Brave New World

Ranked one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, this dystopian satire is a brilliant and terrifying vision of a soulless society—and of one man who discovers the human costs of mindless conformity. Hundreds of years in the future, the World Controllers have created an ideal civilization. Its members, shaped by genetic engineering and behavioral conditioning, are productive and content in roles they have been assigned at conception. Government-sanctioned drugs and recreational sex ensure that everyone is a happy, unquestioning consumer; messy emotions have been anesthetized and private attachments are considered obscene. Only Bernard Marx is discontented, developing an unnatural desire for solitude and a distaste for compulsory promiscuity. When he brings back a young man from one of the few remaining Savage Reservations, where the old unenlightened ways still continue, he unleashes a dramatic clash of cultures that will force him to consider whether freedom, dignity, and individuality are worth suffering for. Aldous Huxley’s ingenious fantasy of a future of mechanical efficiency and engineered harmony has been enormously influential for generations, and is as provocative, powerful, and riveting as when it was first published in 1932.

Literature & Fiction

HUXLEY, ALDOUS

Literary

Everyman's Library

Published in 1776, in the same year as the Declaration of Independence, The Wealth of Nations has had an equally great impact on the course of modern history. Adam Smith’s celebrated defense of free market economies was written with such expressive power and clarity that the first edition sold out in six months. While its most remarkable and enduring innovation was to see the whole of economic life as a unified system, it is notable also as one of the Enlightenment’s most eloquent testaments to the sanctity of the individual in his relation to the state.

The Wealth of Nations (Everyman's Library)

Business & Money

Smith, Adam

Economics

Published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe has long been celebrated as the first great English novel. Based on the account of a shipwrecked sailor, it tells the story of one man rediscovering himself and the world in a solitude he thinks complete until his encounter with Man Friday. Distinguished by its strong, pure style, and by a delight in factual precision, Robinson Crusoe is still the most compelling book we have from the Age of Exploration. The impact of Daniel Defoe’s prose on the development of English writing has often been compared to that of the King James Bible; and the power of this fable of human loneliness has been felt by readers of every age over the last three hundred years.

Robinson Crusoe (Everyman's Library)

Children's Books

DEFOE, DANIEL

Classics

This classic story of a shipwrecked mariner on a deserted island is perhaps the greatest adventure in all of English literature. Fleeing from pirates, Robinson Crusoe is swept ashore in a storm possessing only a knife, a box of tobacco, a pipe-and the will to survive. His is the saga of a man alone: a man who overcomes self-pity and despair to reconstruct his life; who painstakingly teaches himself how to fashion a pot, bake bread, build a canoe; and who, after twenty-four agonizing years of solitude, discovers a human footprint in the sand... Consistently popular since its first publication in 1719, Daniel Defoe's story of human endurance in an exotic, faraway land exerts a timeless appeal. The first important English novel, Robinson Crusoe has taken its rightful place among the great myths of Western civilization.

Robinson Crusoe: His Life and Strange Surprising Adventures (Everyman's Library Children's Classics Series)

Published in the same year as the American Declaration of Independence, The Wealth of Nations has had an equally great impact on the course of modern history. Adam Smith's celebrated defence of free market economics is notable also as one of the Enlightenment's most eloquent testaments to the sanctity of the individual in his relations to the state.

The Wealth of Nations

Adam Smith

D.D. Raphael