The Architecture of Happiness

ALSO BY ALAIN DE BOTTON

STATUS ANXIETY

Anyone who’s ever lost sleep over an unreturned phone call or the neighbor’s Lexus had better read Alain de Botton’s irresistibly clearheaded book immediately. For in its pages, a master explicator of our civilization and its discontents turns his attention to the insatiable quest of status, a quest that has less to do with material comfort than with love. To demonstrate his thesis, de Botton ranges through Western history and thought from St. Augustine to Andrew Carnegie and Machiavelli to Anthony Robbins. Whether it’s assessing the class consciousness of Christianity or the convulsions of consumer capitalism, dueling or home-furnishing, Status Anxiety is infallibly entertaining. And when it examines the virtues of informed misanthropy, art appreciation, or walking a lobster on a leash, it is not only wise but helpful.

Philosophy/978-0-375-72535-7

THE CONSOLATIONS OF PHILOSOPHY

Alain de Botton has performed a stunning feat. He has transformed the arcane into something accessible and entertaining, something useful and kind. Drawing on the work of six of the world’s most uncommonly brilliant thinkers, de Botton has arranged a panoply of inimitable wisdom to guide us through our most common problems. The Consolations of Philosophy is smart, lucid, and pleasing, a rare sort of book that wonderfully fulfills the promise of its peculiarly audacious title. From the frustration of misplacing your keys to the sadness of losing a loved one, the writings of Seneca can offer consolation. For the particular agony of not having enough money, Epicurus has a solution, and it’s one that everyone can afford. Solace for a broken heart can be found in the works of Schopenhauer, even though his most lasting and significant relationships tended to be with poodles. And if your life is beset by difficulty after difficulty, wise advice may be found in the words of Nietzsche, the brilliant philosopher whose own life was riddled with poverty, bad health, and excruciating loneliness.

Self-Help/Philosophy/978-0-679-77917-9

THE ART OF TRAVEL

Any Baedeker will tell us where we ought to travel, but only Alain de Botton will tell us how and why. With the same intelligence and insouciant charm he brought to How Proust Can Change Your Life, de Botton considers the pleasures of anticipation, the allure of the exotic, and the value of noticing everything from a seascape in Barbados to the takeoffs at Heathrow. Even as de Botton takes the reader along on his own peregrinations, he also cites such distinguished fellow-travelers as Baudelaire, Wordsworth, van Gogh, the biologist Alexander von Humboldt, and the eighteenth-century eccentric Xavier de Maistre, who catalogued the wonders of his bedroom. The Art of Travel is a wise and utterly original book.

Travel/Essays/978-0-375-72534-0

HOW PROUST CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE

Alain de Botton combines two unlikely genres—literary biography and self-help manual—in the hilarious and unexpectedly practical How Proust Can Change Your Life. Who would have thought that Marcel Proust, one of the most important writers of our time, could provide us with such a rich source of insight into how best to live life? As relevant today as they were at the turn of the century, Proust’s life and work are transformed here into a no-nonsense guide to, among other things, achieving original and unclichéd articulation, and being a good host. It took de Botton to find the inspirational in Proust’s essays, letters, and fiction and—perhaps even more surprising—to draw out a vivid and clarifying portrait of the master from between the lines of his work. Here is Proust as have never seen or read him before: witty, intelligent, pragmatic. He might well change your life.

Fiction/Self-Help/978-0-679-77915-5

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