Synapse Publishing: 10 books

Wage Labour and Capital is an essay on economics by Karl Marx, written in 1847 and first published in articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in April 1849. It has been widely acclaimed as the precursor to Marx’s important treatise The Capital. The ideas that are expressed in the essay have a very...

Gulliver's Travels describes the four voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon. In Lilliput he discovers a world in miniature; towering over the people and their city, he is able to view their society from the viewpoint of a god. However, in Brobdingnag, a land of giants, tiny Gulliver himself...

Othello has long been recognised as one of the most powerful of Shakespeare's tragedies. This is an intense and moving drama of love, deception, jealousy and destruction. Desdemona's love for Othello, the Moor, transcends racial prejudice; but the envious Iago conspires to destroy their lives. In...

In Libation Bearers, the second play of Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy, many years after the murder of Agamemnon, his son Orestes returns to Argos to exact vengeance on his mother Clytaemnestra for killing the king. Upon arriving, Orestes reunites with his sister Electra at Agamemnon's grave, while she...

Joseph Conrad is one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. He joined the British merchant marine in 1878, and was granted British nationality in 1886. Though he did not speak English fluently until he was in his twenties, he was a master prose stylist who brought a non-English...

The Danaids flee a forced marriage to their Egyptian cousins. When they reach Argos, they entreat King Pelasgus to protect them. He refuses pending the decision of the Argive people, who decide in the favour of the Danaids. Danaus rejoices the outcome, and the Danaids praise the Greek gods. But almost...

Eumenides is the final play of the Oresteia by Aeschylus. It illustrates how the sequence of events in the trilogy end up in the development of social order or a proper judicial system in Athenian society. In this play, Orestes is hunted down and tormented by the Furies, a trio of goddesses known...

In White Nights the narrator is a young man living in Saint Petersburg who suffers from loneliness. He gets to know and falls in love with a young woman, but the love remains unrequited as the woman misses her lover, with whom she is finally reunited. Notes from the Underground is considered by many...

For many years, the narrator and his uncle, Dr. Elihu Whipple, have nurtured a fascination with an old abandoned house on Benefit Street. Dr. Whipple has made extensive records tracking the mysterious, yet apparently coincidental, sickness and death of many who have lived in the house for over one...

In the winter of 1854 Tolstoy, then an officer in the Russian army, arranged to be transferred to the besieged town of Sebastopol. Wishing to see at first hand the action of what would become known as the Crimean War, he was spurred on by a fierce patriotism, but also by an equally fierce desire to...