Machiavelli
'A wonderfully assured and utterly riveting biography that captures not only the much-maligned Machiavelli, but also the spirit of his time and place. A monumental achievement.' – Jessie Childs, author of God's Traitors. ‘A notorious fiend’, ‘generally odious’, ‘he seems hideous, and so he is.’ Thanks to the invidious reputation of his most famous work, The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli exerts a unique hold over the popular imagination. But was Machiavelli as sinister as he is often thought to be? Might he not have been an infinitely more sympathetic figure, prone to political missteps, professional failures and personal dramas? Alexander Lee reveals the man behind the myth, following him from cradle to grave, from his father’s penury and the abuse he suffered at a teacher’s hands, to his marriage and his many affairs (with both men and women), to his political triumphs and, ultimately, his fall from grace and exile. In doing so, Lee uncovers hitherto unobserved connections between Machiavelli’s life and thought. He also reveals the world through which Machiavelli moved: from the great halls of Renaissance Florence to the court of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, from the dungeons of the Stinche prison to the Rucellai gardens, where he would begin work on some of his last great works. As much a portrait of an age as of a uniquely engaging man, Lee’s gripping and definitive biography takes the reader into Machiavelli’s world – and his work – more completely than ever before.
War with the Newts
"Originally written in 1936, two years before Capek's death and three years before the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, War with the Newts is considered by many to be Capek's greatest book." "Working in the "fantastic" satiric tradition of Wells, Orwell, and Vonnegut, Capek chronicles the discovery of a colony of highly intelligent giant salamanders off the coast of an Indonesian island. Capek sardonically details all the reactions of the civilized world - from horror to skepticism, from intellectual fascination to mercantile opportunism - and the ultimate destruction from which it (and the newts) might not escape." --Book Jacket.
Toward the Radical Center
Capek's best plays, stories, and columns take us from the social contributions of clumsy people to dramatic meditations on mortality and commitment. The Reader includes a new and, at last, complete English translation of R.U.R., the play that introduced the literary robot.
Lives of the Monster Dogs
When a race of elegant, superintelligent dogs arrives in twenty-first-century New York, they become instant celebrities, but, unable to adjust to the modern world and confronted with an incurable disease, they construct a fantastic castle and barricade themselves inside.
R.U.R.
We rely on your support to help us keep producing beautiful, free, and unrestricted editions of literature for the digital age. Will you support our efforts with a donation? R.U.R., or Rossum’s Universal Robots is a play written in 1920 by Karel Čapek, a Czech writer who wrote many plays and novels, many of them with science-fiction and dystopian themes. R.U.R. is perhaps the most well-known of these works in the English-speaking world because it brought the word “robot” into the language. “Robot” is derived from the Czech word meaning “worker.” The play is set in the island headquarters of the R.U.R. corporation. The corporation has been manufacturing artificial beings which resemble humans, but who are tireless workers. They can be mass-produced in large numbers and are being adopted as workers in many countries. In the first scene of the play, they are visited by a young woman, Helena Glory, who aspires to relieve the lot of the robots, who she sees as oppressed. However, in what must be the fastest seduction scene in all drama, she is wooed and agrees to marry Harry Domin, the factory manager, who she has just met. She still however aspires to improve the life of robots and find a way to give them souls. Ultimately, however, this admirable desire leads to disaster for humankind. The play was translated into English, and slightly abridged, by Paul Selver and Nigel Playfair in 1923. This version quickly became popular with both British and American audiences and was well received by critics.
