For lovers of books about moral, philosophical and life dilemmas.
Sections
4
Russian literature
France literature 🇫🇷
Japan Literature 🇯🇵
German Literature 🇩🇪
Russian literature
The suspense and layered characters will keep you turning page after page as you bandy with countless questions of philosophy. And it all starts with a single act of questionable morality.
Fyodor M. Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment
Netochka Nezvanova - a 'Nameless Nobody' - tells the story of a childhood dominated by her abusive stepfather, Efimov, a failed musician from who aristrocate family save her, but the abuse against Netochka's delicate psyche continues in a more subtle...
Fyodor M. Dostoevsky - Netochka Nezvanova
Passionate philosophical novel that enters deeply into questions of God, free will, and morality. It is a theological drama dealing with problems of faith, doubt, and reason in the context of a modernizing Russia.
Fyodor M. Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
The twenty-six-year-old Prince Myshkin, following a stay of several years in a Swiss sanatorium, returns to Russia to collect an inheritance and “be among people.”
Even before he reaches home he meets the dark Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son whose ...
Fyodor M. Dostoevsky - The Idiot
The Gambler is a stunning psychological portrait of a young man's exhilarating and destructive addiction to gambling.
In gambling adventures of Alexei Ivanovich, Dostoevsky explores the irresistible temptation to look into the abyss of ultimate ris...
Fyodor M. Dostoevsky - The Gambler
The anti-hero of the novel is a man named Chichikov, who hatches a brilliant plan to get rich quick. He will journey through Russia and buy up, at reduced rates, the recently deceased serfs of landowners, who now won’t have to pay government taxes on...
Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls
This novella reflects the author’s struggle to find meaning in life, a challenge Tolstoy resolved by developing a religious philosophy based on brotherly love, mutual support, and charity. These guiding principles are the dominant moral themes in The...
Leo Tolstoy - The Death of Ivan Ilych
France literature 🇫🇷
Story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach.
Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd" and describes the condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that char...
Alber Camus - The Stranger
In this great work, Camus contemplates the idea of the absurd and the emptiness of the world. Through the lens of existentialism, Camus looks at our own existence in a meaningless world and tries to make sense of our purpose.
Albert Camus - The Myth Of Sisyphus
Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality.
Alber Camus - The Fall
Feared and hated by all, Quasimodo is looked after by Dom Claude Frollo, a stern, cold priest who ignores the poor hunchback in the face of his frequent public torture. But someone steps forward to help—the beautiful gypsy Esmeralda, whose single act...
Victor Hugo - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Japan Literature 🇯🇵
The poignant and fascinating story of a young man who is caught between the breakup of the traditions of a northern Japanese aristocratic family and the impact of Western ideas.
Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its...
Osamu Dazai - No Longer Human
The Setting Sun is a gorgeous and deeply sensible story of the changing of Japanese tradition after World War II, all from the lens of a heroine going through her own changes offset by the challenges of modernity. Timeless and lyrical, it's a story r...
Osamu Dazai - The Setting Sun
German Literature 🇩🇪
Kafka’s survey of the insectile situation of young Jews in inner Bohemia can hardly be improved upon: ‘With their posterior legs they were still glued to their father’s Jewishness and with their wavering anterior legs they found no new ground.’ There...
Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis
Kafka's Czech translator, Milena Jesenská, was a gifted and charismatic twenty-three-year-old who was uniquely able to recognize Kafka's complex genius and his even more complex character. For thirty-six-year-old Kafka, she was "a living fire, such a...
Franz Kafka - Letters to Milena
Franz Kafka wrote this letter to his father, Hermann Kafka, in November 1919. Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, relates that Kafka actually gave the letter to his mother to hand to his father, hoping it might renew a relationship that had lost its...