If Dostoevsky claimed that all Russian writers of his day "came out from Gogol's 'Overcoat,'" then Edith W. Clowes boldly expands his dramatic image to describe the emergence of Russian philosophy out from under the "overcoat" of Russian literature. In Fiction's Overcoat, Clowes responds to the view, commonly held by Western European and North American thinkers, that Russian culture has no philosophical tradition. If that is true, she asks, why do readers everywhere turn to the classics of Russian literature, at least in part because Russian writers so famously engage universal questions, because they are so "philosophical"? Her answer to this question is a lively and comprehensive volume that details the origins, submergence, and re-emergence of a rich and vital Russian philosophical tradition.During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Russian philosophy emerged in conversation with narrative fiction, radical journalism, and speculative theology, developing a distinct cultural discourse with its own claim to authority and truth. Leading Russian thinkers—Berdiaev, Losev, Rozanov, Shestov, and Solovyov—made philosophy the primary forum in which Russians debated metaphysical, aesthetic, and ethical questions as well as issues of individual and national identity. That debate was tragically truncated by the events of 1917 and the rise of the Soviet empire. Today, after seventy years of enforced silence, this particularly Russian philosophical culture has resurfaced. Fiction's Overcoat serves as a welcome guide to its complexities and nuances.Historians and cultural critics will find in Clowes's book the story of the increasing refinement and diversification of Russian cultural discourse, philosophers will find an alternative to the Western philosophical tradition, and students of literature will enjoy the opportunity to rethink the great Russian novelists—particularly Dostoevsky, Pasternak, and Platonov—as important voices in the process of shaping and sustaining a new philosophy and ensuring its survival into our own age.

"During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Russian philosophy emerged in conversation with narrative fiction, radical journalism, and speculative theology, developing a distinct cultural discourse with its own claim to authority and truth. Leading Russian thinkers - Berdiaev, Losev, Rozanov, Shestov, and Solovyov - made philosophy the primary forum in which Russians debated metaphysical, aesthetic, and ethical questions as well as issues of individual and national identity. That debate was tragically truncated by the events of 1917 and the rise of the Soviet empire. Today, after seventy years of enforced silence, this particularly Russian philosophical culture has resurfaced. Fiction's Overcoat serves as a welcome guide to its complexities and nuances.".

Joseph had a little overcoat, but it was full of holes—just like this book! When Joseph's coat got too old and shabby, he made it into a jacket. But what did he make it into after that? And after that? As children turn the pages of this book, they can use the die-cut holes to guess what Joseph will be making next from his amazing overcoat, while they laugh at the bold, cheerful artwork and learn that you can always make something, even out of nothing.

DigiCat presents to you this meticulously edited collection of Hilaire Belloc's greatest nonfiction works, as well as his novels, stories and poems. Hilaire Belloc was a British-French writer and historian and one of the most prolific writers in England during the early twentieth century. Belloc was also an orator, poet, sailor, satirist, writer of letters, soldier, and political activist. Contents: Nonfiction History The Book of the Bayeux Tapestry The Path to Rome The Old Road The French Revolution Blenheim Tourcoing Crécy Waterloo Malplaquet Poitiers First and Last Europe and the Faith Survivals and New Arrivals: The Old and New Enemies of the Catholic Church The Jews The Historic Thames A Change in the Cabinet A General Sketch of the European War: The First Phase The Two Maps of Europe Economics Servile State Essays Avril: Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance Hills and the Sea On Nothing and Kindred Subjects On Everything On Anything On Something This and That On The Free Press Fiction Novels & Short Stories The Mercy of Allah The Green Overcoat Poetry A Moral Alphabet Bad Child's Book of Beasts More Beasts For Worse Children The Modern Traveller Cautionary Tales for Children More Peers :

The stunning final novel from East Germany's most acclaimed writer Three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the writer Christa Wolf was granted access to her newly declassified Stasi files. Known for her defiance and outspokenness, Wolf was not especially surprised to discover forty-two volumes of documents produced by the East German secret police. But what was surprising was a thin green folder whose contents told an unfamiliar—and disturbing—story: in the early 1960s, Wolf herself had been an informant for the Communist government. And yet, thirty years on, she had absolutely no recollection of it. Wolf's extraordinary autobiographical final novel is an account of what it was like to reckon with such a shocking discovery. Based on the year she spent in Los Angeles after these explosive revelations, City of Angels is at once a powerful examination of memory and a surprisingly funny and touching exploration of L.A., a city strikingly different from any Wolf had ever visited. Even as she reflects on the burdens of twentieth-century history, Wolf describes the pleasures of driving a Geo Metro down Wilshire Boulevard and watching episodes of Star Trek late at night. Rich with philosophical insights, personal revelations, and vivid descriptions of a diverse city and its citizens, City of Angels is a profoundly humane and disarmingly honest novel—and a powerful conclusion to a remarkable career in letters.

A tailor's very old overcoat is recycled numerous times over the years into a variety of garments and other uses.

Fiction, far from being the opposite of truth, is wholly bent on finding it out, and writing novels is a way to know the real world as objectively as possible. In Five Fictions in Search of Truth, Myra Jehlen develops this idea through readings of works by Flaubert, James, and Nabokov. She invokes Proust's famous search for lost memory as the exemplary literary process, which strives, whatever its materials, for a true knowledge. In Salammbô, Flaubert digs up Carthage; in The Ambassadors, James plumbs the examined life and touches at its limits; while in Lolita, Nabokov traces a search for truth that becomes a trespass. In these readings, form and style emerge as fiction's means for taking hold of reality, which is to say that they are as epistemological as they are aesthetic, each one emerging by way of the other. The aesthetic aspects of a literary work are just so many instruments for exploring a subject, and the beauty and pleasure of a work confirm the validity of its account of the world. For Flaubert, famously, a beautiful sentence was proven true by its beauty. James and Nabokov wrote on the same assumption--that form and style were at once the origin and the confirmation of a work's truth. In Five Fictions in Search of Truth, Jehlen shows, moreover, that fiction's findings are not only about the world but immanent within it. Literature works concretely, through this form, that style, this image, that word, seeking a truth that is equally concrete. Writers write--and readers read--to discover an incarnate, secular knowledge, and in doing so they enact a basic concurrence between literature and science. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Russia has a rich, huge, unwieldy cultural tradition. How to grasp it? This classroom reader is designed to respond to that problem. The literary works selected for inclusion in this anthology introduce the core cultural and historic themes of Russia's civilisation. Each text has resonance throughout the arts - in Rublev's icons, Meyerhold's theatre, Mousorgsky's operas, Prokofiev's symphonies, Fokine's choreography and Kandinsky's paintings. This material is supported by introductions, helpful annotations and bibliographies of resources in all media. The reader is intended for use in courses in Russian literature, culture and civilisation, as well as comparative literature.

After years of struggle and sacrifice, Falcio val Mond, First Cantor of the Greatcoats, is on the brink of fulfilling his dead king's dream: Aline, the king's daughter, is about to take the throne and restore the rule of law once and for all. But for the Greatcoats, nothing is ever that simple. In the neighboring country of Avares, an enigmatic new warlord is uniting the barbarian armies that have long plagued Tristia's borders--and even worse, he is rumored to have a new ally: Trin, who's twice tried to kill Aline to claim the throne of Tristia for herself. With the armies of Avares at her back, led by a bloodthirsty warrior, she'll be unstoppable. Falcio, Kest, and Brasti race north to stop her, but in those cold and treacherous climes they discover something altogether different, and far more dangerous: a new player is planning to take the throne of Tristia, and with a sense of dread the three friends realize that the Greatcoats, for all their skill, may not be able to stop him. As the nobles of Tristia and even the Greatcoats themselves fight over who should rule, the Warlord of Avares threatens to invade. With so many powerful contenders vying for power, it will fall to Falcio to render the one verdict he cannot bring himself to utter, much less enforce. Should he help crown the young woman he vowed to put on the throne, or uphold the laws he swore to serve?

DigiCat presents the meticulously edited and timeless Harvard collection: Vols. 1 & 2: The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding Vol. 3: A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Vol. 4: Guy Mannering by Sir Walter Scott Vol. 5 & 6: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray Vol. 7 & 8: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens Vol. 9: The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot Vol. 10: The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne Rappaccini's Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving Eleonora by Edgar Allan Poe The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe The Luck of Roaring Camp by Francis Bret Harte The Outcasts of Poker Flat by Francis Bret Harte The Idyl of Red Gulch by Francis Bret Harte Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog by Mark Twain The Man Without a Country by Edward Everett Hale Vol.11: The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James Vol. 12: Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo Vol. 13: Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac The Devil's Pool by George Sand The Story of a White Blackbird by Alfred de Musset The Siege of Berlin by Alphonse Daudet The Last Class by Alphonse Daudet The Child Spy by Alphonse Daudet The Game of Billiards by Alphonse Daudet The Bad Zouave by Alphonse Daudet Walter Schnaffs' Adventure by Guy de Maupassant Two Friends by Guy de Maupassant The Cripple by Guy de Maupassant Vol. 14: Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by J. W. von Goethe Vol.15: The Sorrows of Young Werther by J. W. von Goethe The Banner of the Upright Seven by Gottfried Keller The Rider on the White Horse by Theodor Storm Trials and Tribulations by Theodor Fontane Vols. 16 & 17: Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina Ivan the Fool Vol. 18: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky Vol. 19: Ivan Turgenev A House of Gentlefolk Fathers and Children Vol. 20: Pepita Jimenez by Juan Valera A Happy Boy by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson Skipper Worse by Alexander L. Kielland