The Country Wife


William Wycherley - 1675
    

A Clergyman's Daughter


George Orwell - 1935
    Her thoughts are taken up with the costumes she is making for the church school play, by the hopelessness of preaching to the poor and by debts she cannot pay in 1930s Depression England. Suddenly her routine shatters and Dorothy finds herself down and out in London. She is wearing silk stockings, has money in her pocket and cannot remember her name. Orwell leads us through a landscape of unemployment, poverty and hunger, where Dorothy's faith is challenged by a social reality that changes her life.

Collected Poems


James Schuyler - 1993
    This collection of poetry showcases the unique talent of James Schuyler and highlights the writing that won him a Pulitzer Prize.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. B: The Sixteenth Century & The Early Seventeenth Century


M.H. AbramsLawrence Lipking - 1986
    Under the direction of Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor, the editors have reconsidered all aspects of the anthology to make it an even better teaching tool.

Party Going


Henry Green - 1939
    Party Going describes their four-hour wait in a London railway hotel where they shelter from the grim weather and the throngs of workers on the platform below.

The Separate Rose


Pablo Neruda - 1973
    Neruda made a single pilgrimage to Easter Island during a poignant time in his life—he was dying of cancer and taking his life’s inventory. Out of this journey grew a sequence of poems that alternate between “Men” and “The Island,” through which Neruda observes the latest remnants of the ancient world in direct opposition to modernity. With an introduction by William O’Daly.

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page


G.B. Edwards - 1981
    Eighty years old, Ebenezer has lived his whole life on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a stony speck of a place caught between the coasts of England and France yet a world apart from either. Ebenezer himself is fiercely independent, but as he reaches the end of his life he is determined to tell his own story and the stories of those he has known. He writes of family secrets and feuds, unforgettable friendships and friendships betrayed, love glimpsed and lost. The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is a beautifully detailed chronicle of a life, but it is equally an oblique reckoning with the traumas of the twentieth century, as Ebenezer recalls both the men lost to the Great War and the German Occupation of Guernsey during World War II, and looks with despair at the encroachments of commerce and tourism on his beloved island.G. B. Edwards labored in obscurity all his life and completed The Book of Ebenezer Le Page shortly before his death. Published posthumously, the book is a triumph of the storyteller’s art that conjures up the extraordinary voice of a living man.

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson


Emily Dickinson - 1890
    Early posthumously published collections-some of them featuring liberally “edited” versions of the poems-did not fully and accurately represent Dickinson’s bold experiments in prosody, her tragic vision, and the range of her intellectual and emotional explorations. Not until the 1955 publication of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, a three-volume critical edition compiled by Thomas H. Johnson, were readers able for the first time to assess, understand, and appreciate the whole of Dickinson’s extraordinary poetic genius.This book, a distillation of the three-volume Complete Poems, brings together the original texts of all 1,775 poems that Emily Dickinson wrote.

My Man Jeeves


P.G. Wodehouse - 1919
    My Man Jeeves is sure to please anyone with a taste for pithy buffoonery, moronic misunderstandings, gaffes, and aristocratic slapstick.Contents:"Leave It to Jeeves""Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest" "Jeeves and the Hard-boiled Egg" "Absent Treatment""Helping Freddie""Rallying Round Old George""Doing Clarence a Bit of Good""The Aunt and the Sluggard"Of the eight stories in the collection, half feature the popular characters Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, while the others concern Reggie Pepper, an early prototype for Bertie Wooster.Revised versions of all the Jeeves stories in this collection were later published in the 1925 short story collection Carry On, Jeeves. One of the Reggie Pepper stories in this collection was later rewritten as a Jeeves story, which was also included in Carry On, Jeeves.

The Homecoming


Harold Pinter - 1964
    In the conflict that follows, it is Ruth who becomes the focus of the family's struggle for supremacy.

The Well-Beloved


Thomas Hardy - 1892
    Jocelyn Pierston, celebrated sculptor, tries to create an image of his ideal woman - his imaginary Well-Beloved - in stone, just as he tries to find her in the flesh. Powerful symbolism marks this romantic fantasy that Hardy has grounded firmly in reality with a characteristically authentic rendering of location, the Isle of Slingers, or Portland as we know it. Overt exploration of the relationship between erotic fascination and creativity makes this novel a nineteenth-century landmark in the persistent debate about art, aesthetics and gender.A person who differed from the local wayfarers was climbing the steep road which leads through the sea-skirted townlet definable as the Street of Wells, and forms a pass into that Gibraltar of Wessex, the singular peninsula once an island, and still called such, that stretches out like the head of a bird into the English Channel. It is connected with the mainland by a long thin neck of pebbles 'cast up by rages of the se, ' and unparalleled in its kind in Europe.The pedestrian was what he looked like-a young man from London and the cities of the Continent. Nobody could see at present that his urbanism sat upon him only as a garment. He was just recollecting with something of self-reproach that a whole three years and eight months had flown since he paid his last visit to his father at this lonely rock of his birthplace, the intervening time having been spent amid many contrasting societies, peoples, manners, and scenes

Complete Poems and Selected Letters


Hart Crane - 1968
    In his haunted, brief life, Crane fashioned a distinctively modern idiom that fused the ornate rhetoric of the Elizabethans, the ecstatic enigmas of Rimbaud, and the prophetic utterances and cosmic sympathy of Whitman, in a quest for wholeness and healing in what he called "the broken world." White Buildings, perhaps the greatest debut volume in American poetry since Leaves of Grass, is but an exquisite prelude to Crane's masterpiece The Bridge, his magnificent evocation of America from Columbus to the Jazz Age that countered the pessimism of Eliot's The Waste Land and became a crucial influence on poets whose impact continues to this day. This edition is the largest collection of Crane's writings ever published. Gathered here are the complete poems and published prose, along with a generous selection of Crane's letters, several of which have never before been published. In his letters Crane elucidates his aims as an artist and provides fascinating glosses on his poetry. His voluminous correspondence also offers an intriguing glimpse into his complicated personality, as well as his tempestuous relationships with family, lovers, and writers such as Allen Tate, Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters, Jean Toomer, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Katherine Anne Porter. Several letters included here are published for the first time. This landmark 850-page volume features a detailed and freshly-researched chronology of Crane's life by editor Langdon Hammer, chair of the English Department at Yale University and a biographer of Crane, as well as extensive explanatory notes, and over fifty biographical sketches of Crane's correspondents.

The Beaux' Stratagem


George Farquhar - 1707
    Like The Recruiting Officer, the play is set in a provincial town and its plot is slight:Aimwell and Archer, two impecunious London gentlemen, arrive in Lichfield looking for an heiress to marry. Aimwell, posing as his elder brother, falls in love with his 'prey' Dorinda and confesses his imposture to her; his 'man-servant' Archer arouses the wistful interest of the unhappily married Mrs Sullen. The introduction to this edition discusses the play for its theatrical merits and argues that it dramatises the ills of marriage in early modern England, shown by Farquhar to be more injurious to the wife than to the husband, and calls for a reform of the divorce laws.

The Poems Of Richard Wilbur


Richard Wilbur - 1963
    This collection includes Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems, Things of This World, Ceremony and Other Poems, and The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems.  "One of the best poets of his generation, Richard Wilbur has imagined excellence, and has created it." —Richard Eberhart, New York Times Book Review

The Mahabharata: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic


Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - 1978
    R. K. Narayan provides a superb rendition in an abbreviated and elegant retelling of this great epic.