Literature
The stories, plays and poems in which ideas are given faces — Hamlet's skull, Raskolnikov's axe, Arjuna's lowered bow, Sisyphus's rock. Every work told in full, for readers who haven't read it yet and readers who want to read it again.
The two realms are one library — every page links across. Cross to philosophy →
Traditions
9 roomsGreek & Latin Literature
Homer’s epics, the Athenian tragedians, Virgil and Ovid — the stories, heroes and forms from which all Western literature descends.
Indian Literature
The great epics, the Gītā, Kālidāsa’s plays and poems, the bhakti poets and the moderns — India’s literature of dharma, love and devotion.
English Literature
From Chaucer and Shakespeare to Milton, the Romantics, the great Victorian novelists and the modernists — the literature of the English language.
Russian Literature
Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov — the nineteenth-century miracle in which a young literature asked the biggest questions in the history of the novel.
French Literature
Montaigne’s essays and Pascal’s thoughts, Molière and Racine, Voltaire’s satire, Balzac, Flaubert, Hugo, Baudelaire, Proust — and the novels of the absurd.
German-Language Literature
Goethe’s Faust, Schiller, Hölderlin, Heine, Rilke, Kafka, Mann, Hesse — the literature of Bildung, longing and the modern labyrinth.
Italian & Spanish Literature
Dante’s Divine Comedy, Petrarch and Boccaccio, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Lorca, Borges, García Márquez — from the journey through Hell to the first modern novel.
Tragedy & Drama
Every play in the library — from Athenian tragedy to Shakespeare to Beckett — and the great scenes that hold a theatre breathless.
The Novel of Ideas
Novels in which characters live and die by ideas — Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Kafka, Camus, Voltaire, Turgenev.