G. K. Chesterton was an early critic of the philosophy of eugenics, expressing this opinion in his book, Eugenics and Other Evils. Its advocates regarded eugenics as a social philosophy for the improvement of human hereditary traits through various forms of intervention.Today it is widely regarded as a brutal movement which inflicted massive human rights violations on millions of people.HIs criticism of Eugenics expands into a more general criticism of a modern craze for scientific officialism and strict social organization.Chesterton’s writings consistently displayed wit and a sense of humour. He employed paradox, while making serious comments on the world, government, politics, economics, philosophy, theology and many other topics

« Tout est grand dans ce célèbre roman, sans que rien ne bouge. Eugénie est une sorte de sainte selon l'homme, toujours fidèle à une même pensée, mais toute naturelle. […] Eugénie est le premier personnage de ce drame d'amour […] En Grandet, ce rocheux Grandet, il y a une source de tendresse émouvante, quand il se cache pour voir sa fille à la toilette. […] Au rebours on trouvera dans Eugénie tous les stratagèmes du coeur, et un vrai courage à affronter le terrible homme aux gants de cuir. On a tout dit sur Grandet. On a moins remarqué ce mot de reine, lorsque Eugénie se trouve maîtresse d'une immense fortune et assiégée d'intrigues. Elle répond : « Nous verrons cela» comme son père faisait. […] Ainsi l'âme de Grandet finit par être sauvée. Balzac laboure la terre. »

Poetry. Fiction. Cross Genre. "A marvelous, musical texture of rhymes and echoes"-Harry Matthews. "Eunoia" is the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels, and the word quite literally means "beautiful thinking." EUNOIA is a universal lipogram, in which each chapter restricts itself to the use of a single vowel. Directly inspired by the exploits of Oulipo-the avant-garde coterie renowned for its literary experimentation with extreme formalistic constraints-the text makes a Sisyphean spectacle of its labor, willfully crippling its language in order to show that, even under such improbable conditions of duress, language can still express uncanny thought. A triumphant feat, seven years in the making, this work of literature is "an exemplary monument for 21st-century poetry"-Charles Bernstein

National best-selling and award-winning author Lily King’s new novel is the story of three young, gifted anthropologists in the 1930s caught in a passionate love triangle that threatens their bonds, their careers, and, ultimately, their lives. English anthropologist Andrew Bankson has been alone in the field for several years, studying a tribe on the Sepik River in the Territory of New Guinea with little success. Increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when he encounters the famous and controversial Nell Stone and her wry, mercurial Australian husband Fen. Bankson is enthralled by the magnetic couple whose eager attentions pull him back from the brink of despair. Nell and Fen have their own reasons for befriending Bankson. Emotionally and physically raw from studying the bloodthirsty Mumbanyo tribe, the couple is hungry for a new discovery. But when Bankson leads them to the artistic, female-dominated Tam, he ignites an intellectual and emotional firestorm between the three of them that burns out of anyone’s control. Ultimately, their groundbreaking work will make history, but not without sacrifice. Inspired by events in the life of revolutionary anthropologist Margaret Mead, Euphoria is a captivating story of desire, possession and discovery from one of our finest contemporary novelists

In this remarkable work, master story-teller Edgar Allan Poe builds on known scientific truths to propound a universe governed by the immutable laws of attraction and repulsion, i.e., expansion and a return to unity. The irascible, vindictive God of the Old Testament and the Deists’ Master Clockmaker are routed by Poe’s pantheistic World Spirit who, through the force of expansion, is diffused throughout his creation. Moreover, we humans are all part of this universal spirit and each of us is his own god. Published after his death, as Poe desired, Eureka was based on a lecture Poe presented in 1848, titled “On The Cosmography of the Universe”. He had hoped for an audience of hundreds and that the proceeds of the lecture would pay for his new journal “The Stylus”. However, only 60 attended and they went away confused. Eureka remains a startlingly different work from the author’s more popular offerings

When your street address can either save your life or send it up the creek, there’s no telling what kind of daily challenges you’ll face in the era of the Northern Irish Troubles. “All stories are love stories,” begins Eureka Street, Robert McLiam Wilson’s big-hearted and achingly funny novel. Set in Belfast during the Troubles, Eureka Street takes us into the lives and families of Chuckie Lurgan and Jake Jackson, a Protestant and a Catholic — unlikely pals and staunch allies in an uneasy time. When a new work of graffiti begins to show up throughout the city—“OTG”—the locals are stumped. The harder they try to decipher it, the more it reflects the passions and paranoias that govern and divide them. Chuckie and Jake are as mystified as everyone else. In the meantime, they try to carve out lives for themselves in the battlefield they call home. Chuckie falls in love with an American who is living in Belfast to escape the violence in her own land; the best Jake can do is to get into a hilarious and remorseless war of insults with a beautiful but spitfire Republican whose Irish name, properly pronounced, sounds to him like someone choking. The real love story in Eureka Street involves Belfast — the city’s soul and spirit, and its will to survive the worst it can do to itself

Won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1973

Перед вами — новая книга Игоря Рабинера, посвященная Euro-2008. Весь месяц автор провел в Австрии и Швейцарии рядом с сенсационной российской командой, от которой почти ничего не ждали на этом чемпионате. Но российские футболисты завоевали бронзовые медали и заставили о себе говорить в восторженных тонах не только отечественную, но и мировую спортивную общественность. Три очень подробных и откровенных интервью Гуса Хиддинка, беседы с капитаном команды Сергеем Семаком и ее лучшим бомбардиром Романом Павлюченко, мнения знаменитых болельщиков сборной России, таких, к примеру, как Александр Розенбаум, эмоциональные репортажи «с колес» и аналитические материалы…Прочитав написанную в форме дневника книгу одного из самых ярких спортивных журналистов России, вы вновь окунетесь в волшебный мир первенства Европы и заново переживете незабываемый июнь 2008-го. Июнь, после которого наш футбол и наш взгляд на него уже никогда не будут такими, как прежде. Читайте и гордитесь сборной России!

«Еврокон» – традиционная конференция профессионалов и любителей фантастики всей Европы. В 2008 году этот престижный форум впервые пройдет в России. Тринадцать самых популярных русских фантастов приняли предложение участвовать в проекте, посвященном этому уникальному событию. Сначала каждый из них написал рассказ на любимую читателями тему – «Убить Чужого». После чего создал отповедь одному из ксенофобских текстов, со всей толерантностью пытаясь «Спасти Чужого». В результате творческого соревнования авторов появился двухтомник, одну из книг которого мы предлагаем вашему вниманию

«Еврокон» — традиционная конференция профессионалов и любителей фантастики всей Европы. В 2008 году этот престижный форум впервые пройдет в России. Тринадцать самых популярных русских фантастов приняли предложение участвовать в проекте, посвященном этому уникальному событию. Сначала каждый из них написал рассказ на любимую читателями тему — «Убить чужого». После чего создал отповедь одному из ксенофобских текстов, со всей толерантностью пытаясь «Спасти чужого». В результате творческого соревнования авторов появился двухтомник. Одну из книг мы предлагаем вашему вниманию. Роман Валерьевич Злотников, Владимир Дмитриевич Михайлов, Евгений Юрьевич Лукин, Александр Николаевич Громов, Александр Зорич, Ирина Сергеевна Андронати, Владимир Николаевич Васильев, Алексей Юрьевич Пехов, Леонид Александрович Каганов, Олег Игоревич Дивов, Андрей Геннадьевич Лазарчук, Вадим Юрьевич Панов, Василий Головачев, Сергей Васильевич Лукьяненко

At the midpoint of his life, Jerry Marlow finds himself on a bus from Milan to Strasbourg, taking stock of the wreckage strewn behind him — a failed marriage, a daughter going astray, and an affair that has left him both numb and licking every wound, self-inflicted or otherwise. Even his teaching job is in peril. And what lies around the next bend? There are times when the most appalling premonitions seem all too plausible, yet the pull of hope cannot be resisted. Fueled by Marlow's scalpel-sharp commentary, Europa bristles with ferocious wordplay and a vision of the sexes as honest as it is incorrect

Audacious. Wildly ambitious. Prolific. All describe William T. Vollmann, author of the seven-volume nonfiction work Rising Up and Rising Down and “Seven Dreams” sequence of novels, which the Chicago Tribune hailed as “likely to become one of the masterpieces of the century.” In Europe Central, Vollmann presents a mesmerizing series of intertwined paired stories that compare and contrast the moral decisions made by various figures — some famous, some infamous, some unknown — associated with the warring authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century. He conjures up two generals, one Russian and one German, who collaborate with the enemy for different reasons and with different results. Another pairing tells of two heroes — a female Russian partisan martyred at the beginning of World War II and a young German man who joins the SS in order to reveal its secrets and halt its crimes. Several stories concern the complex and elusive Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the Stalinist assaults against his work and life; also explored are the fates of artists and poets such as Käthe Kollwitz, Anna Akhmatova, and the documentary filmmaker Roman Karmen. Europe Central is another high-wire act of fiction by a writer of prodigious talent

Europe in Autumn is a thriller of espionage and the future which reads like the love child of John le Carré and Franz Kafka. Rudi is a cook in a Kraków restaurant, but when his boss asks Rudi to help a cousin escape from the country he’s trapped in, a new career – part spy, part people-smuggler – begins. Following multiple economic crises and a devastating flu pandemic, Europe has fractured into countless tiny nations, duchies, polities and republics. Recruited by the shadowy organisation Les Coureurs des Bois, Rudi is schooled in espionage, but when a training mission to The Line, a sovereign nation consisting of a trans-Europe railway line, goes wrong, he is arrested, beaten and Coureur Central must attempt a rescue. With so many nations to work in, and identities to assume, Rudi is kept busy travelling across Europe. But when he is sent to smuggle someone out of Berlin and finds a severed head inside a locker instead, a conspiracy begins to wind itself around him. With kidnapping, double-crosses and a map that constantly re-draws, Rudi begins to realise that underneath his daily round of plot and counter plot, behind the conflicting territories, another entirely different reality might be pulling the strings…

Hurtling between Weltschmerz and wit, drollness and diatribe, entropy and enchantment, it’s the juxtaposition at the heart of Dubravka Ugresic’s writings that saw Ruth Franklin dub her “the fantasy cultural studies professor you never had.” In Europe in Sepia, Ugresic, ever the flâneur, wanders from the Midwest to Zuccotti Park, the Irish Aran Islands to Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim, from the tristesse of Dutch housing estates to the riots of south London, charting everything from the listlessness of Central Europe to the ennui of the Low Countries. One finger on the pulse of an exhausted Europe, another in the wounds of postindustrial America, Ugresic trawls the fallout of political failure and the detritus of popular culture, mining each for revelation. Infused with compassion and melancholic doubt, Europe in Sepia centers on the disappearance of the future, the anxiety that no new utopian visions have emerged from the ruins of communism; that ours is a time of irreducible nostalgia, our surrender to pastism complete. Punctuated by the levity of Ugresic’s raucous instinct for the absurd, despair has seldom been so beguiling

To dziennik powrotu z Europy do Polski, która staje się właśnie Europą. Paradoksy polskiej codzienności opisuje pisarka uchodząca za narodową skandalistkę, a prowadząca przykładne rodzinne życie na wsi. Europejka to również książka o młodych Polkach usiłujących zrozumieć mężczyzn, świat, a przede wszystkim same siebie. Pełna ironii i gorzkiej czasem refleksji, ale również dowcipna, jest lekturą dla każdego, kto pragnie intelektualnej przygody

Насмешка судьбы соединила друг с другом самого счастливого человека с самым несчастным

These four dialogues enact the trial and execution of Socrates, presenting a dialectical process that shows not only why the Athenians condemned him to death but, much more to the point, the reason why Socrates lived and devoted himself to examining the meaning of life. These works not only offer the best introduction to Plato’s way of doing philosophy but also serve as an excellent introduction to philosophy itself

The year is 1911. In Cold Spring Harbour, New York, the newly formed Eugenics Records Office is sending its agents to catalogue the infirm, the insane, and the criminal—with an eye to a cull, for the betterment of all. Near Cracked Wheel, Montana, a terrible illness leaves Jason Thistledown an orphan, stranded in his dead mother’s cabin until the spring thaw shows him the true meaning of devastation—and the barest thread of hope. At the edge of the utopian mill town of Eliada, Idaho, Doctor Andrew Waggoner faces a Klansman’s noose and glimpses wonder in the twisting face of the patient known only as Mister Juke. And deep in a mountain lake overlooking that town, something stirs, and thinks, in its way: Things are looking up. Eutopia follows Jason and Andrew as together and alone, they delve into the secrets of Eliada—industrialist Garrison Harper’s attempt to incubate a perfect community on the edge of the dark woods and mountains of northern Idaho. What they find reveals the true, terrible cost of perfection—the cruelty of the surgeon’s knife—the folly of the cull—and a monstrous pact with beings that use perfection as a weapon, and faith as a trap