A carefully woven assemblage of legends, aphorisms, fairy tales and nihilistic philosophy, it remains a deeply enigmatic and haunting work more than a century later, a gathering of literary and personal ruins written in a style that evokes both the Brothers Grimm and Friedrich Nietzsche. The Book of Monelle was the result of Schwob's intense emotional suffering over the loss of his love, a "girl of the streets" named Louise, whom he had befriended in 1891 and who succumbed to tuberculosis two years later. Transforming her into the innocent prophet of destruction, Monelle, Schwob tells the stories of her various sisters: girls succumbing to disillusionment, caught between the misleading world of childlike fantasy and the bitter world of reality. This new translation reintroduces a true fin-de-siècle masterpiece into English.A secret influence on generations of writers, from Guillaume Apollinaire and Jorge Luis Borges to Roberto Bolaño, Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) was as versed in the street slang of medieval thieves as he was in the poetry of Walt Whitman (whom he translated into French). Paul Valéry and Alfred Jarry both dedicated their first books to him, and he was the uncle of Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun.

    It began life as a slapstick comedy about Siamese twins, but as he wrote, something deepened. "The tale kept spreading along, and spreading along, and other people got to intruding themselves and taking up more and more time with their talk and their affairs. It changed from a farce to a tragedy while I was going along with it," Twain wrote in his frank afternote to the novel. In the end, the voice that comes to dominate the tale is Roxana's, a light-skinned slave who switches her infant son with her master's son to keep him from being sold down the river. Roxana, Twain's most complex and fully-realized adult female character, is a compelling and memorable tragic heroine, trapped with her son by the brutal system of slavery and by their own inescapable racial identities. At his best, Twain is the most uniquely American of writers, and it is inevitable that his best work revolves around the issues of race and of slavery embedded in the American psyche. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson is a dark and powerful novel of race in America, written by the American master.

    There he meets his soul mate, who is an initiate of a higher order. In his eagerness to make rapid progress he falls prey to the dark brotherhood. The Masters use this near deadly experience to further test and teach him as part of their ultimate plan. He and his true love learn to work together in service to the Masters and humanity.

    Upon meeting Edvarda, the daughter of a merchant in a nearby town, they are both strongly attracted to each other, but neither understands the other's love.

    Now available together for the first time in this unique Signet Classic edition, both plays--centered on characters hiding terrible, scandalous secrets--offer dark foreshadowing of the dramatic course Wilde's own life was to take.

    In 1830, the last Bourbon King, Charles X, was forced to abdicate in favour of Dumas' employer, Louis Philippe (1773-1850), who styled himself "King of the French" and endeavoured to rule as a constitutional monarch. In 1832, the widowed mother of the young Bourbon pretender, Henri V, Marie-Caroline de Bourbon-Sicilie (1798-1870), the Countess de Berry, made a clandestine return from exile and attempted to lead an uprising against Louis-Philippe in favor of her son. Her supporters generally refused to take up arms, except in La Vendée, the center of Royalist opposition to the French Revolution, and the scene of savage partisan warfare in the 1790's. There, an abortive upraising was suppressed by Government forces, and tailed off into banditry. From this episode, Dumas fashioned an immense and very interesting novel. The eponymous "Louves de Machecoul" are the beautiful twin daughters of the Marquis de Souday, a royalist partisan fighter who fled into exile when Napoleon suppressed the resistance, and returned to reclaim his ancestral lands in 1815. The family are all ardent Legitimists--supporters of the Countess de Berry. The twins encounter the wimpy Michel, son of a commoner who had become rich by betraying the Royalist guerillas to Napoleon’s forces, who, after the war, is killed in a suspicious hunting accident. Michel, smitten with the twins, promptly offers his services to the Legitimist cause. Michel fights bravely in the uprising and falls in love with Mary, while the other twin, Berthe, falls in love with Michel. Through a misunderstanding, Michel is betrothed to the wrong twin. As the revolution collapses, the characters find themselves hunted by the Government forces of the energetic General Dermoncourt, and continually subject to betrayal and arrest. Alexandre Dumas was a proponent of a set of antique and aristocratic virtues: duty, honor, courage, and loyalty. In Louves de Machecoul these virtues lead to a pointless war. General Dermoncourt, in his tribute to the Countess de Berry, describes her as "having been born two centuries too late." The Countess who believes that duty requires her to struggle to uphold her son's rights, learns that the struggle requires the death of her most devoted adherents. This novel, with its flashes of ambivalence, realistic descriptions of guerilla war, emotional growth of its characters, and insight into the tensions of post-revolutionary France, suggests that the mature Dumas had become a wiser and more thoughtful man than course of many of his earlier novels would have suggested.