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The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death in the Sixteenth Century
Meet Frantz Schmidt: executioner, torturer and, most unusually for his times, diarist.
Following in his father’s footsteps, Frantz entered the executioner’s trade as an Apprentice. 394 executions and forty-five years later, he retired to focus his attentions on running the large medical practice that he had always viewed as his true vocation.
Through examination of Frantz’s exceptional and often overlooked record, Joel F. Harrington delves deep into a world of human cruelty, tragedy and injustice. At the same time, he poses a fascinating question: could a man who routinely practiced such cruelty also be insightful, compassionate – even progressive?
The Faithful Executioner is the biography of an ordinary man struggling to overcome an unjust family curse; it is also a remarkable panorama of a Europe poised on the cusp of modernity, a world with startling parallels to our own.
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Jesting Pilate: An Intellectual Holiday
Aldous Huxley recounts his experiences in the mid-1920s traveling through several countries (India, Burma, Malaya, Japan and America), and offers his observations on their people, cultures, and customs. Open-minded, keen-sighted, sometimes iconoclastic, always provocative, Huxley's views on British imperial power, Gandhi, the social life of Delhi, Indian art, Malaysian cuisine and so much more are entertaining.
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The Hero with a Thousand Faces
The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a seminal work of comparative mythology. It reveals that foundational myths from around the world share similar structures and themes, which trace back to some of our earliest stories and continue to hold a strong power over us today.
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Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq
It is 2027. France is in a state of economic decline and moral decay.
As the country plunges into a closely-fought presidential campaign, the French state falls victim to a series of mysterious and unsettling cyberattacks. The sophisticated nature of the attacks leaves the best computer scientists at the DGSI – the French counter-terrorism agency – scrambling for answers.
An advisor to the country’s Finance Minister, Paul Raison is close to the heart of government. His wife Prudence is a Treasury official, while his father Édouard, now retired, has spent his career working for the DGSI. When Édouard has a stroke, his children have an opportunity to repair their strained relationships, as they determine to free their father from the medical centre where he is wasting away.
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Don Quixote
Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain.
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Stoner: A Novel
William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death, his colleagues remember him rarely.
Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value - of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history - and in doing so reclaims the significance of an individual life.
