Description
Book SynopsisA selection of Michel de Montaigne's most profound, searching essays, in a new translation and stunning hardback edition featuring an introduction by Yiyun Li 'I myself am the subject of my book'. So wrote Montaigne in the introductory note to his Essays, the book that marked the birth of the modern essay form. In works of probing intelligence and idiosyncratic observation, Montaigne moved from intimate personal reflection to roving theories of the conduct of kings and cannibals, the effects of sorrow and fear, and the fallibility of human memory and judgement. This new selection of Montaigne's most ingenious essays appears in a lucid new translation by the prize-winning David Coward. What Do I Know? offers the modern reader profound insight into a great Renaissance mind.
Trade Review'Read Montaigne in order to live' - Gustave Flaubert
'I defy any reader of Montaigne not to put down the book at some point and say with incredulity: How did he know all that about me?' -
The Times'[Montaigne] was the first who had the courage to say as an author what he felt as a man' - William Hazlitt
Table of ContentsPART ONE
MONTAIGNE ON MONTAIGNE
1 On Sorrow
2 On how our Actions are to be judged by the Intention
3 On Idling
4 On Liars
5 That we should not be considered happy until we are dead
PART TWO
ON THE PURSUIT OF REASON
6 On Fear
7 To tell true from false, it is folly to rely on our own capacities
8 How we can cry and laugh at the same thing
9 On Solitude
10 On the Uncertainty of our Judgement
11 On Drunkenness
PART THREE
ON GOVERNANCE AND GOVERNORS
12 On Cannibals
13 On the Inequality that exists between us
14 On Sleep
15 On our lease of life
16 On Carriages
