Best of
Literature

1901

Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family


Thomas Mann - 1901
    As Mann charts the Buddenbrooks’ decline from prosperity to bankruptcy, from moral and psychic soundness to sickly piety, artistic decadence, and madness, he ushers the reader into a world of stunning vitality, pieced together from births and funerals, weddings and divorces, recipes, gossip, and earthy humor.In its immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of humanity, buddenbrooks surpasses all other modern family chronicles. With remarkable fidelity to the original German text, this superb translation emphasizes the magnificent scale of Mann’s achievement in this riveting, tragic novel.

Lord Byron: Complete Works


Lord Byron - 1901
    Many poetry collections are often poorly formatted and difficult to read on eReaders. The Delphi Poets Series offers readers the works of literature's finest poets, with superior formatting. This volume presents the complete poetical works of Lord Byron, with beautiful illustrations and the usual Delphi bonus material.* Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Byron's life and works* Concise introductions to the poetry and other works* Images of how the poetry books were first printed, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts* Excellent formatting of the poems* Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the poetry* Easily locate the poems you want to read* Rare minor poems section* Byron’s vampire short story, appearing for the first time in digital print* Includes Byron's journals and letters - spend hours exploring the poet's personal correspondence* Features the first ever biography on Lord Byron by John Galt - discover the poet’s literary life* Scholarly ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genres* UPDATED with NCX toc feature allowing readers to skip forward or back to each poem using the Kindle's 5-way controllerCONTENTS:The Poetry CollectionsHOURS OF IDLENESSCHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGEHEBREW MELODIESSTANZAS FOR MUSICOCCASIONAL PIECES, 1807-1824DOMESTIC PIECES, 1816SATIRESTALESDRAMASBEPPODON JUANMINOR POEMSThe PoemsLIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDERLIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDERThe Short StoryFRAGMENT OF A NOVELThe LettersTHE LETTERS AND JOURNALS OF LORD BYRONThe BiographyTHE LIFE OF LORD BYRON by John Galt

The Bears of Blue River


Charles Major - 1901
    Little Balser lives with his parents, a younger brother, and a baby sister in a cozy log cabin on the bank of the Big Blue River. Although only thirteen or fourteen years old, he is quite familiar with the dangers and rigors of frontier life. As the story unfolds, the boy becomes lost in the forest, encounters the fierce one-eared bear, and is nearly caught by a bear as he dozes next to what he thinks is a bearskin. This is a book for children or adults who love nature and tales of early pioneer life.

Novels and Social Writings


Jack London - 1901
    His prose, always brisk and vigorous, rises in The People of the Abyss to italicized horror over the human degradations he saw in the slums of East London. It also accommodates the dazzling oratory of the hero of The Iron Heel, an American revolutionary named Ernest Everhard, whose speeches have the accents of some of London’s own political essays, like the piece (reprinted in this volume) entitled “Revolution.” London’s prophetic political vision was recalled by Leon Trotsky, who observed that when The Iron Heel first appeared, in 1907, not one of the revolutionary Marxists had yet fully imagined “the ominous perspective of the alliance between finance capitalism and labor aristocracy.”Whether he is recollecting, in The Road, the exhilarating camaraderie of hobo gangs, or dramatizing, in Martin Eden, a life like his own, even to the foreshadowing of his own death at age forty, or confessing his struggles with alcoholism in the memoir John Barleycorn, London displays a genius for giving marginal life the aura of romance. Violence and brutality flash into life everywhere in his work, both as a condition of modern urban existence and as the inevitable reaction to it.Though he is outraged in The People of the Abyss by the condition of the poor in capitalist societies, London is even more appalled by their submission, and in the novel he wrote immediately afterward, The Call of the Wild (in the companion volume, Novels and Stories), he constructed an animal fable about the necessary reversion to savagery. The Iron Heel, with its panoramic scenes of urban warfare in Chicago, envisions the United States taken over by fascists who perpetuate their regime for three hundred years. It constitutes London’s warning to his fellow socialists that mere persuasion is insufficient to combat a system that ultimately relies on force.

Jerusalem


Selma Lagerlöf - 1901
    The novel describes how a Chicago mystic sparks a religious revival in the community that leads people to sell their possessions and conduct a mass pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

The Marrow of Tradition


Charles W. Chesnutt - 1901
    For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Pocket Book of O. Henry Stories


Harry Hansen - 1901
    Henry is one of the most widely published of modern authors. His works-more than six hundred stories-have been translated into nearly every language. Although his first literary success took Latin America for its setting, he is best known for his tales about the people of New York City- "Baghdad-on-the-Subway" -stories that are inventive, ironic, and surprisingly contemporary. This collection of O. Henry's works contain 30 of his best-loved pieces, including the eternal Christmas classic "The Gift of the Magi."

Monsieur De Phocas


Jean Lorrain - 1901
    In the novel, Jean Lorrain presents experiences of the darker side of his life in Paris as the adventures of the Duc de Fr�neuse (Phocas) and his relationship with the svengaliesque English painter Claudius Ethal This book ranks with 'A Rebours' as the summation of the French Decadent Movement. Modelled on 'The Portrait of Dorian Gray, ' it drips with evil and certainly would have been unpublishable in fin de siecle England. "The madness of the eyes is the lure of the abyss. Sirens lurk in the dark depths of the pupils as they lurk at the bottom of the sea, that I know for sure - but I have never encountered them, and I am searching still for the profound and plaintive gazes in whose depths I might be able, like Hamlet redeemed, to drown the Ophelia of my desire." ― Jean Lorrain, Monsieur De Phocas

The Book of Jade


David Park Barnitz - 1901
    P. Lovecraft referred to Park Barnitz as “a vivid decadent of the fin de siècle period who modelled his verse on Baudelaire & killed himself soon after graduation from Harvard.” His one and only volume, The Book of Jade (1901), has become a legend in the realm of weird poetry, its technical precision and its relentless obsession with death, horror, madness, and pessimism making it a choice prize for appreciators of poetic witchery.But almost nothing is known about its young author, who died at the age of twenty-three. This comprehensive edition presents a wealth of material about David Park Barnitz—biographical, critical, and bibliographical. It contains the complete text of The Book of Jade along with additional poems and essays by Barnitz, some of which have never been reprinted. In addition, Gavin Callaghan has written an exhaustive biography that presents a fascinating portrait of the poet, delving into his family’s ancestry and collecting widely scattered nuggets of information on Barnitz’s life, work, and thought.The editors have gathered a wide array of criticism on Barnitz, including contemporary reviews and early essays by Floyd Dell, Carey McWilliams, and Joseph Payne Brennan. The book concludes with a brace of original essays on Barnitz’s poetic achievement. This is the definitive edition of The Book of Jade, featuring masses of material not available elsewhere.

Journey to the Morea: Travels in Greece


Nikos Kazantzakis - 1901
    Account of the author's travels in modern Greece in search of his own roots in Greek culture and genius.

The Hero


W. Somerset Maugham - 1901
    So when Jamie Parson comes home with captain's pips and a Victoria Cross, he is no longer the boy he was. But not to his parents and Mary, his sweetheart...they expect him to fit in. Jamie can't, and shortly breaks off with Mary. Happiness remains a shadow, illusive as the Boers, and Jamie finds the moral struggle as relentless as the military.

Signs & Seasons


John Burroughs - 1901
    Signs and Seasons, originally published in 1886, provides an excellent introduction to the extensive work of one of America's great writers. Because the essays were collected and arranged by Burroughs himself, they offer a synoptic view of his complex and many-sided genius. Signs and Seasons covers a wide range of Burroughs's interests, including plants and animals, the wilderness, pastoral landscapes, and the methods and goals of the naturalist.An authoritative new introduction by Jeff Walker makes Burroughs's work relevant to the twenty-first century, not only through Burroughs's excellent natural history writing but also through his beliefs about community, sustainability, and social justice. Additional notes give historical and scientific context for each essay and offer the reader fresh insight into his work. Walker's intimate knowledge of the Hudson River valley, Riverby, and Slabsides, the areas about which Burroughs writes, reveals sympathy for, and understanding of, Burroughs's work. This edition will be indispensable to the devotee of John Burroughs's writing and to a new generation of environmental reader.

Short Novels of the Masters


Charles Neider - 1901
    The contents include: Benito Cereno by Herman Melville, Notes from Underground by F. M. Dostoyevsky, A Simple Heart by Gustave Flaubert, The Death of Ivan Ilych by L. N. Tolstoy, The Aspern Papers by Henry James, Ward No. 6 by A. P. Chekhov, Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, The Dead by James Joyce (recently made into a musical), The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, and The Fox by D. H. Lawrence. In the introduction, Neider discusses the themes that arise in several of the novels, grouping them by more than just their greatness.

If I Were King


Justin Huntly McCarthy - 1901
    It was sodden through and through, as with the lees of wine; it was stained and shamed with the smells of hams and cheeses; it was thick and heavy as if with the breaths of all the rogues and all the vagabonds that had haunted the hostelry from its evil dawn. Such guttering lights and glimmering flames as lit the place -- for there was a small fire on the wide hearth in spite of the fine weather -- peopled the gloom with fantastic quivering shadows as of lean fingers that unfolded themselves to filch, or clenched themselves to stab in the back. But its patrons seemed to like the place well enough in spite of its miasma, and Master Robin Turgis, the fat landlord, drowsy with his own wine and dripping from the heat, surveyed them complacently, and wallowed as it were in the rattle and clink of mug and can, the full-throated laughter and the shrill chatter, crisply emphasized by oaths, which assured him of the Fircone's popularity with its intimates. Master Robin's intelligence was limited; his wit was simple; the processes of his mind moved easily along the lines of least resistance. The Burgundians might be hammering with mailed fists at the walls of Paris; the fire-new crown of Louis the Eleventh might be falling from the royal forehead: it mattered not a jot to dishonest Robin so long as the Fircone brimmed with company.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Volume VI


William Shakespeare - 1901
    Timon of AthensTitus AndronicusThe TempestThe Winter's TaleHenry VIIIThe Complete Poems and Sonnets

A Treasury of the Theatre


John Gassner - 1901
    

The Fireside Sphinx


Agnes Repplier - 1901