Most people believe that they were either benefited or at least not harmed by being brought into existence. Thus, if they ever do reflect on whether they should bring others into existence---rather than having children without even thinking about whether they should---they presume that they do them no harm. Better Never to Have Been challenges these assumptions. David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm. Although the good things in one's life make one's life go better than it otherwise would have gone, one could not have been deprived by their absence if one had not existed. Those who never exist cannot be deprived. However, by coming into existence one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen one had one not come into existence. Drawing on the relevant psychological literature, the author shows that there are a number of well-documented features of human psychology that explain why people systematically overestimate the quality of their lives and why they are thus resistant to the suggestion that they were seriously harmed by being brought into existence. The author then argues for the 'anti-natal' view---that it is always wrong to have children---and he shows that combining the anti-natal view with common pro-choice views about foetal moral status yield a 'pro-death' view about abortion (at the earlier stages of gestation). Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct. Although counter-intuitive for many, that implication is defended, not least by showing that it solves many conundrums of moral theory about population.

An extraordinary literary journey, 100 Years celebrates every age from birth to 100 with quotations from the world’s greatest writers. This literary tapestry of the human experience will delight readers of all backgrounds. Moving year by year through the words of our most beloved authors, the great sequence of life reveals itself—the wonders and confinements of childhood, the emancipations and frustrations of adolescence, the empowerments and millstones of adulthood, the recognitions and resignations of old age. This trove of wisdom—featuring immortal passages from Arthur Rimbaud, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, William Shakespeare, Herman Melville, Jane Austen, and Maya Angelou, among many others—reminds us that the patterns of life transcend continents, cultures, and generations. As Thomas Mann wrote of our most shared human experience: "It will happen to me as to them." Designed by the legendary Milton Glaser, who created the I ♥ NY logo, 100 Years brings together color, type, and text to illuminate the ebb and flow of an entire life.

This novel is considered the greatest work of fiction by the Brazilian writer the "New York Times Book Review" called "the premier Latin American woman prose writer of this century." An intense and lyrical work, it chronicles its female protagonist's journey of self-discovery and self-affirmation.

Consisting of essays of the 1960s and 1970s, and assembled by Laura (Riding) Jackson herself, this previously unpublished collection is both a substantial addition to the work of her later period, after she had renounced poetry, and also a spirited contribution to later twentieth-century debates about language, literature, and life. There is immense variety and appeal here. Readers will find themselves challenged by the author's combative engagement with her contemporaries, and rewarded by the lucid complexity and immediacy of her thinking. Topics include: love, friendship, imagination; thinking, belief, and conviction; the importance of knowledge of language; the active unselfishness of women; the intrinsic reality of mind; death; good and evil; 'soul' and 'spirit'; structuralism and theory; the novel, history, myth - besides her judgements on writers such as Coleridge, and contemporaries such as Stein. As the excitement aroused by 'theory' subsides, now may be the time for Laura (Riding) Jackson's considered judgement of the spiritual function of language and human life to be given the attention it deserves.