Those who show us that life is art

Discover inspiring books that reveal life as art. Explore our curated list of transformative reads to deepen your appreciation for creativity and existence.

Don Quixote Cover
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Don Quixote

by Miguel Cervantes

Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading romances of chivalry that he determines to become a knight errant and pursue bold adventures, accompanied by his squire, the cunning Sancho Panza. As they roam the world together, the aging Quixote's fancy leads them wildly astray. At the same time the relationship between the two men grows in fascinating subtlety. Often considered to be the first modern novel, Don Quixote is a wonderful burlesque of the popular literature its disordered protagonist is obsessed with.
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The Razor's Edge Cover
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The Razor's Edge

by W. Somerset Maugham

Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of this spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham's most brillant characters - his fiancee Isabel, whose choice between love and wealth have lifelong repercussions, and Elliot Templeton, her uncle, a classic expatriate American snob. The most ambitious of Maugham's novels, this is also one in which Maugham himself plays a considerable part as he wanders in and out of the story, to observe his characters struggling with their fates.
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Tropic of Cancer Cover
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Tropic of Cancer

by Henry Miller

The account of a young writer and his friends in free-wheeling Paris.
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The Time of the Assassins Cover
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The Time of the Assassins

by Henry Miller

This study is not literary criticism but a fascinating chapter in Miller's own spiritual autobiography. The social function of the creative personality is a recurrent theme with Henry Miller, and this book is perhaps his most poignant and concentrated analysis of the artist's dilemma.
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ID: 0811201120
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Nausea Cover
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Nausea

by Jean-Paul Sartre

Presents Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist novel, first published in 1938, in which Antoine Roquentin, a French writer, chronicles his reactions to the world and people around him, which combine to give him an overpowering feeling of nausea.
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A Confederacy of Dunces Cover
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A Confederacy of Dunces

by John Kennedy Toole

Set in New Orleans, the protagonist is nearly arrested for being a suspicious character and encounters many unfortunate events.
Nadja Cover
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Nadja

by André Breton

"Nadja, " originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life. The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in teh city of Paris, the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life. The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work -- pictures of various "surreal" people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in naja's presence and which inspire him to mediate on their reality or lack of it. "The Nadja of the book is a girl, but, like Bertrand Russell's definition of electricity as "not so much a thing as a way things happen, " Nadja is not so much a person as the way she makes people behave. She has been described as a state of mind, a feeling about reality, k a kind of vision, and the reader sometimes wonders whether she exists at all. yet it is Nadja who gives form and structure to the novel.
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ID: 0947757031
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Ficciones. C Edited and with an Introduction by Anthony Kerrigan Cover
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Ficciones. C Edited and with an Introduction by Anthony Kerrigan

by Jorge Luis Borges

Seventeen short stories.
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ID: 0679729518
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Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe Cover
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Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

by Edgar Allan Poe

U.S. poet/writer 1809-1849.