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.

Coronado High


Joshuah Bearman - 2013
    They were just some hippie surfers, high school friends who’d come up with the idea of swimming bundles of marijuana across the border from Tijuana during the summer of 1969. Within a decade, however, the Coronado Company had become the largest pot-smuggling operation on the West Coast, a $100 million empire with outposts from Mexico to Morocco to Thailand. And sitting at the top of it all was the most improbable of kingpins: Lou Villar, a former Spanish teacher and swimming coach at Coronado High School. In the classroom, Villar had told his students to steer clear of drugs. Now he was working with them to move thousands of kilos of the stuff.Drawing on exclusive interviews with Villar and his partners in crime, Joshuah Bearman—author of the Wired article that became the film “Argo”—tells the inside story of the Coronado Company’s unlikely rise and the intrepid DEA agents who brought its principals to justice. “Coronado High” is an epic saga of daring escapades, hedonistic excess, and friendships betrayed, played out across the era when the innocence of the Summer of Love curdled into the paranoia of the Drug War.

Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler: Two Spanish Picaresque Novels


Francisco de Quevedo
    Both Lazarillo de Tormesand Pablos and the swindler are determined to attain the trappings of the gentleman, but have little time for the gentlemanly ideals of religion, justice, honour and nobility.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Places We Fear to Tread


John BrhelBeverley Lee - 2020
    Nightmares imagined into real places; from Nigeria to Japan, North America to Australia. Locations the authors have inhabited and imbued with the sinister–hiking trails, haunted lakes, relics of faded industry, and even a Hawaiian volcano!Is there a selkie who resides in the Wartrace Lake Dam, Tennessee?Can you summon a godlike entity on the coast of Oregon?There are many Crybaby Bridges, but which one belongs to author Gwendolyn Kiste?Tales from the British Isles - of cursed beaches, remote manor houses, and plagued villages. Fresh takes on old legends, newly minted stories attached to interesting landmarks, and even personal hauntings (which will never be pinned on Google Maps.)

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 .

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.

The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents


H.G. Wells - 2005
    G. Wells between 1893 and 1895. It was first published by Methuen & Co. in 1895 and was Wells's first book of short stories. All of the stories had first been published in various weekly and monthly periodicals.