A. S. Byatt is the author of Possession and Angels and Insects. In February, Ms. Byatt spoke at a Harvard Book Store event about her latest novel, The Biographer's Tale. Click here to listen to her reading from her new book.

This summer, Ms. Byatt recommends you cool down with:

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The Anatomy of Melancholy
by Robert Burton

One of the major documents of modern European civilization, Robert Burton's astounding compendium, a survey of melancholy in all its myriad forms, has invited nothing but superlatives since its publication in the seventeenth century. Lewellyn Powys called it "the greatest work of prose of the greatest period of English prose-writing," while the celebrated surgeon William Osler declared it the greatest of medical treatises. And Dr. Johnson, Boswell reports, said it was the only book that he rose early in the morning to read with pleasure. In this surprisingly compact and elegant new edition, Burton¹s spectacular verbal labyrinth is sure to delight, instruct, and divert today¹s readers as much as it has those of the past four centuries.
pb, $22.95

The Mechanization of the Mind Unapproved: On the Origins of Cognitive Science
by Jean-Pierre Dupuy

Every science must forget its founders or stagnate. So declared the great philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. In this book, however, Jean-Pierre Dupuy shows that one of the greatest intellectual mistakes of the past fifty years was for cognitive science to turn its back on its origins. Dupuy reconstructs those origins here in a provocative and engaging combination of philosophy, science, and historical detective work. He takes us back to the 1940s and 1950s, when some of the world's greatest minds founded the "Cybernetics" movement. And he shows us how their remarkably innovative and ambitious ideas -- soon shunned as crude and resented for being overpromoted -- prefigured some of the most important developments of twentieth century thought. The rejection of these ideas, he reveals, was a tragic lost opportunity.
hc, $29.95

Microcosms
by Claudio Magris

Chesterton took the view that the whole world was to be discovered in one's back garden, if one knew how to look for it. Claudio Magris explores the immediate environment of his Triestine homeland and does indeed discover the whole of human striving in a microcosm. The domestic interiors, the cafes and bars, the marketplaces and public gardens are forums into which humanity descends to transact its business, to buy and sell, argue and orate, seek vengeance, escape creditors -- all the things that define a person as human, as a social animal.

As in Danube, here too the short excursions on the ground are but excuses for a brilliant series of stories, anecdotes, considerations, and explorations of character, a kaleidoscope of changing pictures brought to life and made visible.
hc, $25.00

Lost Illusions
by Honore De Balzac

Written between 1837 and 1843, Lost Illusions reveals, perhaps better than any other of Balzac's ninety-two novels, the nature and scope of his genius. The story of Lucien Chardon, a young poet from Angouleme who tries desperately to make a name for himself in Paris, is a brilliantly realistic and boldly satirical portrait of provincial manners and aristocratic life. Handsome and ambitious but naive, Lucien is patronized by the beau monde as represented by Madame de Bargeton and her cousin, the formidable Marquise d'Espard, only to be duped by them. Denied the social rank he thought would be his, Lucien discards his poetic aspirations and turns to hack journalism; his descent into Parisian low life ultimately leads to his own death.
hc, $21.00

The Social Construction of What?
by Ian Hacking

Lost in the raging debate over the validity of social construction is the question of what, precisely, is being constructed. Facts, gender, quarks, reality? Is it a person? An object? An idea? A theory? Each entails a different notion of social construction, Ian Hacking reminds us. His book explores an array of examples to reveal the deep issues underlying contentious accounts of reality.
pb, $16.95