https://emend.press/ Classic public-domain texts, retold in contemporary English. New retellings as they are finished. en-us Sun, 11 Oct 2026 18:09:19 -0400 https://emend.press/genealogy.html https://emend.press/genealogy.html Sun, 11 Oct 2026 18:09:19 -0400 Where do 'good' and 'evil' come from? Three essays tracing our morality back to the masters and slaves, debtors and creditors, and priests who made it. Retold from Nietzsche's German. https://emend.press/princess-of-cleves.html https://emend.press/princess-of-cleves.html Sun, 11 Oct 2026 18:09:19 -0400 A young wife, a perfect husband, the most dazzling man at court, and a passion she will not give in to: the first great psychological novel, with the novella that led to it. Translated from Lafayette's French. https://emend.press/nibelungenlied.html https://emend.press/nibelungenlied.html Sun, 11 Oct 2026 18:09:19 -0400 Siegfried is murdered by his wife's own kin, and Kriemhild waits thirteen years to take her revenge. The great German epic, retold in modern English prose from the Middle High German. https://emend.press/mysterious-island.html https://emend.press/mysterious-island.html Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:01:33 -0400 Five Union escapees ride a balloon out of besieged Richmond and onto an uncharted Pacific island, where an engineer rebuilds civilization from one match — and someone unseen is watching. Translated complete from Verne's French. https://emend.press/malory.html https://emend.press/malory.html Sat, 10 Oct 2026 08:09:20 -0400 The whole story of Arthur, from the sword in the stone to the last battle, written by a knight in prison in 1469. All twenty-one Books, retold in modern English. https://emend.press/gita.html https://emend.press/gita.html Sat, 10 Oct 2026 08:09:20 -0400 On a battlefield, a warrior refuses to fight his own family, and his charioteer, who is God, answers him. All seven hundred verses, retold from the Sanskrit. https://emend.press/zarathustra.html https://emend.press/zarathustra.html Sat, 10 Oct 2026 08:09:20 -0400 A prophet comes down from his mountain to announce that God is dead and man is something to be overcome. Retold from Nietzsche's German. https://emend.press/tarbell.html https://emend.press/tarbell.html Wed, 07 Oct 2026 19:23:50 -0400 The second volume of Harlan Tarbell's famous correspondence course in stage magic: wands, paper cones, coins, cigarettes, cards, eggs, billiard balls, silks, ropes, spirit effects and illusions, with over a thousand of his drawings. https://emend.press/beecher.html https://emend.press/beecher.html Wed, 07 Oct 2026 08:31:05 -0400 Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1869 manual of domestic science: house plans, ventilation, stoves, health, cooking, children, gardens and the earth-closet, with all 81 original illustrations. https://emend.press/godel.html https://emend.press/godel.html Mon, 05 Oct 2026 15:41:57 -0400 The classic short explanation of Gödel's incompleteness theorem: how arithmetic was shown to contain truths it cannot prove, in the first edition of 1958. https://emend.press/sabotage.html https://emend.press/sabotage.html Mon, 05 Oct 2026 13:22:59 -0400 The OSS field manual of 1944 for ordinary people in occupied countries: how to slow an enemy war economy through small acts, including its famous advice on wrecking organizations from within. https://emend.press/endless.html https://emend.press/endless.html Mon, 05 Oct 2026 13:22:59 -0400 Vannevar Bush's 1945 report to the President: why basic research is the pacemaker of progress, and the case for a federal foundation to fund it. https://emend.press/carson.html https://emend.press/carson.html Mon, 05 Oct 2026 13:22:59 -0400 Rachel Carson's booklets for the Fish and Wildlife Service on Chincoteague, Parker River, Mattamuskeet and Bear River, and on why wild creatures need a place to live. https://emend.press/kropotkin.html https://emend.press/kropotkin.html Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:38:39 -0400 Kropotkin's answer to the war of each against all: cooperation among ants, birds, villagers, guildsmen and strikers as a factor of evolution, in the revised edition of 1904. https://emend.press/perlman.html https://emend.press/perlman.html Mon, 05 Oct 2026 09:34:49 -0400 The history of civilization from Sumer to Detroit told as the life of a monster, Hobbes's Leviathan, and of the people who walked away from it: Perlman's 1983 essay, with its Blake plates. https://emend.press/haldane.html https://emend.press/haldane.html Mon, 28 Sep 2026 19:18:32 -0400 Why a mouse survives a fall down a mine shaft, why insects fear getting wet, and why size decides the shape of every animal: Haldane's classic essay, as printed in 1927. https://emend.press/fontenelle.html https://emend.press/fontenelle.html Mon, 28 Sep 2026 18:19:40 -0400 Six evenings in a moonlit park: a young philosopher teaches a witty Marquise the new astronomy and the plurality of worlds. Retold from the French of 1686. https://emend.press/turgot.html https://emend.press/turgot.html Mon, 28 Sep 2026 18:19:40 -0400 A hundred short steps from a village of equal farms to capital, money and interest, written for two Chinese students in 1766. Retold from the French. https://emend.press/hojoki.html https://emend.press/hojoki.html Mon, 28 Sep 2026 18:19:40 -0400 A poet who saw Kyoto burn, starve and shake retires to a ten-foot hut and writes about impermanence. Retold from the Japanese of 1212. https://emend.press/hayy.html https://emend.press/hayy.html Mon, 28 Sep 2026 18:19:40 -0400 A child raised by a doe on a desert island works out anatomy, the stars and God by himself. Ibn Tufayl's 12th-century philosophical tale, retold from the Arabic. https://emend.press/euler.html https://emend.press/euler.html Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:51:57 -0400 The great mathematician's 234 letters teaching a fifteen-year-old princess science and philosophy, 1760 to 1762, translated from the French. https://emend.press/chalk.html https://emend.press/chalk.html Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:23:23 -0400 Huxley's 1868 lecture to the working men of Norwich: what a carpenter's piece of chalk reveals about the sea floor, deep time and evolution. https://emend.press/boltzmann.html https://emend.press/boltzmann.html Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:20:33 -0400 The great physicist's comic account of his 1905 trip from Vienna to teach at Berkeley, retold from the German. https://emend.press/fowler.html https://emend.press/fowler.html Sun, 27 Sep 2026 12:07:00 -0400 Fowler’s 1926 dictionary of English usage, page-read from the first printing, with every headword an anchor and every cross-reference a link. https://emend.press/helmholtz.html https://emend.press/helmholtz.html Mon, 21 Sep 2026 07:29:23 -0400 Helmholtz’s founding work on the physics and physiology of musical sound, in Ellis’s annotated translation, with every figure and passage of music described. https://emend.press/conquest.html https://emend.press/conquest.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 22:46:13 -0400 Russell’s practical book on why people are unhappy and how they can become happy, written in 1930 for readers who are not philosophers. https://emend.press/hoffmann.html https://emend.press/hoffmann.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 22:37:26 -0400 The Victorian conjurer’s complete handbook, from the wand and the cups and balls to the great stage illusions, with every drawing described. https://emend.press/farmer.html https://emend.press/farmer.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 22:17:34 -0400 The cookbook that taught America to measure level: bread to confectionery in its author’s own 1910 revision, with every photograph described. https://emend.press/speed.html https://emend.press/speed.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 22:06:28 -0400 A painter’s account of what drawing is and how to learn it, from line and mass to rhythm, balance and the visual memory, with all eighty-eight illustrations described. https://emend.press/howard.html https://emend.press/howard.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 21:56:33 -0400 The book that invented the garden city: a town of 32,000 in a belt of farmland it never builds over, worked out in plans and figures, with its diagrams transcribed. https://emend.press/verrill.html https://emend.press/verrill.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 21:48:54 -0400 How to tie every useful knot, from the square knot to the Turk’s head, with each of the 148 drawings described so the rope can be followed. https://emend.press/russell-imp.html https://emend.press/russell-imp.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 21:39:31 -0400 What a number is, what infinity is, and what logic has to do with either: the ideas of Principia Mathematica for a reader who does not know the symbols. https://emend.press/capablanca.html https://emend.press/capablanca.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 21:29:03 -0400 A world champion’s first book for beginners, from the simplest mates to fourteen of his own games, with every diagram described square by square. https://emend.press/de-kruif.html https://emend.press/de-kruif.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 21:10:56 -0400 The discovery of microbes and the diseases they cause, one discoverer to a chapter, from Leeuwenhoek's lenses to Ehrlich's magic bullet: the 1926 text. https://emend.press/bulfinch.html https://emend.press/bulfinch.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 20:59:41 -0400 The Greek and Roman myths retold in plain prose in 1855, each followed into the English poetry that borrowed it: the first edition's text, restored. https://emend.press/strunk.html https://emend.press/strunk.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 20:38:02 -0400 The 1920 text of the little book on plain English, before any later revision: eighteen numbered rules, the words most often misused, and exercises. https://emend.press/byrne.html https://emend.press/byrne.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 17:56:34 -0400 The first six books of Euclid's geometry as Oliver Byrne printed them in 1847, with the letters replaced by coloured diagrams set into the sentences of every proof. https://emend.press/gray-plants.html https://emend.press/gray-plants.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:30:19 -0400 A botany book for young people from 1858: how a plant grows from the seed, what its parts are and what they do, and a Popular Flora of 105 families with keys, in over five hundred wood engravings. https://emend.press/bridgman.html https://emend.press/bridgman.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 15:04:05 -0400 Five Harvard lectures of 1920 on how far units alone can take you: the pendulum, the Π theorem, model experiments and the constants of nature, by a physicist who thought almost nobody understood why the method works. https://emend.press/game-of-logic.html https://emend.press/game-of-logic.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:14:47 -0400 Logic taught to children as a board game with red and grey counters, from the author of Alice, with every diagram redrawn. https://emend.press/rhetoric.html https://emend.press/rhetoric.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 13:46:28 -0400 The ancient world's manual of persuasion, from the Greek: the three means of persuasion, the emotions, the young and the old, style and the order of a speech. https://emend.press/erdnase.html https://emend.press/erdnase.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 13:27:20 -0400 The 1902 manual of card handling, at the card table and on the conjuring stage, with every one of its hundred and one drawings from life. https://emend.press/astronomy-for-everybody.html https://emend.press/astronomy-for-everybody.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:28:09 -0400 Newcomb's 1902 tour of the heavens for a reader who has never opened an astronomy book, from the turning sky to the fixed stars. https://emend.press/common-law.html https://emend.press/common-law.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:21:36 -0400 Holmes's 1881 lectures tracing crime, tort, possession, contract and inheritance to their origins, retold in modern English. https://emend.press/nature-of-the-judicial-process.html https://emend.press/nature-of-the-judicial-process.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:59:14 -0400 Four lectures by a sitting judge on what judges actually do when they decide a case, and how far they make the law they apply. https://emend.press/alice.html https://emend.press/alice.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:25:32 -0400 Alice follows a White Rabbit down a hole into a world of arguments, riddles and parodies, in the 1907 edition illustrated by Arthur Rackham. https://emend.press/hunting-of-the-snark.html https://emend.press/hunting-of-the-snark.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:14:52 -0400 A nonsense poem in eight fits: a crew of ten sets out with a blank map to hunt the Snark, and the Baker has been warned what happens if it is a Boojum. https://emend.press/science-and-hypothesis.html https://emend.press/science-and-hypothesis.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:12:42 -0400 How much of what science tells us is found in nature and how much is put there by the scientist, through arithmetic, geometry, mechanics and physics. https://emend.press/introduction-to-mathematics.html https://emend.press/introduction-to-mathematics.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:02:22 -0400 What mathematics is, from variables and symbolism to imaginary numbers, conic sections, series and the calculus, for readers with no more than a school course. https://emend.press/relativity.html https://emend.press/relativity.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 10:46:57 -0400 The special and the general theory of relativity explained for readers without the mathematics, from a train, an embankment and two strokes of lightning. https://emend.press/psychology-briefer-course.html https://emend.press/psychology-briefer-course.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 10:33:35 -0400 The one-volume version of The Principles of Psychology, from the senses and the brain to habit, the stream of consciousness, the self, emotion and will. https://emend.press/short-history-of-the-world.html https://emend.press/short-history-of-the-world.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 10:05:11 -0400 The whole of human history, from the nebulae to the peace after the First World War, in sixty-seven short chapters and two hundred and eight plates. https://emend.press/problems-of-philosophy.html https://emend.press/problems-of-philosophy.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 09:44:24 -0400 A short introduction to philosophy that begins with a table and asks what, if anything, we can know about it. https://emend.press/calculus-made-easy.html https://emend.press/calculus-made-easy.html Sun, 20 Sep 2026 08:37:04 -0400 The book that promised to deliver the reader from the preliminary terrors of the calculus, and did: differentiation and integration explained by a physicist who thought the textbooks made them hard on purpose. https://emend.press/old-indian-legends.html https://emend.press/old-indian-legends.html Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:43:20 -0400 Fourteen Dakota legends of Iktomi the trickster and his neighbours, told for children in 1901 and illustrated by Angel De Cora. https://emend.press/american-indian-stories.html https://emend.press/american-indian-stories.html Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:43:20 -0400 A Dakota writer’s childhood, her schooldays in the East, her stories, and her 1921 essay on how the government managed Indian affairs. https://emend.press/aesop.html https://emend.press/aesop.html Thu, 17 Sep 2026 19:35:52 -0400 All 284 of Aesop’s fables in V. S. Vernon Jones’s 1912 translation, with G. K. Chesterton’s introduction and every one of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations. https://emend.press/irish-fairy-tales.html https://emend.press/irish-fairy-tales.html Thu, 17 Sep 2026 19:35:52 -0400 Ten stories of Fionn, the Fianna and the people of the Shi’, retold by James Stephens in 1920 and illustrated by Arthur Rackham. https://emend.press/worthington.html https://emend.press/worthington.html Thu, 17 Sep 2026 19:29:32 -0400 Instantaneous photographs of the splash of a drop, taken by electric spark in thousandths of a second, with Worthington’s Royal Institution discourse on the same subject. https://emend.press/lucretius.html https://emend.press/lucretius.html Thu, 10 Sep 2026 07:51:06 -0400 Lucretius's poem on atoms, the soul, the senses, the making of the world and the plague at Athens, from the Latin, as modern prose. https://emend.press/euripides.html https://emend.press/euripides.html Thu, 10 Sep 2026 07:31:36 -0400 Every surviving play of Euripides, from the Greek: nineteen plays, the spoken scenes as modern prose and the songs as verse. https://emend.press/aeschylus.html https://emend.press/aeschylus.html Wed, 09 Sep 2026 22:48:43 -0400 All seven surviving plays of Aeschylus, from the Greek: the spoken scenes as modern prose, the sung odes as verse, and the Oresteia complete. https://emend.press/sophocles.html https://emend.press/sophocles.html Wed, 02 Sep 2026 09:28:29 -0400 All seven surviving plays of Sophocles, from the Greek: the spoken scenes as fast modern prose, the sung odes as verse. https://emend.press/kenzeiki.html https://emend.press/kenzeiki.html Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:20:37 -0400 The oldest life of Dōgen, founder of Sōtō Zen: the Kenzeiki, with his letters, verses and temple rules. From the Japanese, complete. https://emend.press/dogen.html https://emend.press/dogen.html Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:12:36 -0400 Three short instructions from the founder of Sōtō Zen: how to sit, how to study, and how to cook. From the Chinese, complete. https://emend.press/odyssey.html https://emend.press/odyssey.html Fri, 28 Aug 2026 08:30:40 -0400 The oldest adventure story in Europe: ten years of monsters and shipwrecks, and then the harder half, a man getting his house back. https://emend.press/paradiso.html https://emend.press/paradiso.html Sun, 23 Aug 2026 09:40:57 -0400 The third book of the Comedy: out through the spheres to the light, and the last words of the greatest poem in Europe. https://emend.press/purgatorio.html https://emend.press/purgatorio.html Sat, 22 Aug 2026 22:45:44 -0400 The second book of the Comedy: a mountain in the southern sea where the dead are being changed, and where the dead are glad. https://emend.press/cellini.html https://emend.press/cellini.html Sat, 22 Aug 2026 14:14:16 -0400 A Florentine goldsmith tells his own story: popes, murders, a prison escape, and the casting of the Perseus. https://emend.press/inferno.html https://emend.press/inferno.html Sat, 22 Aug 2026 12:15:06 -0400 A man lost in a dark wood is taken down through Hell by a dead poet, and meets the people he knew. https://emend.press/sun-tzu.html https://emend.press/sun-tzu.html Sat, 22 Aug 2026 11:05:04 -0400 The oldest surviving book on war, and the one that says the highest skill is to win without fighting at all. https://emend.press/wollstonecraft.html https://emend.press/wollstonecraft.html Fri, 21 Aug 2026 20:34:12 -0400 Written in six weeks, three years after the Revolution: women are not born frivolous, they are made so by an education that gives them nothing else to be. https://emend.press/spinoza.html https://emend.press/spinoza.html Fri, 21 Aug 2026 11:07:27 -0400 Everything that exists is one substance, which you may call God or Nature; understanding that is the only freedom there is. https://emend.press/burke.html https://emend.press/burke.html Wed, 19 Aug 2026 10:58:58 -0400 The book that invented conservatism, written in 1790 by a Whig who had spent his career attacking the abuse of power in America, Ireland and India. https://emend.press/subjection.html https://emend.press/subjection.html Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:37:44 -0400 Written in 1861, held back for eight years, published fifty years before British women could vote: the legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong, and nobody has ever tried the alternative. https://emend.press/mill.html https://emend.press/mill.html Mon, 17 Aug 2026 22:28:41 -0400 One principle: the only thing that entitles anyone to interfere with your freedom is preventing harm to somebody else. https://emend.press/boethius.html https://emend.press/boethius.html Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:31:17 -0400 A condemned man in a prison cell is visited by Philosophy, who tells him that nothing he has lost was ever his. https://emend.press/augustine.html https://emend.press/augustine.html Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:22:06 -0400 The first autobiography: a brilliant, restless man tells God everything, and invents the inner life on the way. https://emend.press/hume.html https://emend.press/hume.html Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:24:23 -0400 The book that broke causation: why no amount of experience can prove the sun will rise tomorrow, and why it does not matter. https://emend.press/epictetus.html https://emend.press/epictetus.html Sun, 16 Aug 2026 22:40:24 -0400 The lectures the Enchiridion was cut down from: a former slave, in a provincial classroom, telling Rome's young gentlemen that they are the ones in chains. https://emend.press/grimm.html https://emend.press/grimm.html Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:38:47 -0400 All two hundred tales and ten children's legends the Brothers Grimm collected — the famous ones and the two hundred nobody prints — retold complete in clear modern English from Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation. https://emend.press/nights.html https://emend.press/nights.html Sat, 15 Aug 2026 16:07:50 -0400 Shahrazad's frame story and eighteen of the great tales of the Thousand Nights and a Night — Sindbad, the City of Brass, Aladdin, Ali Baba — retold in clear modern English from Richard Burton's 1885 translation. https://emend.press/quixote.html https://emend.press/quixote.html Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:03:48 -0400 The first modern novel, complete and unabridged — both volumes, all 126 chapters — retold in vivid contemporary English fresh from Cervantes' Spanish. https://emend.press/euclid-rivals.html https://emend.press/euclid-rivals.html Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:28:23 -0400 The author of Alice in Wonderland, in his day job as an Oxford mathematics lecturer, puts every geometry textbook of the age on trial before the ghost of Euclid — and it is a farce in four acts. https://emend.press/pillow-problems.html https://emend.press/pillow-problems.html Thu, 06 Aug 2026 20:29:51 -0400 Seventy-two mathematical problems that the author of Alice worked out in his head, in bed, in the dark — and the reason he gives for doing it is not what you expect. https://emend.press/symbolic-logic.html https://emend.press/symbolic-logic.html Thu, 06 Aug 2026 06:59:07 -0400 The author of Alice teaching formal logic to children of twelve and fourteen — as a game, played on a squared board with red and grey counters, and with three hundred diagrams to show every move. https://emend.press/tangled-tale.html https://emend.press/tangled-tale.html Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:19:06 -0400 Ten comic stories with a mathematical puzzle hidden in each — and then, a month later, the author's own review of the answers his readers sent in, class-listed by pseudonym and taken apart with enormous relish. https://emend.press/bunyan.html https://emend.press/bunyan.html Wed, 05 Aug 2026 06:35:13 -0400 The journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City — the burden that falls off by itself, the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, and the key called Promise that was in his pocket all along. https://emend.press/tyndall.html https://emend.press/tyndall.html Sun, 02 Aug 2026 17:55:00 -0400 The lectures on sound that founded a tradition — from the row of boys who pass a push down a line to the fog-signal researches that overturned everything the age believed about sound at sea. https://emend.press/thompson.html https://emend.press/thompson.html Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:42:06 -0400 Six Royal Institution Christmas lectures on light — from ripples in a tank of water to the X-rays discovered thirteen months before the first lecture was given. https://emend.press/ball.html https://emend.press/ball.html Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:35:03 -0400 Six Royal Institution Christmas lectures taking young people from the sun out to the nebulae — with a closing chapter that teaches you to find your own way around the constellations tonight. https://emend.press/fleming.html https://emend.press/fleming.html Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:21:57 -0400 Six Christmas lectures for young people at the Royal Institution on waves of every kind — ripples on a pond, the wake of a ship, sound and music, electric oscillations, and the waves by which Marconi had just begun to signal across the sea. https://emend.press/forces.html https://emend.press/forces.html Thu, 30 Jul 2026 16:10:14 -0400 Six Christmas lectures for young people on gravitation, cohesion, chemical affinity, heat, magnetism and electricity — arriving at the conclusion that they are not six powers at all but one, convertible each into the others. https://emend.press/candle.html https://emend.press/candle.html Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:41:18 -0400 Six Christmas lectures for young people at the Royal Institution, drawing the whole of chemistry out of a single burning candle — where it gets its fuel, why the flame is bright, what it consumes, what it makes, and why you yourself are a slow candle. https://emend.press/soap-bubbles.html https://emend.press/soap-bubbles.html Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:51:31 -0400 Why a bubble is round, why a falling jet of water breaks into beads, and how a fountain can be made to sing a tune — three Christmas lectures on surface tension, given to a hall full of children and illustrated with all sixty-nine of the original plates. https://emend.press/ovid.html https://emend.press/ovid.html Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:20:50 -0400 The great storybook of classical mythology — from the making of the world to the transformations of gods and mortals — retold complete in vivid modern prose, fresh from Ovid's Latin. https://emend.press/journey-center-earth.html https://emend.press/journey-center-earth.html Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:26:25 -0400 Professor Lidenbrock deciphers a coded parchment and drags his reluctant nephew down an Icelandic volcano toward the Earth's core — Verne's purest wonder-and-descent adventure, translated complete and fresh from the French. https://emend.press/eighty-days.html https://emend.press/eighty-days.html Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:10:10 -0400 Phileas Fogg's £20,000 wager to circle the globe in eighty days — Verne's most delightful comic adventure, translated complete and fresh from the French. https://emend.press/twenty-thousand-leagues.html https://emend.press/twenty-thousand-leagues.html Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:52:23 -0400 A ten-month voyage under every sea aboard Captain Nemo's submarine Nautilus — the founding adventure of science fiction, translated complete and fresh from Verne's French. https://emend.press/galileo.html https://emend.press/galileo.html Tue, 21 Jul 2026 15:38:41 -0400 Four days of brilliant argument about whether the Earth moves — the vernacular bestseller that got its author hauled before the Inquisition, translated from Galileo's own Italian. https://emend.press/theophrastus.html https://emend.press/theophrastus.html Tue, 21 Jul 2026 13:00:34 -0400 Thirty short comic sketches of annoying people — the flatterer, the bore, the cheapskate, the newsmonger — proving human nature hasn't changed in 2,300 years. https://emend.press/seneca.html https://emend.press/seneca.html Tue, 21 Jul 2026 11:55:16 -0400 All 124 letters from a Stoic: an old philosopher writes his friend a daily course in living — time, friendship, fear, fortune, and how to die well. https://emend.press/catos-letters.html https://emend.press/catos-letters.html Tue, 21 Jul 2026 08:16:17 -0400 Eighteen selected letters on liberty, power, and free speech — the anonymous newspaper columns that taught the American colonies how to argue for revolution. https://emend.press/roman-lives.html https://emend.press/roman-lives.html Tue, 21 Jul 2026 07:55:51 -0400 The fall of the Roman Republic in five lives — Caesar, Cato, Cicero, Brutus, and Antony — by the ancient world's greatest biographer. https://emend.press/ethics.html https://emend.press/ethics.html Tue, 21 Jul 2026 07:21:41 -0400 The original inquiry into the good life: happiness as the goal, virtue as trained habit aiming at the mean, two books on friendship, and the case for the thinking life. https://emend.press/tusculan.html https://emend.press/tusculan.html Mon, 20 Jul 2026 21:27:31 -0400 Five days of dialogues at a country villa on the things that scare us most — death, pain, grief, and the passions — ending with the case that virtue alone is enough for happiness. https://emend.press/autobiography.html https://emend.press/autobiography.html Mon, 20 Jul 2026 20:32:32 -0400 The original American life story: a runaway apprentice becomes printer, scientist, and statesman — told with the dry wit of a man who brags and then winks at the brag. https://emend.press/de-officiis.html https://emend.press/de-officiis.html Mon, 20 Jul 2026 20:02:45 -0400 Cicero's last book, written as a letter to his son: what the right requires, what advantage tempts, and why nothing dishonorable is ever truly useful. https://emend.press/memorabilia.html https://emend.press/memorabilia.html Mon, 20 Jul 2026 18:07:37 -0400 Socrates remembered by his other student: not the ironist of Plato's dialogues but the practical teacher — on friendship, work, self-control, and how to be useful to your city. https://emend.press/way-to-wealth.html https://emend.press/way-to-wealth.html Mon, 20 Jul 2026 17:44:05 -0400 Twenty-five years of Poor Richard's proverbs stitched into one speech about work, thrift, and debt — delivered to a crowd that applauds every word and then ignores it. https://emend.press/enchiridion.html https://emend.press/enchiridion.html Mon, 20 Jul 2026 17:35:23 -0400 The Stoic pocket manual: fifty-one short drills for keeping your head — sort what is up to you from what isn't, and want what actually happens. https://emend.press/montaigne.html https://emend.press/montaigne.html Thu, 11 Jun 2026 09:01:02 -0400 The invention of the essay: a retired French magistrate turns his pen on himself — on friendship, fear, cannibals, thumbs, and death — and finds the whole human condition there. https://emend.press/utopia.html https://emend.press/utopia.html Thu, 11 Jun 2026 08:26:59 -0400 The book that named a genre: a sailor describes the strange island commonwealth of Utopia, where property is common, gold is worthless, and everything about European society is quietly turned on its head. https://emend.press/true-history.html https://emend.press/true-history.html Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:58:33 -0400 The original science fiction: a voyage to the moon, war between the sun and moon empires, and life inside a whale — narrated by an author who promises that every word is a lie. https://emend.press/social-contract.html https://emend.press/social-contract.html Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:40:31 -0400 "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" — the book that asked what could make political authority legitimate, and helped ignite a revolution. https://emend.press/leviathan.html https://emend.press/leviathan.html Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:36:58 -0400 Written in the shadow of civil war: why life without government is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short — and why we trade liberty for a sovereign to escape it. https://emend.press/herodotus.html https://emend.press/herodotus.html Tue, 24 Feb 2026 14:59:58 -0500 The first history book ever written: the Persian Wars, plus every marvel, custom, and gossip-worthy story its insatiably curious author picked up along the way. https://emend.press/the-prince.html https://emend.press/the-prince.html Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:27:21 -0500 The infamous handbook of power politics: how princes win states, keep them, and why it is safer to be feared than loved. https://emend.press/candide.html https://emend.press/candide.html Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:27:21 -0500 A wide-eyed young man raised to believe this is the best of all possible worlds gets kicked around the entire globe testing the theory. https://emend.press/decameron.html https://emend.press/decameron.html Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:27:21 -0500 Ten young Florentines flee the Black Death and pass ten days telling a hundred stories — bawdy, tragic, scandalous, and very much alive. https://emend.press/dialogues.html https://emend.press/dialogues.html Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:27:21 -0500 Socrates in conversation: the trial, the prison cell, the drinking party, and the relentless questions that got him executed. https://emend.press/democracy2.html https://emend.press/democracy2.html Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:27:21 -0500 The great French study of America, translated fresh from the French: how equality reshapes politics, thought, feeling, art and ambition — and how democracies can drift into a soft new despotism. https://emend.press/two-treatises.html https://emend.press/two-treatises.html Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:27:21 -0500 The philosophical foundation of liberal government: natural rights, property earned by labor, rule by consent, and the people's right to dissolve a government that betrays its trust. https://emend.press/population.html https://emend.press/population.html Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:27:21 -0500 The most alarming arithmetic ever published: population grows geometrically, food arithmetically, and the gap is settled by misery — an argument that has haunted optimists since 1798. https://emend.press/origin-of-species.html https://emend.press/origin-of-species.html Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:27:21 -0500 One long argument that changed biology forever: variation, inheritance, and the struggle for existence add up to natural selection — and to the common descent of all living things. https://emend.press/philosophical-works.html https://emend.press/philosophical-works.html Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:27:21 -0500 "I think, therefore I am": the philosophical works that doubted everything — the senses, the world, even mathematics — to find the one certainty that could rebuild knowledge. https://emend.press/gallic-war.html https://emend.press/gallic-war.html Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:27:21 -0500 A general's own account of conquering Gaul: eight years of campaigns, written in the third person by the man who fought them — part war report, part campaign ad. https://emend.press/peloponnesian-war.html https://emend.press/peloponnesian-war.html Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:27:21 -0500 The war that broke Greece, told by a general who fought in it: plague, massacre, the Melian dialogue, and the doomed expedition to Sicily — history written as a possession for all time. https://emend.press/flatland.html https://emend.press/flatland.html Mon, 23 Feb 2026 13:00:07 -0500 A Square living in a two-dimensional world is visited by a Sphere from the third dimension, and nothing about his flat life survives the encounter. https://emend.press/common-sense.html https://emend.press/common-sense.html Mon, 23 Feb 2026 13:00:07 -0500 The pamphlet that talked a continent into independence: a plain-language demolition of monarchy and the case for an American republic. https://emend.press/federalist.html https://emend.press/federalist.html Mon, 23 Feb 2026 13:00:07 -0500 The eighty-five newspaper essays that sold a skeptical public on the United States Constitution — and still explain how it is supposed to work. https://emend.press/democracy.html https://emend.press/democracy.html Mon, 23 Feb 2026 13:00:07 -0500 A young French aristocrat tours Jacksonian America and writes the sharpest account of democracy — its energy, its conformity, and its future — ever produced by a visitor. https://emend.press/wealth-of-nations.html https://emend.press/wealth-of-nations.html Mon, 23 Feb 2026 13:00:07 -0500 The book that invented economics: the division of labor, the invisible hand, and a sweeping case that nations grow rich through freedom of trade, not hoards of gold. https://emend.press/progress-and-poverty.html https://emend.press/progress-and-poverty.html Mon, 23 Feb 2026 13:00:07 -0500 Why does poverty deepen as wealth explodes? A self-taught San Francisco printer's answer — land rent — became the best-selling economics book of the nineteenth century. https://emend.press/meditations.html https://emend.press/meditations.html Sun, 22 Feb 2026 21:58:34 -0500 The private notebook of a Roman emperor: reminders to himself about how to stay calm, do his duty, and face death without fear.