Book cover of Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

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Chosen as a BOOK OF THE YEAR in The Times, The Spectator, Prospect, Sunday Times, Economist, New Statesman, Telegraph, Financial Times, TLS, New York Times, and Washington Post.

'This is ridiculous. No book about German philosophy has any right to be this fun. This witty, gossipy, sparkling history . .


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1 author picked Magnificent Rebels as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

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Robert Ray Morgan
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This is history told in the most exciting way: through the lives of outstanding and accomplished people of the era in the small university town of Jena, Germany, 1794-1803.

Among figures such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Novalis, we learn about the poet and thinker August Wilhelm von Schlegel, the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, the beautiful, gifted, and passionate Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling, who inspired them all.

Readers will be surprised to find many sources of the art and thought of Romantics, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, and Thoreau, in this account of a few revolutionary short years that created


From Robert's 3 favorite reads in 2023.

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December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue


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