Charles Owen

Sixteen-year-old Karl Rossmann is sent to America by his parents after a housemaid seduced him and became pregnant. This banishment—punishment for being victimized—begins a series of displacements and arbitrary punishments that define his American...

Honoré de Balzac worked himself to death at fifty-one, producing ninety-plus novels documenting nineteenth-century French society. He earned enormous sums yet died deeply in debt. He observed human psychology with unprecedented accuracy yet was blind...

In 1517, Martin Luther shattered European unity with his Reformation. One man tried to stop the catastrophe: Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the most famous intellectual in Europe, who believed reform should come through reason, not...

1938. Stefan Zweig writes from exile as Europe tears itself apart.Fleeing Nazi Austria, Zweig chose his subject deliberately: Ferdinand Magellan—Portuguese navigator serving Spanish crown, commanding multinational crew, proving Earth was one connected...

Before Socrates, before reason triumphed over instinct, ancient Greece created the highest art humanity has ever known—and then destroyed it.In his explosive 1872 debut, twenty-seven-year-old Friedrich Nietzsche revolutionized how we understand art,...

K. arrives in a snow-covered village, summoned to work as a land surveyor for the mysterious Castle that looms above. But reaching the Castle proves impossible. Every attempt to make contact produces only more bureaucratic layers, contradictory...

In the frozen North, gold fever burns hotter than any fire—and destroys everything it touchesWhen French-Canadian cousins Ben Raddle and Summy Skim inherit a mining claim in the Klondike, they journey north during the height of the 1890s gold rush,...

A meteor of solid gold. Unlimited wealth falling from the sky. And a race that will corrupt everyone who enters it.When astronomers discover a meteor composed entirely of gold hurtling toward Earth, the world goes mad. The celestial object is worth...

What happens when perfect goodness confronts a corrupt world? Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot (1869) poses this devastating question through one of literature's most extraordinary characters: Prince Myshkin, a man so pure of heart that society can only...

"No wall can stop him. No lock can hold him. He is everywhere, and he is nowhere."In the picturesque Hungarian city of Ragz, the Roderich family is preparing for a joyous occasion: the wedding of their beloved daughter, Myra, to the dashing French...

The most haunting memoir of the twentieth century—written in exile, published after death.Stefan Zweig was born into the golden age of European civilization—a world that believed in progress, treasured culture over nationalism, and thought peace...