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Past Present Editions publishes updated and redesigned works of bold and influential literature, philosophy, and cultural insight.
Our books speak urgently to the modern world—from Stoic philosophy and early science fiction to strange tales, dystopian warnings, and literary masterpieces.
Featured Title
We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Future Dystopia Through an Engineer’s Eyes
Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote We in 1920. He was a Russian naval engineer by training, a Bolshevik by early conviction, and a man who had already been arrested twice by the Tsar's government for his political beliefs, which makes what happened next one of the more pointed ironies in literary history. The revolution he had believed in, and suffered for, read his novel, recognized itself in it, and banned him.
We was the first work of literature ever banned by the Soviet censorship bureau, the Goskomizdat, in 1921. Not because it was counterrevolutionary in any simple sense—Zamyatin was no monarchist, no apologist for the old order. It was banned because it was accurate. He had looked at the logic of the revolution, followed it forward with an engineer's precision, and described exactly where it was going. The Soviet state didn't appreciate the preview.
Since the novel couldn't be published in Russia, it was smuggled out in manuscript form and published first in English translation in New York in 1924, then in Czech, then in French. Zamyatin's own countrymen wouldn't read it in their own language for decades. The Soviet edition didn't appear until 1988, during Glasnost, sixty-seven years after it was written and fifty years after Zamyatin died in poverty in Paris, having been effectively hounded out of his homeland by a literary establishment that found his imagination inconvenient.
The Collection
Passing
$15.95
One of the most incisive explorations of race, identity, and the fragile boundaries between the selves we live and the selves we conceal.
The Time Machine
$15.95
The Time Machine was H.G. Wells’ first novel, announcing him to the world with the confidence of someone who had been waiting to say something important and had finally found the form to say it in. And what he had to say about the future wasn’t good.
Meditations
$15.95
Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the world. He wrote these notes to remind himself not to act like it.
We
$15.95
Written before Orwell. Before Huxley. Before the word dystopia even existed, Zamyatin saw it coming first.
The Purple Cloud
$15.95
Prophetic, radical, and chillingly plausible, it stands as one of the earliest—and most unsettling—dystopian novels ever written.
The King in Yellow
$15.95
One of the defining works of weird fiction—a haunting collection whose influence echoes through Lovecraft, Borges, and modern horror itself.
The Iron Heel
$15.95
Jack London’s prophetic dystopia exposes corporate tyranny, resistance, and power, to reveal how fragile democracy becomes when wealth consolidates and dissent disappears entirely.
The Metamorphosis
$15.95
Spare, precise, and deeply unsettling, The Metamorphosis remains one of the most enduring explorations of identity, isolation, and what it means to remain human in an indifferent world.
A Voyage to Arcturus
$15.95
Equal parts science fiction, philosophy, and spiritual quest, A Voyage to Arcturus is one of the most extraordinary and original works of speculative fiction ever written.
Herland
$15.95
A hidden all-female civilization challenges assumptions about gender, power, and society, revealing alternative possibilities for human cooperation, progress, and equality.
Past Present Editions is dedicated to restoring enduring works of literature, philosophy, and speculative thought.
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