Benito Cereno, Bartleby: The Scrivener, and The Encantadas


Herman Melville - 1855
    Considered to be one of Melville's best short stories, "Benito Cereno" is a tale of the revolt aboard a Spanish ship. "Bartleby: The Scrivener" is a moral allegory set on Wall Street in New York. And "The Encantadas" are a collection of sketches based on Melville's experiences in the Galapagos Islands.

Almayer's Folly


Joseph Conrad - 1892
    Set in the lush jungle of Borneo in the late 1800s, it tells of the Dutch merchant Kaspar Almayer, whose dreams of riches for his beloved daughter, Nina, collapse under the weight of his own greed and prejudice. Nadine Gordimer writes in her Introduction, “Conrad’s writing is lifelong questioning . . . What was ‘Almayer’s Folly’? The pretentious house never lived in? His obsession with gold? His obsessive love for his daughter, whose progenitors, the Malay race, he despised? All three?” Conrad established in Almayer’s Folly the themes of betrayal, isolation, and colonialism that he would explore throughout the rest of his life and work.

The Past Through Tomorrow


Robert A. Heinlein - 1967
    Here in one monumental volume are all 21 of the stories, novellas and novels making up Heinlein's famous Future History—the rich, imaginative architecture of Man's destiny that many consider his greatest and most prophetic work.Contents:* Introduction - Damon Knight* Life-Line* The Roads Must Roll* Blowups Happen* The Man Who Sold the Moon* Delilah and the Space-Rigger* Space Jockey* Requiem* The Long Watch* Gentleman, Be Seated* The Black Pits of Luna* "It's Great to Be Back!"* "—We Also Walk Dogs"* Searchlight* Ordeal in Space* The Green Hills of Earth* Logic of Empire* The Menace from Earth* "If This Goes On—"* Coventry* Misfit* Methuselah's Children

Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette & The Professor


Charlotte Brontë
    In her fiction, Charlotte Bront

The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories


D.H. Lawrence - 1928
    Many were considerably revised; some were completely rewritten. The editors give composition histories and discuss publication difficulties. Appendixes record manuscript revisions for three stories and give complete, unpublished early versions of four. Notes elucidate literary allusions and give biographical information. An unpublished fragment A Pure Witch is also included.

The God of His Fathers


Jack London - 1901
    From that seminal experience emerged these gripping, inimitable wilderness tales, which have endured as some of London’s best and most defining work. With remarkable insight and unflinching realism, London describes the punishing adversity that awaited men in the brutal, frozen expanses of the Yukon, and the extreme tactics these adventurers and travelers adopted to survive.

Big Woods


William Faulkner - 1955
    An avid hunter as well as one of America's greatest writers, Faulkner spent many days hunting in the big woods near Oxford, Mississippi.Included here is his most famous hunting story, "The Bear", as well as "The Old People", "A Bear Hunt", and "Race at Morning". Together, these four stories are considered to be the finest hunting stories ever written. Each is introduced with a prelude that weaves these tales together into a modern American classic.This book, a classic collection of sporting literature, belongs in the library of every sportsman. Big Woods was published in 1955. It has long been out of print in hard cover, and a copy of the book commands up to $175 if you can find one. We are honored to offer you a special edition of Big Woods.This edition of 1,200 copies is bound in rich cloth on 70-pound acid-free paper, with a silk ribbon and a handsome slipcase.

Anne of Green Gables Collection


L.M. Montgomery - 2009
    This Halcyon Classics ebook edition contains eleven works by Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery, including 'Anne of Green Gables,' and seven of its sequels.' Includes an active table of contents for easy navigation.Anne Shirley Novels:Anne of Green GablesAnne of AvonleaAnne of the IslandAnne's House of DreamsRainbow ValleyRilla of InglesideChronicles of AvonleaFurther Chronicles of AvonleaOther Works:The Golden RoadKilmeny of the OrchardThe Story GirlThis unexpurgated edition contains the complete text, with minor errors and omissions corrected.

Ulysses and Dubliners


James Joyce - 2011
    None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book.William Blake saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordion folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.Dubliners was completed in 1905, but British and Irish publishers and printers found it so offensive and immoral, it was suppressed. It finally came out in London in 1914, just as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man began to appear in the journal Egoist under Ezra Pound's auspices. The first three stories might be incidents from a draft of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and many of the characters who figure in Ulysses first appear here, but this isn't a book of interest only because of its relationship to Joyce's life and mature work. It's one of the great story collections in the English language--a brilliant, unflinching, often tragic portrait of early 20th-century Dublin. The book, which begins and ends with a death, moves from "stories of my childhood" through tales of public life. Its larger purpose, Joyce said, was as a moral history of Ireland.

Companions to the Moon


Charles de Lint - 2007
    Edric is a musician whose out-of-town concerts happen to coincide with every full moon. Mary decides to secretly follow Edric to his next full moon gig, and makes an unexpected discovery. De Lint's love of combining real life with myth shines in this story.

A Stark and Wormy Knight


Tad Williams - 2011
    

Mortal Coils


Aldous Huxley - 1920
    The grandson of Thomas H, Huxley (Darwin's famous defender), he was born in England and educated at Eton and Oxford. He traveled widely in his youth and lived in Italy for a while in the 1920s. He began his literary career with poetry and critical essays, then turned to novels. Having been born just too late to participate in World War I, he was able, in his early works, such as CROME YELLOW (1921), ANTIC HAY (1923), THOSE BARREN LEAVES (1925), and POINT COUNTER POINT (1928), to perfectly capture a sense of purposeless aftermath which resonated strongly in British society at the time. A satirical strain already evident manifested itself spectacularly in BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932), after which much of his work began to show a fantastic or speculative cast, including AFTER MANY A SUMMER DIES THE SWAN (about immortality, 1939), TIMES MUST HAVE A STOP (1944), and APE AND ESSENCE (a dystopia, 1948). ISLAND, his last work, published in 1962, is a utopia. Late in life he developed an increasing disdain for Western society and an interest in Eastern mysticism and in the possibilities of psychedelic drugs, which he described in THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION (1954). MORTAL COILS is a short-story collection from Huxley's early period, including one of his most popular stories, "The Gioconda Smile."

Sanctuary


Edith Wharton - 2007
    But when she learns of Denis's guilty secret, she becomes painfully aware of her fiancé's flawed morality. Determined that no child of hers should inherit such character traits, she does everything in her power to instill in their son the highest moral code. Yet, when Dick is faced with a moral choice of his own, she can only watch to see if history will repeat itself. American novelist Edith Wharton (1862–1937) is celebrated for her finely crafted stories of New York mores, including The Age of Innocence.

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream


Harlan Ellison - 1967
    This edition contains the original introduction by Theodore Sturgeon and the original foreword by Harlan Ellison, along with a brief update comment by Ellison that was added in the 1983 edition. Among Ellison's more famous stories, two consistently noted as among his very best ever are the title story and the volume's concluding one, Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes.Since Ellison himself strongly resists categorization of his work, we won't call them science fiction, or SF, or speculative fiction or horror or anything else except compelling reading experiences that are sui generis. They could only have been written by Harlan Ellison and they are incomparably original.CONTENTS"I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream""Big Sam Was My Friend""Eyes of Dust""World of the Myth""Lonelyache""Delusion for Dragonslayer""Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes"

The Tomb


H.P. Lovecraft - 1917
    P. Lovecraft written in June 1917 and first published in the March 1922 issue of The Vagrant. It is the first work of fiction that Lovecraft wrote as an adult."The Tomb" tells of Jervas Dudley, a self-confessed day-dreamer. While still a child, he discovers the entrance to a mausoleum, belonging to the family Hyde, whose nearby family mansion had burnt down many years previously. The entrance to the mausoleum is padlocked and slightly ajar. Jervas attempts to break the padlock, but is unable. Dispirited, he takes to sleeping beside the tomb. Eventually, inspired by reading Plutarch's Lives, Dudley decides to patiently wait until it is his time to gain entrance to the tomb.One night, several years later, Jervas falls asleep once more beside the mausoleum. He awakes suddenly in the late afternoon, and believes that a light has been latterly extinguished from inside the tomb. Taking leave, he returns to his home, where he goes directly to the attic, to a rotten chest, and therein finds the key to the tomb.Once inside the mausoleum, Jervas discovers an empty coffin with the name of Jervas Hyde upon the plate. He begins, so he believes, to sleep in the empty coffin each night as its name matches his. He also develops a fear of thunder, and is aware that he is being spied upon, under his father's orders.One night, against his own better judgement, Jervas sets out for the tomb on an overcast night, a night threatening to storm. As he approaches the tomb, he sees the Hyde mansion restored to its former state there is a party in progress, to which he joins, abandoning his former quietude for blasphemous hedonism.During the party, lightning strikes the mansion, and it burns. Jervas loses consciousness, having imagined himself being burnt to ashes in the blaze.He is awoken, screaming and struggling, to find himself being held by two men, his father in attendance. A small antique box is discovered, having been unearthed by the recent storm. Inside is a porcelain miniature of a man, with the initials J.H. Jervas fancies its face to be the mirror image of his own.He begins jabbering that he has been sleeping inside the tomb. His father, saddened by his son's mental instability, tells him that he has been watched for some time and has never gone inside the tomb, and indeed, the padlock is rusted with age. Jervas is removed to a room with barred windows, presumed mad.He then asks his servant Hiram, who has remained faithful to him despite his current state, to explore the tomb a request which Hiram fulfils. After breaking the padlock and descending with a lantern into the murky depths, Hiram return to his master and informs him that there is, indeed, a coffin with a plate which reads 'Jervas' on it. Jervas then states that he has been promised to be buried in that vault and coffin when he dies and thus ends the previous narration.