Best Selling Books by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

A biography of St. Francis of Assisi that highlights his contradictions, showing his affinity for animals and his love for nature, art, and the world of the senses alongside his vow of chastity, life of poverty, and devotion to the Church.

8 suspenseful tales featuring Chesterton''s delightful amateur sleuth. "A masterpiece . . . amusing, full of surprises, supremely readable"--"Saturday Review."

So it was, certainly, with the Bastille. The destruction of the Bastille was not a reform; it was something more important than a reform. It was an iconoclasm; it was the breaking of a stone image. The people saw the building like a giant looking at them with a score of eyes, and they struck at it as at a carved fact. For of all the shapes in which that immense illusion called materialism can terrify the soul, perhaps the most oppressive are big buildings. Man feels like a fly, an accident, in the thing he has himself made. It requires a violent effort of the spirit to remember that man made this confounding thing and man could unmake it.

A unique collection of 10 of the best of Chesterton''s famous Fr. Brown mysteries, this book''s focus is on the stories that emphasize the role of Brown''s Catholic faith in helping solve the murders. This is a special deluxe edition.

Listed in C̀rime and mystery : the 100 best books". First pub. in 1911. The unassuming East Anglia priest solving crime by the intuitive method.

Father Brown is a seemingly innocent man of the cloth, whimsical yet wise, who exhibits uncanny insight into ingeniously tricky human problems. This collection includes twelve mysteries solved by the redoubtable Father Brown.

Francis of Assisi is, after Mary of Nazareth, perhaps the greatest saint in the Christian calendar, and one of the most influential men in the whole of human history. By universal acclaim, this biography by G. K. Chesterton is considered the best appreciation of Francis''s life--the one that gets to the heart of the matter.For Chesterton, Francis is a great paradoxical figure, a man who loved women but vowed himself to chastity; an artist who loved the pleasures of the natural world as few have loved them, but vowed himself to the most austere poverty, stripping himself naked in the public square so all could see that he had renounced his worldly goods; a clown who stood on his head in order to see the world aright. Chesterton gives us Francis in his world-the riotously colorful world of the High Middle Ages, a world with more pageantry and romance than we have seen before or since. Here is the Francis who tried to end the Crusades by talking to the Saracens, and who interceded with the emperor on behalf of the birds. Here is the Francis who inspired a revolution in art that began with Giotto and a revolution in poetry that began with Dante. Here is the Francis who prayed and danced with pagan abandon, who talked to animals, who invented the creche.

Light-hearted work introduces Innocent Smith, a bubbly, eccentric gentleman of questionable character, into the lives of a group of young disillusioned people -- and the result is inspired, high-spirited nonsense.