Byatt returns to the territory she explored in Possession: the landscape of Victorian England, where science and spiritualism are both popular manias, and domestic decorum coexists with brutality and perversion. Angels and Insects is "delicate and confidently ironic.... Byatt perfectly blends laughter and sympathy [with] extraordinary sensuality" (San Francisco Examiner).

    Included are: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, Sylvie and Bruno, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, "The Hunting of the Snark," and Lewis' poetry, phantasmagoria, stories, miscellany, and "acrostics, inscriptions, and other verse."The following have also never appeared in print except in their original editions: "Resident Women Students," "Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection," "Lawn Tennis Tournaments," "Rules for Court Circular," "Croquet Castles," "Mischmasch," "Doublets," "A Postal Problem," "The Alphabet-Cipher," and "Introduction to The Lost Plum Cake."

    From the bizarre job posting in 'The Red-Headed League' to the chilling words uttered by a dying woman in 'The Adventures of the Speckled Band', Sherlock Holmes encounters some of the most twisted cases of his career in this collection of 12 stories.

    Will the privileged Boston feminist Olive Chancellor succeed in turning her beloved ward into a celebrated activist and lifetime companion? Or will Basil Ransom, a conservative southern lawyer, steal Verena’s heart and remove her from the limelight? “The Bostonians has a vigor and blithe wit found nowhere else in James,” writes A. S. Byatt in her Introduction. “It is about idealism in a democracy that is still recovering from a civil war bitterly fought for social ideals . . . [written] with a ferocious, precise, detailed—and wildly comic—realism.”

    Stephen Crane died at the age of 28 in Germany. In his short life, he produced stories that are among the most enduring in the history of American ficiton. The Red Badge of Courage manages to capture both the realistic grit and the grand hallucinations of soldiers at war. Maggie: A Girl on the Streets reflects the range of Crane's ability to invest the most tragic and ordinary lives with great insight.James Colvert writes in the introduction to this volume: "Here we find once again the major elements of Crane's art: the egotism of the hero, the indifference of nature, the irony of the narrator ... Crane is concerned with the moral responsibility of the individual ... (and) moral capability depends upon the ability to see through the illusions wrought by pride and conceit—the ability to see ourselves clearly and truly."Great Short Works of Stephen Crane Includes : The Red Badge of Courage; Maggie: A Girl of the Streets; The Monster. Stories: An Experiment in Misery; A Mystery of Heroism; An Episode of War; The Upturned Face; The Open Boat; The Pace of Youth; The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky; The Blue Hotel.

    - Plain Tales from the Hills (a collection of 40 short stories)- Soldiers Three (a collection of 9 short stories)- The Story of the Gadsbys (a collection of 8 short stories)- In Black and White (a collection of 8 short stories)- Under the Deodars (a collection of 8 short stories)- The Phantom Rickshaw and other Tales (a collection of 4 short stories)- Wee Willie Winkie and Other Child Stories (a collection of 4 short stories)- Life's Handicap (a collection of 27 short stories)- The Light That Failed (a novel)- The Naulahka: A Story of West and East (a novel) - Many Inventions (a collection of 14 short stories)- The Jungle Book (a collection of 7 short stories) - The Second Jungle Book (a collection of 8 short stories)- Captains Courageous (a novel)- The Day's Work (a collection of 13 short stories)- Stalky & Co. (a collection of 9 short stories)- Kim (a novel)- Just So Stories for Little Children (a collection of 13 short stories)- Traffics and Discoveries (a collection of 11 short stories)- Puck of Pook's Hill (a collection of 10 short stories)- Actions and Reactions (a collection of 8 short stories)- Rewards and Fairies (a collection of 11 short stories)- A Diversity of Creatures (a collection of 14 short stories)- The Eyes of Asia (a collection of 4 short stories)

    The Claverings is filled with contemporary detail and shows, as Trollope often does, the weakness of men and the emotional strength of women.

    It is not a completed novel, however. According to Margerie Lowry, the author's widow, this published version is her "sorting out" of numerous drafts of chapters, paragraphs and even sentences that Lowry began to write in 1946.

    Set in the mid-19th century on New York City's Wall Street, it was also, perhaps, Herman Melville's most prescient story: what if a young man caught up in the rat race of commerce finally just said, "I would prefer not to"?The tale is one of the final works of fiction published by Melville before, slipping into despair over the continuing critical dismissal of his work after Moby-Dick, he abandoned publishing fiction. The work is presented here exactly as it was originally published in Putnam's magazine—to, sadly, critical disdain.

    A selection of 8 short stories:The Muse's TragedyA JourneyThe PelicanSouls BelatedA CowardThe Twilight of the GodsA Cup of Cold WaterThe Portrait

    Mary Scudder lives in a modest farmhouse with her widowed mother and their boarder, Samuel Hopkins, a famous Calvinist theologian who preaches against slavery. Mary is in love with the passionate James Marvyn, but Mary is devout and James is a skeptic, and Mary’s mother opposes the union. James goes to sea, and when he is reportedly drowned, Mary is persuaded to become engaged to Dr. Hopkins.With colorful characters, including many based on real figures, and a plot that hinges on romance, The Minister’s Wooing combines comedy with regional history to show the convergence of daily life, slavery, and religion in post-Revolutionary New England.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.

    He wrote some of his books under the pseudonyms Dod Grile and J. Milton Sloluck. Bierce's lucid, unsentimental style has kept him popular when many of his contemporaries have been consigned to oblivion. His dark, sardonic views and vehemence as a critic earned him the nickname, "Bitter Bierce. " Such was his reputation that it was said his judgment on any piece of prose or poetry could make or break a writer's career. His short stories are considered among the best of the 19th century, providing a popular following based on his roots. He wrote realistically of the terrible things he had seen in the war in such stories as An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Killed at Resaca, and Chickamauga. His works include: The Fiend's Delight (1873), Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (1874), Black Beetles in Amber (1892), Fantastic Fables (1899), Shapes of Clay (1903), A Son of the Gods, and A Horseman in the Sky (1907), Write It Right (1909) and A Cynic Looks at Life (1912).

    Here in one volume are his immensely popular novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray; his last literary work, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” a product of his own prison experience; and four complete plays: Lady Windermere’s Fan, his first dramatic success, An Ideal Husband, which pokes fun at conventional morality, The Importance of Being Earnest, his finest comedy, and Salomé, a portrait of uncontrollable love originally written in French and faithfully translated by Richard Ellmann.Every selection appears in its entirety–a marvelous collection of outstanding works by the incomparable Oscar Wilde, who’s been aptly called “a lord of language” by Max Beerbohm.

    She portrays the MacLains, the Starks, the Moodys, and other families of the fictitious town of Morgana. “I doubt that a better book about ‘the South’-one that more completely gets the feel of the particular texture of Southern life and its special tone and pattern-has ever been written” (New Yorker).

    Basil, a sensitive artisan, is purchased from slavery and commissioned to create a decorative casing for the Chalice that Jesus used at the Last Supper. Basil travels to Jerusalem, Greece, and Rome, meets the apostles, braves the perils of persecution, and finally makes a fateful choice that allows him to “see” Jesus. The dramatic plot, compelling characters, and spiritual depth of The Silver Chalice made it one of the most popular historical novels of the twentieth century.