Confessions by Saint Augustine (Oxford, $8). The first psychological analysis of the human condition—sublimely wise, rich with insights into the covert motivations of the human heart—does the spadework for Freud’s own explorations, 1,500 years later.
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (Vintage, $64). Whoever perseveres to the last chapters of this glorious text—some 4,000 pages filled with unsurpassed splendor and wit concerning turn-of-the-century European life—will be rewarded by an illumination into the nature of time and memory. For many of us, it has been nothing less than life-transforming.
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The Tragic Muse by Henry James (Kessinger, $43). This work of the master’s late Middle Period—more accessible than The Wings of the Dove or The Golden Bowl—offers poignant perceptions into the nature of ambition and lust, and also into the torments that often plague those who choose art as a vocation.
Break, Blow, Burn by Camille Paglia (Pantheon, $20). Our foremost cultural provocateur takes on a new incarnation as a tame and measured literary critic. In pellucid prose, with no academic cant or obfuscation whatever, Paglia brilliantly explores the structure and symbolism of 43 poems of the Anglo-American tradition. As entertaining as it is dazzlingly erudite, Break, Blow, Burn is capable of re-energizing any reader’s engagement with poetry.
Regeneration by Pat Barker (Penguin, $15). The first installment in this British novelist’s brilliant World War I trilogy concerns the poet Siegried Sassoon and his harrowing saga as a conscientious objector, when he was sent to a psychiatric hospital for refusing military service. Barker’s complex interplay of fiction and historical fact breaks new ground in the genre of the historical novel.
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