleys of the Holy League, assembled by Pope Pius V and led by Don John of Austria, defeated the Ottoman fleet. Chesterton published it in The Eye-Witness in October 1911 and collected it in his Poems of 1915.
Little Women follows the four March sisters growing up in a New England town during and after the American Civil War, while their father serves as an army chaplain. Meg, the eldest, is pretty and longs for fine things; Jo, a tomboyish aspiring writer with a quick temper, is the heart of the book; Beth is shy, gentle and musical; and Amy, the youngest, is artistic and vain.
Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects is a collection of biographies of Italian artists from the late thirteenth century to Vasari's own day, arranged to tell the story of how the arts of design, after their decline in late antiquity, were reborn in Tuscany and brought to perfection in the age of Michelangelo. The library text is the first of the ten volumes of Gaston du C. de Vere's English translation of the 1568 edition, published 1912-1915.
This volume gathers comic pieces that Jane Austen wrote as a teenager at Steventon rectory, between about 1790 and 1793, and copied into the notebook she called Volume the Second. The title work, 'Love and Freindship', dated 13 June 1790 when she was fourteen, is a novel in fifteen letters parodying the sentimental fiction of the day.
The Metamorphoses is a Latin poem in fifteen books of dactylic hexameter, about 12,000 lines, that strings together some 250 myths of transformation from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus. Its unifying thread is change of form: gods, humans and nymphs become animals, plants, stones, stars and springs, usually at moments of extreme passion, violence or divine punishment.
My Last Duchess is a dramatic monologue of 56 lines, first published in Robert Browning's Dramatic Lyrics in 1842 and headed Ferrara. The speaker is a Renaissance Duke of Ferrara, and his listener, who never speaks, is an envoy sent by a Count to arrange the Duke's marriage to the Count's daughter.
This record joins two Latin books by Johannes Kepler that together contain the three laws of planetary motion and the religious vision that drove his astronomy. The library does not store a text: the English translations of both books (William Donahue's New Astronomy, 1992; E. J. Aiton, A. M. Duncan and J. V. Field's Harmony of the World, 1997; and Charles Glenn Wallis's earlier version of Harmony Book V) are under copyright, and no public-domain English translation is available, so the record gives a summary and guide only.
Ada Lovelace's Notes on Menabrea's Sketch of the Analytical Engine begin as an act of translation and become a theory of computation. Luigi Menabrea had published a French account of Charles Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine after hearing Babbage lecture in Turin.
In the Ode on a Grecian Urn Keats addresses an ancient vase carved with figures and asks what it can tell us that living speech cannot. The first stanza piles up names for the urn, a still unravished bride of quietness, a foster-child of silence and slow time, a sylvan historian, and then a rush of questions about the scene on its side: men or gods, reluctant maidens, mad pursuit, pipes and timbrels, wild ecstasy.
On Fairy-Stories is Tolkien's defense of fairy-story as a serious form of imaginative art. He begins by rejecting narrow definitions that identify fairy tales with children, small supernatural beings, dreams, or mere folklore collection.
De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Seven Books on the Fabric of the Human Body) was printed at Basel by Johannes Oporinus in 1543, when its author, Andreas Vesalius, professor at Padua, was twenty-eight. Its seven books describe the bones and cartilages, the ligaments and muscles, the veins and arteries, the nerves, the organs of nutrition and generation, the heart and the organs of the chest, and the brain and the senses.
On the Road is narrated by Sal Paradise, a young writer living with his aunt in New Jersey, and records a series of journeys back and forth across the United States and into Mexico between 1947 and 1950. The engine of the book is Dean Moriarty, a fast-talking, car-stealing, endlessly restless young man from Denver who seems to Sal the embodiment of a wild, joyous American energy.
Orlando is a comic, fantastical biography of an English nobleman and poet who lives from the last years of Elizabeth I to the eleventh of October 1928, ageing only about twenty years and becoming a woman along the way. The book opens with the sixteen-year-old Orlando slashing at a Moor's head in the attic of his family's enormous house in the country.
Ozymandias is a fourteen-line sonnet about a ruined statue of an Egyptian king in the desert, and it has become the best-known English poem on the vanity of earthly power. Shelley wrote it in late 1817, in a friendly sonnet-writing contest with his friend Horace Smith on the same subject, and Leigh Hunt printed it in The Examiner on 11 January 1818.
Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy was published in 1958 by Routledge and Kegan Paul in London and by the University of Chicago Press. Its author, Michael Polanyi, had been a physician and a distinguished physical chemist before turning to philosophy, and the book grew from his Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 1951–52.
This volume pairs one of Plato's most literary dialogues with two letters attributed to him. The Phaedrus takes place outside the walls of Athens, where Socrates, who rarely leaves the city, walks with the young Phaedrus along the river Ilissus and sits under a plane tree on a hot summer day.
Gerard Manley Hopkins's Poems, published after his death in 1918, bring together a Jesuit priest's experiments in sound, perception, praise, and spiritual desolation. Hopkins's key ideas of inscape and instress name the particular form of a created thing and the energy by which that form is apprehended.
The Poetics is Aristotle's short treatise on the art of poetry, chiefly tragedy and epic, and the oldest surviving work of literary theory in the West. It opens by defining all poetry, together with music and dance, as imitation (mimesis), and by distinguishing the arts according to the medium of imitation (rhythm, language, melody), the objects imitated (people better than us, worse, or like us), and the manner (narration or enactment).
This volume, published in New York in 1922 as Three Plays, brought Pirandello's theatre to English readers. It contains Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and Henry IV (1922), both translated by Edward Storer, and Right You Are!
Sixty Stories is Donald Barthelme's own selection of his short fiction from roughly two decades, drawn from collections such as Come Back, Dr. Caligari, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, City Life, Sadness, Amateurs and Great Days, together with some previously uncollected pieces. The stories are short, often only a few pages, and are among the defining works of American postmodern fiction.
Shakespeare's Sonnets is a sequence of 154 fourteen-line poems, nearly all in the form now named after him: three quatrains rhyming abab cdcd efef and a closing couplet gg, in iambic pentameter. The sequence has no plot in the ordinary sense, but readers since the eighteenth century have traced a loose story.
Sts. Cosmas and Damian are the physician saints par excellence: twin or paired martyrs, healers without payment, patrons of doctors and surgeons, and subjects of one of medieval art's strangest surgical miracles. The historical core is modest.
Sts. Roch and Sebastian became plague saints through two different imaginative routes. Sebastian is an older martyr of the Roman persecution tradition.
Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann) is the first volume of Marcel Proust's seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time, which C. K. Scott Moncrieff translated under the title Remembrance of Things Past. Grasset issued it at Proust's expense in November 1913.
The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes, is Thomas Bulfinch's prose retelling of Greek and Roman mythology, with shorter chapters on Egyptian, Eastern, Norse and Celtic belief, first published in Boston in 1855. Bulfinch, a bank clerk with a Harvard classical education, wrote it so that ordinary readers could understand the mythological allusions in English poetry and speech.
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini is the life story of a Florentine goldsmith and sculptor, dictated in his late fifties and carried from his birth on All Saints' night in 1500 to 1562. It opens with Cellini's claim that anyone who has done excellent work and is honest should write his own life after forty, and with his ancestry and childhood: his father Giovanni, a musician and maker of instruments, wants him to be a flute-player, and once boxes his ears so that he will remember the salamander they have seen in the fire.
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, published in 1872 when Nietzsche was a twenty-seven-year-old professor at Basel, argues that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two opposed artistic drives, which he names after the gods Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian is the drive toward clear form, measure and individuation, whose physiological analogue is the dream, in which every person is a perfect artist of images.
The Cricket in Times Square is set at a newsstand in the Times Square subway station in New York City at the end of one summer. The stand belongs to the Bellini family: Papa, Mama, and their son Mario, who keeps it open late in the hope of selling a few more papers, because business is poor.
The Gay Science, also translated as The Joyful Wisdom, is Nietzsche's book of convalescence, experiment, and dangerous cheerfulness. Its aphorisms and songs range across knowledge, art, women, morality, religion, science, friendship, self-creation, health, and style.
The Homeric Hymns are a collection of thirty-three anonymous Greek poems addressed to the gods, composed in the same dactylic hexameter and formulaic language as the Iliad and Odyssey. Ancient audiences treated many of them as Homer's own; most scholars now see them as the work of different singers over a long period, with the four great narrative hymns usually dated to the archaic age and some short pieces much later.
The Hundred Dresses is a short novel in seven chapters about a girl who is teased at school and the classmate who watched and said nothing. Wanda Petronski, the daughter of a Polish immigrant, Jan Petronski, lives with her father and brother Jake in a shabby house on Boggins Heights, outside a small Connecticut town.
The Journey of the Mind into God is Bonaventure's compact map of contemplative ascent, written after meditation on Francis of Assisi's vision of the six-winged seraph at La Verna. The work is structured around six stages, corresponding to the seraph's wings, by which the mind rises through creation, the self, and the names of God before passing beyond conceptual mastery into ecstatic union.
Tristram Shandy promises to tell the life and opinions of its narrator, a Yorkshire gentleman, and spends most of its nine volumes failing to reach his life at all. Tristram begins with the moment of his conception in March 1718, when his mother interrupts his father at the critical instant to ask whether he has remembered to wind up the clock.
The Life of Samuel Johnson is James Boswell's account of the poet, essayist, critic and lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), arranged year by year and built largely from conversations Boswell wrote down over twenty-one years of friendship. It opens with Johnson's birth in Lichfield, the son of a bookseller, his childhood scrofula, for which his mother took him to London to be touched by Queen Anne, and his schooling.
The Master and Margarita interweaves two stories: the visit of the Devil to Soviet Moscow in the 1930s and a novel about Pontius Pilate written by an unnamed author known as the Master. On a hot spring evening at Patriarch's Ponds, the literary bureaucrat Mikhail Berlioz and the young poet Ivan Bezdomny are discussing the non-existence of Jesus when a mysterious foreigner joins them.
The Metamorphosis is a novella in three parts about Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman in cloth who supports his parents and his seventeen-year-old sister Grete, and who wakes one morning in his room to find that he has been changed into a monstrous insect. Kafka tells the story plainly, in the third person and almost entirely from Gregor's point of view, never explaining the transformation and never letting it become a dream.
The Metaphysical Poets is Helen Gardner's anthology of English poets of the seventeenth century who wrote in the style that Samuel Johnson, borrowing a phrase from Dryden, called 'metaphysical'. Johnson complained that in their verse the most heterogeneous ideas were yoked by violence together; T. S. Eliot, in his 1921 review of Herbert Grierson's earlier anthology, praised them for a unified sensibility in which thought and feeling were fused.
The Method, known in Greek as the Ephodos and translated in the library text as Geometrical Solutions Derived from Mechanics, is a letter from Archimedes of Syracuse to Eratosthenes, the head of the Library at Alexandria. In it Archimedes does something almost unique in ancient mathematics: he explains how he found his results before he proved them.
The New York Trilogy gathers three linked short novels: City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room. Each begins from the materials of detective fiction and then dissolves the detective plot into questions of identity, authorship, language and mental disintegration.
The narrator, presenting himself as a researcher, announces that the Opera ghost really existed and that he has proved it from archives, the memories of old employees and the papers of a mysterious Persian. In the 1880s the ballet girls of the Paris Opera whisper about a ghost in evening dress with a death's head; the scene-shifter Joseph Buquet, who claims to have seen him, is found hanged in the third cellar.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde's only novel, a moral fable told in the polished language of the London drawing room. In the studio of the painter Basil Hallward, the witty Lord Henry Wotton sees an unfinished portrait of an extraordinarily handsome young man and insists on meeting its subject.
The Portrait of a Lady follows Isabel Archer, a young American woman brought to Europe by her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, and admired for her intelligence, independence and hunger for experience. At Gardencourt, the English estate of her uncle, Isabel meets her invalid cousin Ralph Touchett, who loves her imaginatively and persuades his dying father to leave her a fortune so that she can live freely.
The Prose Edda is a handbook of Norse myth and of the art of skaldic poetry, written in Iceland around 1220 by the chieftain and historian Snorri Sturluson. It was meant to teach young poets the old stories and the poetic names (kennings) that the court verse of Scandinavia depended on, at a time when Iceland had been Christian for more than two centuries.
The Symposium is a framed dialogue about eros, memory and ascent. Apollodorus repeats what Aristodemus told him about a banquet at Agathon’s house after the poet’s tragic victory.
The Tempest opens with a ship breaking apart in a storm off a remote island. On shore, the magician Prospero tells his fifteen-year-old daughter Miranda that he was once Duke of Milan.
The True Story of My Life is the autobiographical sketch Hans Christian Andersen wrote in 1846, at forty-one, for a collected edition of his works. He opens by calling his life a lovely story, happy and full of incident, and says it shows that a loving God directs all things for the best.
On a camping trip in the Canadian woods, eleven-year-old Sam Beaver, a Montana rancher's son who loves wild things and keeps a journal that ends each night with a question, discovers a pair of trumpeter swans nesting on a hidden pond. He keeps their secret, and when a fox creeps up on the sitting pen he drives it off with a stick.
This volume pairs two of Henry James's most intense short fictions about possession, interpretation and moral trespass. The Turn of the Screw is framed as a manuscript read aloud during a country-house gathering.
The Tyger is the most famous lyric in William Blake's Songs of Experience, which he etched, printed and hand-coloured in 1794 and issued together with the earlier Songs of Innocence under the subtitle Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. It is the counterpart of The Lamb in Innocence, where a child asks a lamb who made it and answers that its maker is the gentle Lamb of God.
The Waning of the Middle Ages is a study of the forms of life, thought and art in France and the Burgundian Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Huizinga, a Dutch professor of history, published it in 1919 as Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen, literally the autumn-tide of the Middle Ages.
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, translated by Haldane and Kemp as The World as Will and Idea, is Arthur Schopenhauer's single, systematic statement of a philosophy that he claimed expressed one thought from four sides. It appeared in December 1818 (dated 1819) in four books with an appendix criticising Kant, and in 1844 he added a second volume of fifty supplementary chapters keyed to the first.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is a philosophical prose-poem in four parts, written in the cadences of Luther's Bible. Its hero borrows the name of the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster, whom Nietzsche chose because the first moralist should be the one to overturn morality.
Timaeus offers Plato's most elaborate cosmological account, framed by Socrates' wish to see the ideal city in motion and Critias's story of ancient Athens and Atlantis. Timaeus then delivers a likely story about the cosmos, not a demonstration with mathematical certainty.
To the Lighthouse, published by the Hogarth Press in May 1927, follows the Ramsay family and their guests at a holiday house on the Isle of Skye in the Hebrides, across one evening before the First World War and one morning ten years later. Virginia Woolf tells it almost entirely through the passing thoughts of her characters, so that small events, a remark about the weather, a dinner, a brushstroke, carry the weight of a lifetime.
Christiaan Huygens read the substance of this treatise to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1678 and published it in French at Leiden in 1690 as Traité de la lumière, with a short discourse on the cause of gravity. The library text is Silvanus P. Thompson's literal English translation of 1912, complete, with the author's preface, Thompson's note and a table of matters; the many geometrical figures are marked but not reproduced.
Hugh Kennedy's When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World is a narrative history of the Abbasid caliphate at the height of its power, from the revolution that brought the dynasty to the throne in 750 to the anarchy of the later ninth century at Samarra, after which effective power slipped away from the caliphs. It was first published in Britain in 2004 as The Court of the Caliphs and in the United States in 2005 under its present title.