Book picks similar to
Chickamauga by Ambrose Bierce


short-stories
fiction
classics
horror

Recitatif


Toni Morrison - 1983
    Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable at the time, they lose touch as they grow older, only to find each other later at a diner, then at a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and in disagreement each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them.Written in 1980 and anthologized in a number of collections, this is the first time Recitatif is being published as a stand-alone hardcover. In the story, Twyla's and Roberta's races remain ambiguous. We know that one is white and one is black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage?Morrison herself described this story as "an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial." Recitatif is a remarkable look into what keeps us together and what keeps us apart, and about how perceptions are made tangible by reality.

The House on Mango Street


Sandra Cisneros - 1984
    Told in a series of vignettes – sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous–it is the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.

The Secret Sharer


Joseph Conrad - 1910
    A mysterious night-swimmer climbs aboard, and, in keeping the presence of this fugitive a secret, the skipper risks both his captaincy and the safety of his ship. A test of nerve in the Gulf of Siam ensues.

Goblin Market


Christina Rossetti - 1862
    Published in 1862, this phantasmagoric tale of two maidens seduced by lewd goblin men provides a startling glimpse into the depths of the Victorian psyche. Full color throughout .

Life in the Iron Mills


Rebecca Harding Davis - 1861
    A general introduction providing historical and cultural background, a chronology of Davis' life and times, an introduction to each thematic group of documents, headnotes, extensive annotations, a generous selection of illustrations, and a selected bibliography make this volume the definitive scholarly text of this classic work of industrial fiction.---- Life in the iron-mills: the complete text --Introduction: cultural and historical background --A note on the text --Life in the iron-mills (1861 Atlantic Monthly edition) --Life in the iron-mills: cultural context --Work and class --The village blacksmith / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow --That aristocracy may be engendered by manufactures / Alexis de Tocqueville --Iron interests of wheeling / A.W. Campbell --Senate testimony from iron foundry proprietor / John Roach --In Soho on Saturday night (song) / Anonymous --Perils- immigration / Josiah Strong --The Anglo-Saxon and the world's future / Josiah Strong --Senate testimony on the kitchen garden movement / Anna Gordon --Ten nights in a bar-room (excerpt) / T.S. Arthur --The Quaker of the olden time / John Greenleaf Whittier --The Quaker settlement (from uncle tom's cabin) / Harriet Beecher Stowe --Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (excerpt) / Edward Bellamy --Art and artists --An inquiry into the art-conditions and prospects of America / James Jackson Jarves --Art thoughts (excerpt) / James Jackson Jarves --Hints to American artists / Anonymous --Conversations in a studio (excerpt)William Wetmore Story --The Stewart art gallery / Anonymous --The process of sculpture / Anonymous --The Greek slave / Anonymous --A sculptor's studio (from the marble faun) / Nathaniel Hawthorne --Roderick Hudson (excerpt) / Henry James --/ Senate testimony on the arts and art education in the United States / Wilson McDonald --Senate testimony on industrial art schools for women / Florence Elizabeth Cory --Women and writing: the public platform --Letter to George D. Ticknor / Nathaniel Hawthorne --The great lawsuit (excerpt) / Margaret Fuller --St. Elmo (excerpt) / Augusta Evans Wilson --Literary women / Caroline Kirkland --Ruth Hall (excerpt) / Fanny Fern --A New England girlhood (excerpt) / Lucy Larcom --Little Women (excerpt) / Louisa May Alcott --Life and letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (excerpt) / Annie Fields.

All My Sons


Arthur Miller - 1947
    Deever was sent to prison while Keller escaped punishment and went on to make lots of money. In a work of tremendous power, a love affair between Keller's son, Chris, and Ann Deever, Herbert's daughter, the bitterness of George Keller, who returns from the war to find his father in prison and his father's partner free, and the reaction of a son to his father's guilt escalate toward a climax of electrifying intensity.Winner of the Drama Critics' Award for Best New Play in 1947, All My Sons established Arthur Miller as a leading voice in the American theater. All My Sons introduced themes that thread through Miller's work as a whole: the relationship between fathers and sons, and the conflict between business and personal ethics.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner


Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1792
    Modern editions use a later revised version printed in 1817 and featuring a gloss. Along with other poems in Lyrical Ballads, it was a signal shift to modern poetry and the beginning of British Romantic literature.It relates the events experienced by a mariner who has returned from a long sea voyage. The Mariner stops a man on his way to a wedding ceremony and begins to narrate a story. The Wedding-Guest's reaction turns from bemusement to impatience, fear, and fascination as the Mariner's story progresses, as can be seen in the language style: for example, the use of narrative techniques such as personification and repetition to create a sense of danger, or the supernatural, or serenity, depending on the mood each different part of the poem.

An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge


Christopher Sergel - 1967
    On this, Bierce creates the most surprising story of his career. With dramatic force, the situation is established. The man's nature and mission are quickly revealed in a moving encounter with his wife and two daughters. Then in one of the most exciting short scenes in literature, the audience is taken into the mind of the man at the moment of his execution.

The Wife of Bath


Geoffrey Chaucer
    Martin's innovative Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism series has introduced more than a quarter of a million students to literary theory and earned enthusiastic praise nationwide. Along with an authoritative text of a major literary work, each volume presents critical essays, selected or prepared especially for students, that approach the work from several contemporary critical perspectives, such as gender criticism and cultural studies. Each essay is accompanied by an introduction (with bibliography) to the history, principles, and practice of its critical perspective. Every volume also surveys the biographical, historical, and critical contexts of the literary work and concludes with a glossary of critical terms. New editions reprint cultural documents that contextualize the literary works and feature essays that show how critical perspectives can be combined.

Quicksand


Nella Larsen - 1928
    As a young woman, Helga teaches at an all-black school in the South, but even here she feels different. Moving to Harlem and eventually to Denmark, she attempts to carve out a comfortable life and place for herself, but ends up back where she started, choosing emotional freedom that quickly translates into a narrow existence. Quicksand , Nella Larsen's powerful first novel, has intriguing autobiographical parallels and at the same time invokes the international dimension of African American culture of the 1920s. It also evocatively portrays the racial and gender restrictions that can mark a life.

The Grass Harp, Including A Tree of Night and Other Stories


Truman Capote - 1956
    AS they pass sweet yet hazardous hours in a china tree, The Grass Harp manages to convey all the pleasures and responsibilities of freedom. But most of all it teaches us about the sacredness of love, "that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life."This volume also includes Capote's A Tree of Night and Other Stories, which the Washington Post called "unobstrusively beautiful...a superlative book."

The Wood of the Dead


Algernon Blackwood
    

Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze


Eliza Fowler Haywood - 1724
    Since the 1980s, Eliza Haywood's literary works have been gaining in recognition and interest. She wrote and published over seventy works during her lifetime including fiction, drama, translations, poetry, conduct literature and periodicals. Haywood is a significant figure of the long 18th century as one of the important founders of the novel in English. Her writing career began in 1719 with the first two installments of Love in Excess. Many of her works were published anonymously. Amongst her other works are Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1724), The Fortunate Foundlings (1744), Life's Progress Through the Passions; or, The Adventures of Natura (1748) and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751).

Uncle Tom's Children


Richard Wright - 1938
    Published in 1938, this was the first book from Wright, who would continue on to worldwide fame as the author of the novels Native Son and Black Boy.

The Lifted Veil


George Eliot - 1859
    Published the same year as her first novel, Adam Bede, this overlooked work displays the gifts for which George Eliot would become famous—gritty realism, psychological insight, and idealistic moralizing. It is unique from all her other writing, however, in that it represents the only time she ever used a first-person narrator, and it is the only time she wrote about the supernatural. The tale of a man who is incapacitated by visions of the future and the cacophony of overheard thoughts, and yet who can’t help trying to subvert his vividly glimpsed destiny, it is easy to read The Lifted Veil as being autobiographically revealing—of Eliot’s sensitivity to public opinion and her awareness that her days concealed behind a pseudonym were doomed to a tragic unveiling (as indeed came to pass soon after this novella’s publication). But it is easier still to read the story as the exciting and genuine precursor of a moody new form, as well as an absorbing early masterpiece of suspense.The Art of The Novella SeriesToo short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.