Jacob Jankowski tells his story from two vantage points. In one, he is 23 years old: a Cornell veterinary student whose parents die in a car accident the week before his final exams, leaving him broke, adrift, and with no plan except the one that appears when he stumbles onto a moving circus train. In…
Susie Salmon is fourteen years old when her neighbor George Harvey rapes and murders her. From a personal heaven — a place shaped like a wishful version of high school, populated by others who share the things she loved — Susie watches her family fracture and slowly reconstruct in the years following her death. She…
Pi Patel grows up in Pondicherry, India, the son of a zookeeper who tends a menagerie of animals that will later save his son’s life — and nearly end it. Pi is an endlessly curious boy who practices Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam simultaneously, to the mild bafflement of everyone around him. When his family emigrates…
When Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a young man at the Tübingen seminary in the early 1790s, he filled notebooks with fragments: compressed observations on religion, politics, love, and moral life that he never intended for publication. “Aphorisms on Love and Law” gathers some of the most striking of these early fragments alongside related short…
In 1801, a twenty-nine-year-old Hegel published his first independent philosophical work, a dense critical essay comparing the systems of his two great contemporaries, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. The essay, known in English as “On the Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy” and usually called simply the Differenzschrift, announced the…
Hegel wrote “The German Constitution” between 1799 and 1802, in the shadow of Napoleon’s armies reorganizing the map of Europe, and he never published it during his lifetime. The manuscript sat unfinished and unpublished until after his death, when it emerged as evidence of a political mind working through questions that would eventually produce the…
Hegel published the “Philosophy of Right” in 1821, at the height of his powers and at the center of German intellectual life as Professor of Philosophy in Berlin. It is his most sustained and systematic treatment of law, morality, society, and the state, and it remains one of the foundational texts of political philosophy. The…
Hegel delivered his lectures on aesthetics at the University of Berlin four times between 1820 and 1829, and he never published them as a book. What we have as “Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art” is a posthumous compilation assembled by his student Heinrich Gustav Hotho from lecture notes and student transcripts, first published in 1835,…
In 2015, Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician at a Flint, Michigan hospital, noticed something troubling in her data: blood lead levels in children under five had nearly doubled since the city switched its water supply to the Flint River in 2014. When she published her findings, state officials attacked her methodology, accused her of causing panic,…
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote “Twilight of the Idols” in the summer of 1888, completing it in about two weeks. He was forty-four years old and had roughly six months of productive intellectual life left before his mental collapse in January 1889. The book he produced in that extraordinary burst of late work is compact, ferocious, and…