50 Great Short Stories


Milton CraneEdmund Wilson - 1952
    The authors represented range from Hawthorne, Maupassant, and Poe, through Henry James, Conrad, Aldous Huxley, and James Joyce, to Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Faulkner, E.B. White, Saroyan, and O'Connor. The variety in style and subject is enormous, but all these stories have one point in common—the enduring quality of the writing, which places them among the masterpieces of the world's fiction.Garden party / Katherine Mansfield --Three-day blow / Ernest Hemingway --Standard of living / Dorothy Parker --Saint / V.S. Pritchett --Other side of the hedge / E.M. Forster --Brooksmith / Henry James --Jockey / Carson McCullers --Courting of Dinah Shadd / Rudyard Kipling --Shot / Alexander Poushkin, translated by T. Keane --Graven Image / John O'Hara --Putois / Anatole France, translated by Frederic Chapman --Only the dead know Brooklyn / Thomas Wolfe --A.V. Laider / Max Beerbohm --Lottery / Shirley Jackson --Masque of the Red Death / Edgar Allan Poe --Looking back / Guy de Maupassant, translated by H.N.P. Sloman --Man higher up / O. Henry --Summer of the beautiful white horse / William Saroyan --Other two / Edith Wharton --Theft / Katherine Anne Porter --Good man is hard to find / Flannery O'Connor --Man of the house / Frank O'Connor --Man who shot snapping turtles / Edmund Wilson --Gioconda smile / Aldous Huxley --Curfew tolls / Stephen Vincent Benet --Father wakes up the village / Clarence Day --Ivy Day in the committee room / James Joyce --Chrysanthemums / John Steinbeck --Door / E.B. White --Upheaval / Anton Chekhov --How beautiful with shoes / Wilbur Daniel Steele --Haunted house / Virginia Woolf --Catbird seat / James Thurber --Schartz-Metterklume method / H.H. Munro --Death of a Bachelor / Arthur Schnitzler --Apostate / George Milburn --Phoenix / Sylvia Townsend Warner --That evening sun / William Faulkner --Law / Robert M. Coates --Tale / Joseph Conrad --Girl from Red Lion, PA / H.L. Mencken --Main currents of American thought / Irwin Shaw --Ghosts / Lord Dunsany --Minister's black veil / Nathaniel Hawthorne --String of beads / W. Somerset Maugham --Golden honeymoon / Ring Lardner --Man who could work miracles / H.G. Wells --Foreigner / Francis Steegmuller --Thrawn Janet / Robert Louis Stevenson --Chaser / John Collier

100 Best-Loved Poems


Philip SmithRobert Herrick - 1995
    Dating from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, these splendid poems remain evergreen in their capacity to engage our minds and refresh our spirits. Among them are Marlowe: "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"; Shakespeare: "Sonnet XVIII" ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"); Donne: "Holy Sonnet X" ("Death, be not proud"); Marvell: "To His Coy Mistress"; Wordsworth: "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"; Shelley: "Ode to the West Wind"; Longfellow: "The Children's Hour"; Poe: "The Raven"; Tennyson: "The Charge of the Light Brigade"; Whitman: "O Captain! My Captain!"; Dickinson: "This Is My Letter to the World"; Yeats: "When You Are Old"; Frost: "The Road Not Taken"; Millay: "First Fig."Works by many other poets — Milton, Blake, Burns, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Emerson, the Brownings, Hardy, Housman, Kipling, Pound, and Auden among them — are included in this treasury, a perfect companion for quiet moments of reflection.

The Seagull Reader: Poems


Joseph KellySharon Olds - 2000
    W. Norton proudly announces the Seagull Readers, a new collection of the most frequently taught poems. Ideal for genre or introductory literature courses, the Seagull Readers offer a compact and affordable alternative to larger anthologies. Each volume includes a wide selection of both classic and contemporary works, as well as a thorough introduction to each genre and biographies of the authors. An inexpensive and portable alternative to bulky anthologies, The Seagull Reader: Poems offers 154 poems, from time-honored classics such as T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and John Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci" to contemporary classics by Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Seamus Heaney, Sharon Olds, and Li-Young Lee, among others. The Seagull Reader: Poems is lightly supplemented by editorial apparatus, including an introduction to the major concepts of the genre, brief headnotes, annotations where necessary, a glossary of terms, and biographical sketches of each author.

Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems


Billy Collins - 2001
    These poems show Collins at his best, performing the kinds of distinctive poetic maneuvers that have delighted and fascinated so many readers. They may begin in curiosity and end in grief; they may start with irony and end with lyric transformation; they may, and often do, begin with the everyday and end in the infinite. Possessed of a unique voice that is at once plain and melodic, Billy Collins has managed to enrich American poetry while greatly widening the circle of its audience.

Ten Little Indians


Sherman Alexie - 2003
    In 'The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above', an intellectual feminist Spokane Indian woman saves the lives of dozens of white women all around her, to the bewilderment of her only child. In 'Do You Know Where I Am?' two college sweethearts rescue a lost cat - a simple act that has profound moral consequences for the rest of their lives together. In 'What You Pawn I Will Redeem', a homeless Indian man must raise $1,000 in twenty-four hours to buy back the fancy dance outfit stolen from his grandmother fifty years earlier.Even as they often make us laugh, Sherman Alexie's stories are driven by a haunting lyricism and naked candour that cut to the heart of the human experience.

The Best American Short Stories of the Century


John UpdikeF. Scott Fitzgerald - 2000
    Now THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES OF THE CENTURY brings together the best of the best - fifty-five extraordinary stories that represent a century's worth of unsurpassed accomplishments in this quintessentially American literary genre. Here are the stories that have endured the test of time: masterworks by such writers as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Saroyan, Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Cynthia Ozick, and scores of others. These are the writers who have shaped and defined the landscape of the American short story, who have unflinchingly explored all aspects of the human condition, and whose works will continue to speak to us as we enter the next century. Their artistry is represented splendidly in these pages. THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES series has also always been known for making literary discoveries, and discovery proved to be an essential part of selecting the stories for this volume too. Collections from years past yielded a rich harvest of surprises, stories that may have been forgotten but still retain their relevance and luster. The result is a volume that not only gathers some of the most significant stories of our century between two covers but resurrects a handful of lost literary gems as well. Of all the great writers whose work has appeared in the series, only John Updike's contributions have spanned five consecutive decades, from his first appearance, in 1959. Updike worked with coeditor Katrina Kenison to choose stories from each decade that meet his own high standards of literary quality.

The Pleasures of the Damned


Charles Bukowski - 2007
    A hard-drinking wild man of literature and a stubborn outsider to the poetry world, he wrote unflinchingly about booze, work, and women, in raw, street-tough poems whose truth has struck a chord with generations of readers.Edited by John Martin, the legendary publisher of Black Sparrow Press and a close friend of Bukowski's, The Pleasures of the Damned is a selection of the best works from Bukowski's long poetic career, including the last of his never-before-collected poems. Celebrating the full range of the poet's extraordinary and surprising sensibility, and his uncompromising linguistic brilliance, these poems cover a rich lifetime of experiences and speak to Bukowski's “immense intelligence, the caring heart that saw through the sham of our pretenses and had pity on our human condition” (New York Quarterly). The Pleasures of the Damned is an astonishing poetic treasure trove, essential reading for both longtime fans and those just discovering this unique and legendary American voice.

Bulfinch's Mythology


Thomas Bulfinch - 1855
            The stories are divided into three sections: The Age of Fable or Stories of Gods and Heroes (first published in 1855); The Age of Chivalry (1858), which contains King Arthur and His Knights, The Mabinogeon, and The Knights of English History; and Legends of Charlemagne or Romance of the Middle Ages (1863). For the Greek myths, Bulfinch drew on Ovid and Virgil, and for the sagas of the north, from Mallet's Northern Antiquities. He provides lively versions of the myths of Zeus and Hera, Venus and Adonis, Daphne and Apollo, and their cohorts on Mount Olympus; the love story of Pygmalion and Galatea; the legends of the Trojan War and the epic wanderings of Ulysses and Aeneas; the joys of Valhalla and the furies of Thor; and the tales of Beowulf and Robin Hood. The tales are eminently readable. As Bulfinch wrote, "Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated. . . . Our book is an attempt to solve this problem, by telling the stories of mythology in such a manner as to make them a source of amusement."Thomas Bulfinch, in his day job, was a clerk in the Merchant's Bank of Boston, an undemanding position that afforded him ample leisure time in which to pursue his other interests. In addition to serving as secretary of the Boston Society of Natural History, he thoroughly researched the myths and legends and copiously cross-referenced them with literature and art. As such, the myths are an indispensable guide to the cultural values of the nineteenth century; however, it is the vigor of the stories themselves that returns generation after generation to Bulfinch.

Good Poems


Garrison Keillor - 2002
    And here, for the first time, is an anthology of poems from the show, chosen by Keillor for their wit, their frankness, their passion, their "utter clarity in the face of everything else a person has to deal with at 7 a.m." Good Poems includes verse about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendance. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds. It's a book of poems for anybody who loves poetry whether they know it or not.

Literature: A Portable Anthology


Janet E. Gardner - 2003
    The literature is chronologically arranged by genre and supported by informative and concise editorial matter, including a complete guide to writing about literature at the back of the book. This volume in Bedford/St. Martin’s popular series of Portable Anthologies and Guides offers the series’ trademark combination of high quality and great value.

The Classic Fairy Tales


Maria Tatar - 1998
    The Classic Fairy Tales focuses on six tale types: "Little Red Riding Hood," "Beauty and the Beast," "Snow White," "Cinderella," "Bluebeard," and "Hansel and Gretel," and presents multicultural variants and sophisticated literary rescriptings. Also reprinted are tales by Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde."Criticism" gathers twelve essays that interpret aspects of fairy tales, including their social origins, historical evolution, psychological drama, gender issues, and national identities.A Selected Bibliography is included.

The complete novels of Jane Austen


Jane Austen - 2016
    This book contains the complete novels of Jane Austen.- Lady Susan- Sense and Sensibility- Pride and Prejudice- Mansfield Park- Emma- Persuasion- Northanger Abbey- Love And Friendship And Other Early Works

Tales of the Jazz Age


F. Scott Fitzgerald - 1922
    Icky" "Jemina"

The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry


George Walter - 2006
    This newly edited anthology reflects the diverse experiences of those who lived through the war, bringing together the words of poets, soldiers, and civilians affected by the conflict. Here are famous verses by Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen; poetry by women writing from the home front; and the anonymous lyrics of soldiers' songs. Arranged thematically, the selections take the reader through the war's stages, from conscription to its aftermath, and offer a blend of voices that is both unique and profoundly moving.

The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 2b: The Victorian Age


David Damrosch - 1999
    Volume 2B: The Victorian Age of The Longman Anthology of British Literature is a comprehensive and thoughtfully arranged text that offers a rich selection of major British authors throughout the Victorian age.