Library
The Pale Dog
Ellis Wren
Dr. Simon Ashby, a physician in San Francisco, is visited one evening by Willa Cray, the coroner's doctor of Mercy County on the northern California coast. Ambrose Vandermeer, the last of the county's founding family, has been found dead on a gravel path below his house, his face fixed in terror; beyond the body are the prints of a dog far larger than any in the county. A family document of 1851 records nine deaths in three generations, each sudden, each at night, each with the marks of a running dog about it — the county calls it the curse of the Vandermeers. Dr. Cray has a theory of her own: the family carries a gene that can stop a healthy heart under sudden fright. The heir, Cole Vandermeer, an engineer from Chicago, arrives to take up four thousand acres, carrying that gene himself. Ronan Varley, a consultant who works for people the police have failed, sends Ashby north in his place, to keep the heir alive and to write to him by hand. At Harrow Reach, Ashby finds a house shut up for years, a groundskeeper feeding a fugitive in the blackberry, an enormous pale animal that runs the peat flat at night without a sound, and Emmett Scully, who runs the neighbouring wildlife station, breeds guardian dogs, and holds the survey permit over the ground where the beast is seen. A man is killed on the path in a Vandermeer's coat; a watercolour in the stairwell shows the station-keeper's face; and the truth turns out to be a hundred and thirty years of a family's silence, an animal painted with a compound so that it glows in fog, and a bog that has been made to look like a curse.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde's only novel, 1890 — the scandalous fable of beauty and corruption. Handsome young Dorian Gray has his portrait painted and wishes the picture would age in his place; his wish is granted. As he descends into a hidden life of vice, the painted face grows old and cruel while his own stays perfect — until the night he looks at what he has become. Witty, poisonous and full of the epigrams that made Wilde famous, it is his most sustained meditation on art, sin and the price of the aesthetic life.
The Prince
Niccolo Machiavelli
Machiavelli's little book of statecraft, written in 1513 and dedicated to the Medici — and a watershed in the history of political thought. Casting aside moral sermonizing, it examines power as it is, not as it ought to be: is it safer for a prince to be feared or loved? When may promises be broken? Why is a new princedom harder to hold than an inherited one? Condemned for five centuries as wicked and honoured as the founding text of political realism, it remains the clearest account ever written of how modern power works.
The Prince and the Pauper
Mark Twain
Tom Canty, the pauper of Offal Court, and Edward Tudor, Prince of Wales, born the same day and alike to the life, meet at the palace gate and change clothes for a game - and then the prince is thrown out of his own palace as a beggar while Tom is taken for mad when he insists he is not king. Twain uses the swap for both satire and sweetness: Tom, well-meaning, reforms the cruelties of the court from the throne, while Edward, thrown among his subjects, learns what his laws do to them. Miles Hendon, the disgraced soldier who shelters the boy-king without believing a word of his story, is one of Twain's best-beloved characters.
The Prisoner of Zenda
Anthony Hope
Anthony Hope's 1894 romance of Ruritania — the novel that launched a genre and a thousand imitators. English gentleman Rudolf Rassendyll, in the country for a coronation, discovers an uncanny family resemblance to the new king — who is drugged by his treacherous half-brother on the eve of the ceremony. Rassendyll must impersonate the king, foil the villains, and pretend not to fall in love with the princess he is deceiving. Swashbuckling, honour and doomed love in perfect proportion: the definitive romantic adventure.
The Problems of Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell's 1912 introduction to philosophy, and still the best short way in for a general reader. Is there any knowledge that is certain? Does the table exist when no one looks at it? Using questions like these, Russell walks through appearance and reality, matter, induction, idealism, knowledge by acquaintance, and the limits of what philosophy can claim — with absolute clarity and no jargon. Over a century old and never bettered as the classic starting point of Western philosophy in English.
The Quiet Half
Ellis Wren
Howard Vane is the lawyer Boston brings its ruins to, and the newest is Adrian Kessler - the best-known good man in Massachusetts. Then a check signed in Kessler's hand pays off a man who knocked down a child in a service lane, and Kessler's new will leaves everything to Calvin Voss, a tenant nobody can describe twice the same way. When Judge Merritt Ashby is beaten to death with a cane Vane once gave as a gift, the trail ends at Kessler's laboratory door. The truth arrives in two documents: a dying friend's account of a midnight errand, and a confession by a man who split himself in two and learned the quiet half was the one that killed.
The Red Badge of Courage
Stephen Crane
Crane's 1895 novel of the American Civil War, written by a man who had never seen a battle — and so the most exact account of what a battle does inside a soldier's head. Henry Fleming, a farm boy in the Union army, has dreamed of heroic deeds; at Chancellorsville he runs from his first engagement, then spends a day among the wounded and the dying, watching his own courage, cowardice and self-deception rise and fall. Short, impressionistic and pitiless, it has the strange distinction of being the finest war novel ever written by a civilian who feared himself a fraud.
The Red Hour
Ellis Wren
In the high desert of the inland Northwest, a science writer is ghostwriting a memoir for an aging astronomer when she shows him something impossible: lights on Mars that keep a schedule. Days later, a cylinder falls out of a clear sky onto the sagebrush flats outside his town. A delegation of sheriffs and mayors walks down to it under a white flag, and the first contact between Earth and its nearest neighbor ends in a line of burning earth and a weapon that erases everything it touches. More cylinders land. Machines stand up out of the pits on three long legs and begin to walk. Elias sends his wife east to her sister's and goes back for one more look, and spends the rest of the war trying to reach her. He escapes the fall of his town as a black smoke pours down the river valleys, survives the bridge at Milburn Siding, and crosses an occupied country emptied of everyone but the dead and the patient machines that farm it. In the fallen city downriver, his brother Frank, an emergency-room nurse, keeps his own account of the collapse and of the river gunboat that taught the invaders caution at the cost of her crew. Elias shelters with a pastor whose faith breaks against what the machines do with their harvest, meets a sergeant building an underground nation on half-rations and a whistle, and wakes one morning to find the invaders dead, undone not by armies but by the oldest, smallest life of the earth. Walking east through the ruins, past gulls at their work, Elias registers at a camp on the mountain pass, where a pencil line on a plywood board leads him back to his wife, and to the work of writing it all down.
The Red and the Black
Stendhal, trans. Horace Barnett Samuel
Julien Sorel is the son of a provincial carpenter in the France of the Restoration: frail, proud, with a prodigious memory for Latin and a secret admiration for Napoleon. Since a military career is closed to a young man of his station in peacetime, he chooses the other road to advancement and becomes an abbe, hiding his true ambitions behind a mask of piety. His employment as tutor to the children of the mayor of the small town of Verrieres, M. de Renal, draws him into the world above his birth. Julien is resolved to be respected and, quietly, to have his revenge on the class that despises him. His affair with Madame de Renal begins partly as a calculated act of conquest, then turns into something he neither planned nor understands. Forced to leave town when the affair is exposed in an anonymous letter, he enters the austere seminary of Besancon under the protection of the abbe Pirard, learns the hard lessons of clerical politics, and is finally recommended to the Marquis de la Mole of Paris as a secretary. In the capital Julien rises fast. He is Useful, discreet, and increasingly trusted; he wins the friendship of the marquis and, more dangerously, the love of the marquis's proud, brilliant daughter Mathilde. Stendhal watches his hero with a surgeon's eye, tracing every calculation of vanity, class, and desire in a society where the color of a uniform or a cassock decides a man's fate. First published in 1830, this Chronicle of 1830 is among the founding novels of psychological realism, and its verdict on ambition without principle remains as sharp as ever.
The Republic
Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett
Plato's Republic, the founding dialogue of Western philosophy and political thought, in Benjamin Jowett's classic translation. Socrates asks what justice is — and to find it, builds a city in words, ruled by philosopher-kings, educated on a carefully designed curriculum, with its famous images: the Ring of Gyges, the Myth of the Cave, the Divided Line. Along the way it argues that the just life is happier than the unjust, whatever the world says. Everything in Western philosophy since, Whitehead said, is a footnote to this book.
The Salt and the Shadow
Ellis Wren
西雅图信托律师奥尔登·马什替老友、神经科学家朱利安·沃斯管了二十年的文件。一次周日散步，表亲卡尔·梅林讲起一桩怪事：面相说不出的年轻矮个子埃兹拉·威克在市场小巷故意撞倒八岁女童，踩过她扬长而去，再掏出一张无名的黑色支付卡当晚私了，而卡上签字授权的正是沃斯本人。马什重读自己起草的遗嘱，发现那条他始终反对的条款：沃斯一旦死亡或失踪超过三个月，全部财产与人身权利无条件移交威克。他追查无果，与威克在实验室后门相遇，对方只说：文件不在我名下，文件在我身体里。一年后，参议员韦恩在公园被人用马什当年送给沃斯的手杖活活打死，凶手留下的名字是威克。全城搜捕无功，一封替沃斯洗清干系的信却被笔迹专家证明与沃斯本人的契据出自同一只手。沃斯的旧友阿德勒被深夜电话拖进秘密，亲眼目击药剂把矮个子变回沃斯本人，随后猝然离世，只留下一封封存的陈述。当实验室门后响起不属于主人的声音，马什与管家破门而入，目送穿在沃斯衣服里的小个子服毒自尽。两份陈述揭开真相：沃斯配出一种能让天性折缝展开的盐，把被教养压抑的另一半自己放出来过夜，而真正起效的竟是原料里被厂家修正掉的微量杂质。杂质告罄，盐不再起效，两个自己再难合并，他只能写下自白，静候那只握笔的手停下。