Author

C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis
  • The revered author’s definitive collection of short fiction, which explores enduring spiritual and science fiction themes such as space, time, reality, fantasy, God, and the fate of humankind.

    From C.S. Lewis—the great British writer, scholar, lay theologian, broadcaster, Christian apologist, and author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia, and many other beloved classics—comes a collection of his dazzling short fiction.

    This collection of futuristic fiction includes a breathtaking science fiction story written early in his career in which Cambridge intellectuals witness the breach of space-time through a chronoscope—a telescope that looks not just into another world, but into another time.

    As powerful, inventive, and profound as his theological and philosophical works, The Dark Tower reveals another side of Lewis’s creative mind and his longtime fascination with reality and spirituality. It is ideal reading for fans of J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis’s longtime friend and colleague.

  • A succinct statement of Christian doctrine from one of Christianity’s most beloved thinkers

    Master storyteller and essayist C. S. Lewis here tackles the central questions of the Christian faith: Who was Jesus? What did he accomplish? What does it mean for me?

    In these classic essays, which began as talks on the BBC during World War II, Lewis creatively and simply explains the basic tenets of Christianity. Taken from the core section of Mere Christianity, this book provides an accessible way for people to discover these timeless truths. For those looking to remind themselves of what they hold true, or those looking for a snapshot of Christianity, this book is a wonderful introduction to the faith, as well as to Lewis’ ideas and apologetics.

  • This beautifully conceived meditation on prayers and praying from beloved author and theologian C. S. Lewis was the final book he wrote.

    In the form of warm, relaxed letters to a close friend, C. S. Lewis meditates on many puzzling questions concerning the intimate dialogue between man and God. He considers practical and metaphysical aspects of prayer, such as when we pray and where. He questions why we seek to inform God in our prayers if he is omniscient, whether there is an ideal form of prayer, and which of our many selves we show to God while praying. The concluding letter contains provocative thoughts about “liberal Christians,” the soul, and resurrection.

    Lewis never intended for this book to instruct readers how to pray but rather wanted it to illuminate the purpose of prayer and what really happens when we take the time to communicate with our Heavenly Father.

  • Selected from sermons delivered by C. S. Lewis during World War II, these nine addresses show the beloved author and theologian bringing hope and courage in a time of great doubt. Addressing some of the most difficult issues we face in our day-to-day lives, Lewis’ ardent and timeless words provide an unparalleled path to greater spiritual understanding. “The Weight of Glory,” considered by many to be Lewis’ finest sermon of all, is an incomparable explication of virtue, goodness, desire, and glory. Also included are: “Transposition,” “On Forgiveness,” “Why I Am Not a Pacifist,” and “Learning in War-Time,” in which Lewis presents his compassionate vision of Christianity in language that is both lucid and compelling.

  • C. S. Lewis was a profound thinker with the rare ability to communicate the philosophical and theological rationale of Christianity in simple yet amazingly effective ways. His books were insightful, engaging, and often full of wit. Expressed in brilliant contemporary prose, these models of genuine Christianity contain a lasting relevance that make them perennial bestsellers.

    God in the Dock contains forty-eight essays and twelve letters written by Lewis between 1940 and 1963 for a wide variety of publications. Ranging from popular newspaper pieces to learned defenses of the faith, these essays cover topics as varied as the logic of theism, good and evil, miracles, vivisection, the role of women in church polity, and ethics and politics. Many of these writings represent Lewis’ first ventures into themes he would later treat in full-length books.

  • In one of his most enlightening works, C. S. Lewis shares his ruminations on both the form and the meaning of selected psalms. In the introduction he explains, "I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself." Consequently, he takes on a tone of thoughtful collegiality as he writes on one of the Bible's most elusive books.

    Characteristically graceful and lucid, Lewis cautions us that the psalms were originally written as songs that should now be read in the spirit of lyric poetry rather than as doctrinal treatises or sermons. Drawing from daily life as well as the literary world, Lewis begins to reveal the mystery that often shrouds the psalms. 

  • Written after his wife’s tragic death as a way of surviving the “mad midnight moments,” A Grief Observed is C. S. Lewis’ honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period: “Nothing will shake a man—or at any rate a man like me—out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.”

    This is a beautiful and unflinchingly honest record of how even a stalwart believer can lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and how he can gradually regain his bearings.

  • A timeless classic on “Hell’s latest novelties and Heaven’s unanswerable answer”

    A masterpiece of satire, this classic work has entertained and enlightened readers the world over with its sly and ironic portrayal of human life and foibles from the vantage point of Screwtape, a highly placed assistant to “Our Father Below.”

    At once wildly comic, deadly serious, and strikingly original, C. S. Lewis gives us the correspondence of the worldly wise old devil to his nephew Wormwood, a novice demon in charge of securing the damnation of an ordinary young man. The Screwtape Letters is the most engaging account of temptation—and triumph over it—ever written, offering insights on good vs. evil, repentance, grace, and more.

  • The first book written by C. S. Lewis after his conversion, The Pilgrim's Regress is, in a sense, a record of Lewis' own search for meaning and spiritual satisfaction that eventually led him to Christianity. It is the story of John and his odyssey to an enchanting island that has created in him an intense longing, a mysterious, sweet desire. John's pursuit of this desire takes him through adventures with such people as Mr. Enlightenment, Media Halfways, Mr. Mammon, Mother Kirk, Mr. Sensible, and Mr. Humanist and through such cities as Thrill and Eschropolis, as well as the Valley of Humiliation. Though the dragons and giants here are different from those in Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Lewis' allegory performs the same function of enabling the author to say in fable form what would otherwise have demanded a full-length philosophy of religion.

  • This is the final book in C. S. Lewis’s acclaimed Ransom Trilogy, which includes Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. A classic work of fantasy as much for the wonder of its storytelling as for its insights into the human condition, the trilogy stages an epic battle between forces of light and darkness across a canvas of other worlds.

    In That Hideous Strength, the brave philologist Dr. Ransom (modeled after Lewis’s friend J. R. R. Tolkien) finds himself in a world of superior alien beings and scientific experiments run amok. There is a rumor that the powerful wizard Merlin has returned to the world of the living, and a sinister technocratic organization plans to use his power in their plot to “recondition” society. Ransom’s fight for moral wisdom in a brave new universe dominated by science is a quest filled with intrigue and suspense.

  • C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, of which Perelandra is the second volume, stands alongside such works as Albert Camus’s The Plague and George Orwell’s 1984 as a timely parable that has become timeless, beloved by succeeding generations as much for the sheer wonder of its storytelling as for the significance of the moral concerns.

    Readers who fall in love with Lewis’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Namia as children unfailingly cherish his Space Trilogy as adults; it, too, brings to life strange and magical realms in which epic battles are fought between the forces of light and those of darkness. But in the many layers of its allegory, and the sophistication and piercing brilliance of its insights into the human condition, it occupies a place among the English language’s most extraordinary works for any age, and for all time.

    Perelandra is a planet of pleasure, an unearthly, misty world of strange desires, sweet smells, and delicious tastes, where beasts are friendly and naked beauty is unashamed, a new Garden of Eden, where the story of the oldest temptation is enacted in an intriguingly new way. Here, in the second part of C. S. Lewis’s acclaimed Ransom Trilogy, Dr. Ransom’s adventures continue against the backdrop of a religious allegory that, while it may seem quaint in its treatment of women today, nonetheless shows the capability of science to be an evil force tempting a ruler away from the path that has produced a paradisiacal kingdom. Will Perelandra succumb to this malevolent being, who strives to create a new world order, or will it throw off the yoke of corruption and achieve a spiritual perfection as yet unknown to man?

  • Out of the Silent Planet is the first novel in Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy (also known as the Cosmic or Space Trilogy), which is considered his chief contribution to science fiction. A planetary romance with elements of medieval mythology, the trilogy concerns Dr. Elwin Ransom, a professor of philology who, like Christ, is offered as a ransom for mankind. On a walking tour of the English countryside, Ransom falls in with some slightly shady characters from his old university and wakes up to find himself naked in a metal ball in the middle of the light-filled heavens. He learns that he is on his way to a world called Malacandra by its natives, who call our world Thulcandra, the silent planet. The Malacandrans see planets as having tutelary spirits; those of the other planets are good and accessible, but Earth’s is fallen and twisted. 

  • Do miracles really happen? Can we know if the supernatural world exists?

    “The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares the way for this, or results from this.” This is the key statement of Miracles, in which C. S. Lewis shows that a Christian must not only accept but rejoice in miracles as a testimony of the unique personal involvement of God in His creation.

    Using his characteristic lucidity and wit to develop his argument, Lewis challenges the rationalists, agnostics, and deists on their own grounds. He makes an impressive case for the irrationality of their assumptions by positing: “Those who assume that miracles cannot happen are merely wasting their time by looking into the texts. We know in advance what results they will find for they have begun by begging the question.”

  • Here are two classics of moral philosophy from one of the most revered Christian voices of our time.

    In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis reflects on society and nature and the challenges of how best to educate our children. He describes what public education should be and how far from this standard modern education has fallen. Lewis eloquently argues that, as a society, we need to underpin reading and writing lessons with moral education.

    In The Great Divorce, Lewis presents his vision of the afterworld. A fictional narrator boards a bus on a drizzly English afternoon and embarks on an incredible voyage through Heaven and Hell, where he meets a host of supernatural beings and comes to some significant realizations about the nature of good and evil.

  • C. S. Lewis reworks the timeless myth of Cupid and Psyche into an enduring piece of contemporary fiction in this novel about the struggle between sacred and profane love. Set in the pre-Christian world of Glome on the outskirts of Greek civilization, it is a tale of two princesses: the beautiful Psyche, who is loved by the god of love himself, and Orual, Psyche’s unattractive and embittered older sister who loves Psyche with a destructive possessiveness. Her frustration and jealousy over Psyche’s fate sets Orual on the troubled path of self-discovery. Lewis’ last work of fiction, this is often considered his best by critics.

  • For centuries, Christians have been tormented by one question above all: “If God is good and all-powerful, why does he allow his creatures to suffer pain?” Is there justice or wisdom to be won by suffering, or some reward beyond understanding? And what of the suffering of animals, which neither deserve pain nor can be improved by it? Is the quantity and variety of suffering in the world inconsistent with, or evidence against, an omnipotent and perfectly loving God?

    The greatest Christian thinker of all time sets out to disentangle this knotty issue. With his signature wealth of compassion and insight, C. S. Lewis offers answers to these crucial questions and shares his hope and wisdom to help heal a world hungering for a true understanding of human nature, free will, and the will of the Divine.

  • In the closest thing we have to an autobiography, C. S. Lewis, an unfailingly honest and perceptive observer of self, here shares the story of his personal spiritual journey. With characteristic candor and insight, he describes how his “search for joy” led him from the conventional Christianity of his childhood to a youthful atheism, and finally back to an assured Christianity compatible with his formidable intellect. With no pretense, Lewis describes his early schooldays, his experiences in the trenches during World War I, and his undergraduate life at Oxford, where he reasoned his way to God. Lewis’ “surprise” holds continuing interest not only for admirers of his work but for any modern seeker concerned with the compatibility of the rational and the spiritual.

  • Mere Christianity is C. S. Lewis’s forceful and accessible doctrine on Christian belief. First heard as informal radio broadcasts and then published as three separate books—The Case for Christianity, Christian Behavior, and Beyond Personality—Mere Christianity brings together what Lewis sees as the fundamental truths of his religion.

    Rejecting the boundaries that divide Christianity’s many denominations, C. S. Lewis finds a common ground on which all those who have Christian faith can stand together, proving that “at the center of each there is something, or a Someone, who against all divergences of belief, all differences of temperament, all memories of mutual persecution, speaks with the same voice.”