New and Selected Poems, Volume One


Mary Oliver - 1992
    Features previously published and new poems that explore the natural world and how it is connected to human beings and spirituality.

Marius the Epicurean


Walter Pater - 1885
    This has been described as "the most highly finished of all his works and the expression of his deepest thought". It is the story of Marius, the grave and thoughtful young man whose reactions to the diverse philosophical forces of his times the Golden Book of Lucius Apuleius, the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, the tranquil beauties of the old Roman religion, and the lurid horrors of the Christian persecution are interestingly and imaginatively depicted.

Civil Disobedience and Other Essays


Henry David Thoreau - 1849
    Contained in this volume are the following essays: Civil Disobedience, Natural History of Massachusetts, A Walk to Wachusett, The Landlord, A Winter Walk, The Succession of Forest Trees, Walking, Autumnal Tints, Wild Apples, Night and Moonlight, Aulus Persius Flaccus, Herald of Freedom, Life Without Principle, Paradise (to be) Regained, A Plea for John Brown, The Last Days of John Brown, After the Death of John Brown, The Service, Slavery in Massachusetts, and Wendell Phillips Before Concord Lyceum.

Chita: A Memory of Last Island


Lafcadio Hearn - 1886
    He later moved to Japan, which had a great influence on his writing. Hearn is best known for his stories about Japan, especially his ghost stories and legends. Chita a Memory of Last Island was written while Hearn was living in New Orleans. Chita was a young white girl adopted by Spanish parents. The novella was based on the hurricane of 1856. The barrier island of L'Ile Dernicre was totally destroyed and swept into the sea. The story tells of good people living on the edge of an abyss and the brutality of nature. After Hurricane Katrina destroyed portions of New Orleans this story by Hearn has even more significance.

To Build a Fire and Other Stories


Jack London - 1908
    In these collected stories of man against the wilderness, London lays claim to the title of greatest outdoor adventure writer of all time.Contents:- To build a fire- Love of life- Chinago- Told in the drooling ward- The Mexican- War- South of the slot- Water baby- All Gold Canyon- Koolau the leper- Apostate- Mauki- An Odyssey of the north- A piece of steak- Strength of the strong- Red one- Wit or Porportuk- God of his fathers- In a far country- To the man on trail- White silence- League of the old men- Wisdom of the trail- Batard

The True Story of Lilli Stubeck


James Aldridge - 1987
    But there's an ongoing battle between Lilli and Miss Dalgleish, seemingly for possession of Lilli's very soul.Ahead of its time in its subtle and clever use of narrative techniques, The True Story of Lilli Stubeck acknowledges that no true story can ever be one-sided. Narrator Kit's multi-layered account of Lilli Stubeck's story is informed by Kit and others' recollections, town gossip and an important little black book.

Clotel: or, The President's Daughter


William Wells Brown - 1853
    The story begins with the auction of his mistress, here called Currer, and their two daughters, Clotel and Althesa. The Virginian who buys Clotel falls in love with her, gets her pregnant, seems to promise marriage—then sells her. Escaping from the slave dealer, Clotel returns to Virginia disguised as a white man in order to rescue her daughter, Mary, a slave in her father’s house. A fast-paced and harrowing tale of slavery and freedom, of the hypocrisies of a nation founded on democratic principles, Clotel is more than a sensationalist novel. It is a founding text of the African American novelistic tradition, a brilliantly composed and richly detailed exploration of human relations in a new world in which race is a cultural construct.

Riders of the Purple Sage


Zane Grey - 1912
    It is the story of Lassiter, a gunslinging avenger in black, who shows up in a remote Utah town just in time to save the young and beautiful rancher Jane Withersteen from having to marry a Mormon elder against her will. Lassiter is on his own quest, one that ends when he discovers a secret grave on Jane’s grounds. “[Zane Grey’s] popularity was neither accidental nor undeserved,” wrote Nye. “Few popular novelists have possessed such a grasp of what the public wanted and few have developed Grey’s skill at supplying it.”

A Shropshire Lad


A.E. Housman - 1896
    E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad, first published in 1896. Scholars and critics have seen in these timeless poems an elegance of taste and perfection of form and feeling comparable to the greatest of the classic. Yet their simple language, strong musical cadences and direct emotional appeal have won these works a wide audience among general readers as well.This finely produced volume, reprinted from an authoritative edition of A Shropshire Lad, contains all 63 original poems along with a new Index of First Lines and a brief new section of Notes to the Text. Here are poems that deal poignantly with the changing climate of friendship, the fading of youth, the vanity of dreams — poems that are among the most read, shared, and quoted in our language.

Heat and Light


Ellen Van Neerven - 2014
    In ‘Water’, a futuristic world is imagined and the fate of a people threatened. In ‘Light’, familial ties are challenged and characters are caught between a desire for freedom and a sense of belonging.Heat and Light presents an intriguing collection while heralding the arrival of an exciting new talent in Australian writing.

Deadwood


Pete Dexter - 1986
    Bill, aging and sick but still able to best any man in a fair gunfight, just wants to be left alone to drink and play cards. But in this town of played-out miners, bounty hunters, upstairs girls, Chinese immigrants, and various other entrepeneurs and miscreants, he finds himself pursued by a vicious sheriff, a perverse whore man bent on revenge, and a besotted Calamity Jane. Fueled by liquor, sex, and violence, this is the real wild west, unlike anything portrayed in the dime novels that first told its story.

House Made of Dawn


N. Scott Momaday - 1968
    One was that of his father, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the land, the ecstasy of the drug called peyote. The other was the world of the twentieth century, goading him into a compulsive cycle of sexual exploits, dissipation, and disgust. Home from a foreign war, he was a man being torn apart, a man descending into hell.

Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters


Anne Boyd Rioux - 2018
    In Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Anne Boyd Rioux brings a fresh and engaging look at the circumstances leading Louisa May Alcott to write Little Women and why this beloved story of family and community ties set in the Civil War has resonated with audiences across time.

The Making of Martin Sparrow


Peter Cochrane - 2018
    He can buckle down and set about his agricultural recovery, or he can heed the whispers of an earthly paradise on the far side of the mountains – a place where men are truly free – and strike out for a new life. But what chance does a ditherer such as Sparrow have of renewal, either in the brutal colony or in the forbidding wilderness?The decision he makes triggers a harrowing chain of events and draws in a cast of extraordinary characters, including Alister Mackie, the chief constable on the river; his deputy, Thaddeus Cuff; the vicious hunter, Griffin Pinney; the Romany girl, Bea Faa; and the young Aboriginal men, Caleb and Moowut’tin, caught between war and peace.Rich, raw, strangely beautiful and utterly convincing, The Making of Martin Sparrow reveals Peter Cochrane – already one of our leading historians – as one of our most compelling novelists.

Hope Leslie: or, Early Times in the Massachusetts


Catharine Maria Sedgwick - 1827
    Set in seventeenth-century New England in the aftermath of the Pequod War, Hope Leslie not only chronicles the role of women in building the republic but also refocuses the emergent national literature on the lives, domestic mores, and values of American women.