Philosophy bestsellers

How to Be Perfect

“This is the kind of book that has you taking notes and trying to find ways to recall all the concepts when you'll certainly need them in the future. Invitingly straightforward and charmingly relatable, Schur navigates big ethics questions and players. He delivers hilarious conversational sidebars about how to pronounce words that had me in stitches. A wonderful 'how to lead a moral life 101' guide, he answers questions with insightful humor, wit and delightful engagement that prompts judgment-free introspection. For anyone interested in philosophy and contemplating how they fit in the world while connecting to other folks.”

Keithe, The Snail on the Wall

Four Thousand Weeks

“Burkeman’s title emphasizes that if we make it to 80 years of age, we live roughly four thousand weeks. That intro alone sounds pretty sobering, but Burkeman takes us through philosophers’ and scientists’ wisdom across centuries with conclusions that are very optimistic. Burke reassures us with stories such as the American who in 1969 went through a brutal orientation to become a Zen Buddhist with secrets to feeling at peace by merely stopping avoidance to the obvious, diving in to reclaim control of our lives.”

Roxanne, Bookstore1Sarasota

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER 

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

What does everyone in the modern world need to know?

Renowned psychologist Jordan B. Peterson's answer to this most difficult of questions uniquely combines the hard-won truths of ancient tradition with the stunning revelations of cutting-edge scientific research.

Humorous, surprising and... Read more »

The author of the New York Times bestseller You Are the Placebo, as well as Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself and Evolve Your Brain, draws on research conducted at his advanced workshops since 2012 to explore how common people are doing the uncommon to transform themselves and their lives. Becoming Supernatural marries the some of the most... Read more »

“When you wake up and you see that the Earth is not just the environment, the Earth is us, you touch the nature of interbeing. And at that moment you can have real communication with the Earth… We have to wake up together. And if we wake up together, then we have a chance. Our way of living our life and planning our future has led us into this...

Part H Is for Hawk, part The Soul of an Octopus, The Book of Eels is both a meditation on the world’s most elusive fish—the eel—and a reflection on the human condition.

Remarkably little is known about the European eel, Anguilla anguilla. So little, in fact, that scientists and philosophers have, for centuries, been obsessed with what has...

The Book of Hope

“Listening to this on audio has been a special experience simply due to the fact that Jane Goodall’s voice as she delivers her philosophies on hope in regards to the environment is both a balm to a troubled mind and spark of inspiration towards action. There is someone in your life that needs this book and it would make a great gift for them.”

Sofia, Phoenix Books

Fathoms

“This isn't a scientists memoir about their life studying whales; it's really just a rambling of facts that held me and my friends in fascination as we listened to it on libro.fm during a road trip. WHALES ARE SO INTERESTING! Rebecca lives in Australia and became obsessed with whales when a young humpback washed up too high on her local beach and none of their efforts helped save it. The book evaluates what we know about whales and their relationship to us in really fascinating ways, throughout human history. It also offers some running commentary on how humans currently interact with whales, and how they bring hope to our uncertain future with climate change and anthropocene-caused extinction. ”

Amy, Bright Side Bookshop

With poetry and clarity, Thich Nhat Hanh imparts comforting wisdom about the nature of suffering and its role in creating compassion, love, and joy – all qualities of enlightenment. 

“Thich Nhat Hanh shows us the connection between personal, inner peace, and peace on earth.”—His Holiness the Dalai Lama

In The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, now...

This program is read by the author.

The world-renowned philosopher and author of the bestselling Justice explores the central question of our time: What has become of the common good?

These are dangerous times for democracy. We live in an age of winners and losers, where the odds are stacked in favor of the already fortunate. Stalled social...

When Breath Becomes Air

“With a message both mournful and life-affirming, When Breath Becomes Air chronicles a young doctor's journey from literature student to promising neurosurgeon and finally to a patient in his own hospital after being diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. Always profound, never sentimental, this important book refuses to take refuge in platitudes, instead facing mortality with honesty and humility. Written in engaging prose and filled with penetrating insights, this story is relevant to everyone and will captivate fans of memoir, literature, philosophy, and popular science alike. Lyrical passages of great beauty and vulnerability are deftly balanced by bright, candid moments of joy and even humor. Come prepared with plenty of tissues; over and over again this exquisite book will break your heart.”

Carmen Tracey, Loganberry Books

In troubled times, there is an urgency to understand ourselves and our world. We have so many questions, and they tug at us night and day, consciously and unconsciously. In this important volume Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh—one of the most revered spiritual leaders in the world today—reveals an art of living in mindfulness that helps us answer...

Thrilling, sharp, and deeply humane, philosopher Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century upends the way we discuss—or avoid discussing—the problems and politics of sex.

How should we think about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
 
“This is the most important book ever written about time management. Oliver Burkeman offers a searing indictment of productivity hacking and profound insights on how to make the best use of our scarcest, most precious resource. His writing will challenge you to rethink many of your beliefs about getting things done-and... Read more »

Zen master Thick Nhat Hanh, bestselling author of Peace is Every Step and one of the most respected and celebrated religious leaders in the world, delivers a powerful path to happiness through mastering life's most important skill.

How do we say what we mean in a way that the other person can really hear?

How can we listen with compassion and...

"Traveling easily through a thousand years of history, The Bright Ages reminds us society never collapsed when the Roman Empire fell, nor did the modern world did wake civilization from a thousand year hibernation. Thoroughly enjoyable, thoughtful and accessible; a fresh look on an age full of light, color, and illumination." —Mike Duncan,...

Noam Chomsky is widely known and deeply admired for being the founder of modern linguistics, one of the founders of the field of cognitive science, and perhaps the most avidly read political theorist and commentator of our time. In these lectures, he presents a lifetime of philosophical reflection on all three of these areas of research to which... Read more »

There are qualities we all yearn to experience in our lives-peace, simplicity, grace, connection, clarity. Yet these qualities evade us because each of them arises from an experience of wholeness, and we live in a culture that enforces divisions within each of us. In Radical Wholeness, Philip Shepherd shows the countless ways in which we are... Read more »

A thought-provoking essay that teaches us that confidence is not a gift from the gods, but a skill that can be learned.

We spend vast amounts of time acquiring confidence in narrow technical fields: quadratic equations or bioengineering; economics or pole vaulting. But we overlook the primordial need to acquire a more free ranging variety of...

A guide to learning how to communicate with people who have diametrically opposed opinions from you, how to empathize with them, and how to (possibly) change their minds

America is more polarized than ever. Whether the issue is Donald Trump, healthcare, abortion, gun control, breastfeeding, or even DC vs Marvel, it feels like you can't voice an... Read more »

Drawing on the story of a Zen student asking his teacher for his most advanced teaching, Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh shares his own experiences on how to take care of sadness, anger, loss, injustice, and how to transform the seeds of suffering we have inherited from past generations. Using examples and often humorous stories, this... Read more »

An expansive, exhilarating work of criticism by one of the most significant writers of our day.

So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long... Read more »

Despite constant efforts to declutter your home, do papers still accumulate like snowdrifts and clothes pile up like a tangled mess of noodles?
Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes tidying to a whole new level, promising that if you properly simplify and organize your home once, you'll never have to do it again. Most methods advocate... Read more »

“[A] fascinating and accessible account . . . In his entertaining book, Mr. Eilenberger shows that his magicians’ thoughts are still worth collecting, even if, with hindsight, we can see that some performed too many intellectual conjuring tricks.” —Wall Street Journal

A grand narrative of the intertwining lives of Walter Benjamin, Martin... Read more »

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“The best dictionary you'll ever had read to you. In fact, there's probably a word for that.”

Charity, Schuler Books

As we emerge (though perhaps only temporarily) from the pandemic, other crises move center stage: outrageous inequality, climate disaster, desperate refugees, mounting tensions of a new cold war. The abiding motif of our time is relentless chaos.

Acknowledging the possibilities for new beginnings at such moments, Mao Zedong famously proclaimed,... Read more »

Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, and The Bed of Procrustes.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the... Read more »

The author of Self-Compassion follows up her groundbreaking book with new ideas that expand our notion of self-kindness and its capacity to transform our lives, showing women how to balance tender self-acceptance with fierce action to claim their power and change the world.

Kristin Neff changed how we talk about self-care with her enormously...

When Einstein Walked with Gödel

“This would make a great gift for anyone interested in math or physics. It's also just good, clear non-fiction writing that gets into the personalities of men and women whose work has changed the way we perceive our existence on a small planet in a large cosmos.”

Bob, Changing Hands

Brave New World is a dystopian social science fiction novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published a year later. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology,... Read more »

The "Republic" poses questions that endure: What is justice? What form of community fosters the best possible life for human beings? What is the nature and destiny of the soul? What form of education provides the best leaders for a good republic? What are the various forms of poetry and the other arts, which ones should be fostered, and which... Read more »

World renowned leader at the core of the Maharishi Foundations, a Harvard graduate neuroscientist, renowned Vedic scholar and world reference in Transcendental Meditation, Dr.Tony Nader formulates in this book a series of fundamental existential questions (what is our purpose in life, do we have true control over our destinies?) and, ...

Activists and change agents, restorative justice practitioners, faith leaders, and anybody engaged in social progress and shifting society will find this mindful approach to nonviolent action indispensable.

Nonviolence was once considered the highest form of activism and radical change. And yet its basic truth, its restorative power, has been... Read more »

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up for the mind, The Courage to Be Disliked is the Japanese phenomenon that shows you how to free yourself from the shackles of past experiences and others’ expectations to achieve real happiness.

The Courage to Be Disliked, already an enormous bestseller in Asia with more than 3.5 million copies sold,... Read more »

Silence

“Kagge's deceptively simple meditation on silence complicates something we all think we understand. Quoting from a wide range of artists and thinkers, Kagge constructs a graceful mosaic of definitions, statements, and paradoxes. We all have a 'primal need for' silence, Kagge states, and in this noisy world, it's 'the new luxury.' Though it's found inside of us, Kagge, an explorer and publisher, traveled to Japan to look for it in meditation and yoga; he walked to Antarctica in search of it, spending 50 days alone. Made up of 33 brief sections and ending in a blank page, Kagge leaves plenty of room for the reader's own reflections, demonstrating the kind of active engagement he believes silence invites.”

Laurie Greer, Politics & Prose

Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller & Wall Street Journal Bestseller

In The Obstacle Is the Way and Ego Is the Enemy, bestselling author Ryan Holiday made ancient wisdom wildly popular with a new generation of leaders in sports, politics, and technology. In his new book, Stillness Is the Key, Holiday draws on timeless Stoic and Buddhist... Read more »

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Everybody tells you to live for a cause larger than yourself, but how exactly do you do it? The author of The Road to Character explores what it takes to lead a meaningful life in a self-centered world.

“Deeply moving, frequently eloquent and extraordinarily incisive.”—The Washington Post

Every so often, you meet... Read more »

UNABRIDGED AND AVAILABLE ON AUDIO FOR THE FIRST TIME

Simone de Beauvoir’s essential masterwork is a powerful analysis of the Western notion of “woman,” and a revolutionary exploration of inequality and otherness. This unabridged edition of the text reinstates significant portions of the original French text that were cut in the first English...

"A POWERFUL WORK OF SPIRITUALITY AND ANTI-RACISM"—Publishers Weekly

"IF YOU READ ONE BOOK IN 2020, MAKE IT THIS ONE."—Tricycle 

From much-admired meditation expert Sebene Selassie, You Belong is a call to action, exploring our tangled relationship with belonging, connection, and each other

You are not separate. You never were. You never will be.

We...

Modern Western culture and technology is inextricably tied to the belief in the existence of a self as a separate ego, separated from and in conflict with the rest of the world. In this classic book, Watts provides a lucid and simple presentation of an alternative view based on Hindu and Vedantic philosophy. Read more »

Brave New World author Aldous Huxley on enlightenment and the "ultimate reality."

In this anthology of twenty-six essays and other writings, Huxley discusses the nature of God, enlightenment, being, good and evil, religion, eternity, and the divine. Huxley consistently examined the spiritual basis of both the individual and human society,... Read more »

"Where pregnancy is concerned, let every pregnancy be for everyone. Let us overthrow, in short, the family."

The surrogacy industry is estimated to be worth over $1 billion a year, and many of its surrogates around the world work in terrible conditions—deception, wage-stealing and money skimming are rife; adequate medical care is horrifyingly...

From author and psychotherapist Dr. Brian Weiss comes the classic New York Times bestseller on the true case of the past-life therapy that changed the lives of both the prominent psychiatrist and young patient involved—now featuring a new afterword by the author.

As a traditional psychotherapist, Dr. Brian Weiss was astonished and skeptical when... Read more »

The instant New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today Bestseller!
 
Ryan Holiday’s bestselling trilogy—The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, and Stillness is the Key—captivated professional athletes, CEOs, politicians, and entrepreneurs and helped bring Stoicism to millions of readers. Now, in the first book of an exciting new series... Read more »

Originally written as a series of newspaper articles in 1847, Wage-Labor and Capital were intended to give an overview of Marx’s central theories regarding the economic relationships between workers and capitalists. These theories outlined include the Marxian form of the Labour Theory of Value, which distinguishes “labor” from “labor-power”, and... Read more »

Composed in four parts between 1883 and 1885, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the most famous and influential work of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The work is a philosophical novel in which the character of Zarathustra, a religious prophet–like figure, delivers a series of lessons and sermons in a Biblical style that articulate the central... Read more »

Over the past few years, Brianna Wiest has gained renown for her deeply moving, philosophical writing. This new compilation of her published work features pieces on why you should pursue purpose over passion, embrace negative thinking, see the wisdom in daily routine, and become aware of the cognitive biases that are creating the way you see... Read more »

Begin your journey toward spiritual exploration and deepen your connection with the earth. Taoism for Beginners is your easy-to-understand guide to a rich, spiritual Chinese religion and a new holistic perspective.

Discover the core principles and traditions of Taoism with straightforward language and simple exercises you can do anywhere.... Read more »

"Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science, but man needs both." —Fritjof Capra, Ph.D.
Their paths to the truth could not be more different—but the amazing thing is that, in their own ways, the mystics and the scientists are discovering the same truths about our world. In non-technical language, with no complex...

The struggle between individual rights and the good of the community has been the basis of nearly every major disagreement in our history, from the debates at the Constitutional Convention to the fights surrounding the agendas of the Federalists, the Progressives, and the Tea Party. In American Character, Colin Woodard traces these key strands... Read more »