Trifles


Susan Glaspell - 1916
    Her short story, "A Jury of Her Peers", was adapted from the play a year after its debut. It was first performed by the Provincetown Players at the Wharf Theatre in Provincetown, Massachusetts on August 8, 1916. In the original play, Glaspell played the role of one of the characters, Mrs. Hale. It is frequently anthologized in American literature textbooks. The play begins as the county attorney, the sherrif, Mr. Hale, Mrs. Peters, and Mrs. Hale enter the Wright's empty farm house. On prompting from the county attorney, Mr. Hale recounts his visit to the house the previous day, when he found Mrs. Wright behaving strangely and found her husband upstairs with a rope around his neck, dead. Mr. Hale notes that, when he questioned her, Mrs. Wright claimed that she was fast asleep when someone strangled her husband.Often hailed as one of the quintessential feminist plays, 'Trifles' earned Glaspell a Pulitzer Prize and renewed literary recognition.

Barefoot in the Park


Neil Simon - 1963
    He's a straight-as-an-arrow lawyer and she's a free spirit always looking for the latest kick. Their new apartment is her most recent find-too expensive with bad plumbing and in need of a paint job. After a six day honeymoon, they get a surprise visit from Corie's loopy mother and decide to play matchmaker during a dinner with their neighbor-in-the-attic Velasco, where everything that can go wrong, does. Paul just doesn't understand Corie, as she sees it. He's too staid, too boring and she just wants him to be a little more spontaneous, running "barefoot in the park" would be a start...

The Swimmer


John Cheever - 1964
    But as night falls and the season begins to change, Neddy sinks from optimistic bliss to utter despair.

American Indian Myths and Legends


Richard Erdoes - 1984
    From all across the continent come tales of creation and love, of heroes and war, of animals, tricksters, and the end of the world. Alfonso Ortiz, an eminent anthropologist, and Richard Erdoes, an artist and master storyteller, Indian voices in the best folkloric sources of the nineteenth century to make this the most comprehensive and authentic volume of American Indian myths available anywhere.With black-and-white drawings throughoutPart of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library

The Illustrated Rumi: A Treasury of Wisdom from the Poet of the Soul


Rumi - 2010
    But add images and story, and you have more than enough for a lifetime, an overabundance…an excess of wisdom, beauty, and pleasure. This book will be one of the few I take wherever I go.” —Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul and Original SelfThis richly illustrated collection delivers a fresh and inspiring way to read Rumi’s most intimate poems of love, rage, sadness, joy, and longing. No other edition of Rumi’s poetry combines his singularly passionate words with authentic, rare, and wonderful Sufi and Islamic art. Readers moved by Sappho, Hafiz, Rilke, or by Coleman Barks’ translations of Rumi will relish the beautiful imagery and new translations in this unique volume of some of the finest works by “the most popular poet in America” (Time magazine).

The Ascent of Everest


John Hunt - 1953
    Expedition leader John Hunt's account of the first ascent of Mount Everest's summit in 1953 by Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay.

The Destructors


Graham Greene - 1955
    Each book in the series has been designed with today's young reader in mind. As the words come to life, students will develop a lasting appreciation for great literature.The humor of Mark Twain...the suspense of Edgar Allan Poe...the danger of Jack London...the sensitivity of Katherine Mansfield. Creative Short Stories has it all and will prove to be a welcome addition to any library.

Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman


Mary Wollstonecraft - 1798
    Her story of a woman incarcerated in a madhouse by her abusive husband dramatizes the effect of the English marriage laws, which made women virtually the property of their husbands.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches (Yuasa)


Matsuo Bashō - 1702
    The sketches are written in the "haibun" style--a linking of verse and prose. The title piece, in particular, reveals Basho striving to discover a vision of eternity in the transient world around him and his personal evocation of the mysteries of the universe.

Tolkien On Fairy-stories


J.R.R. Tolkien - 2008
    Tolkien's On Fairy-stories is his most-studied and most-quoted essay, an exemplary personal statement of his own views on the role of imagination in literature, and an intellectual tour de force vital for understanding Tolkien's achievement in writing The Lord of the Rings .Contained within is an introduction to Tolkien's original 1939 lecture and the history of the writing of On Fairy-stories, with previously unseen material. Here, at last, Flieger and Anderson reveal the extraordinary genesis of this seminal work and discuss how the conclusions that Tolkien reached during the composition of the essay would shape his writing for the rest of his life.

The Jungle


Upton Sinclair - 1905
    When it was published in serial form in 1905, it was a full third longer than the censored, commercial edition published in book form the following year. That expurgated commercial edition edited out much of the ethnic flavor of the original, as well as some of the goriest descriptions of the meat-packing industry and much of Sinclair's most pointed social and political commentary. The text of this new edition is as it appeared in the original uncensored edition of 1905. It contains the full 36 chapters as originally published, rather than the 31 of the expurgated edition. A new foreword describes the discovery in the 1980s of the original edition and its subsequent suppression, and a new introduction places the novel in historical context by explaining the pattern of censorship in the shorter commercial edition.

The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works


William ShakespeareJan Sewell - 2008
    The First Folio is a literary icon and is the version of Shakespeare's text preferred by many actors and directors, yet no one has edited it in its entirety for over three hundred years.At the request of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmunssen, two of today's most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, have used the very latest techniques and research to correct the errors and variations in the early printed copies and to present the First Folio for modern readers. The result is a fresh and definitive Complete Works for the twenty-first century.This edition includes all the material that might be needed by a student of Shakespeare. The Sonnets, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Pericles, Shakespeare's scene from Sir Thomas More, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and Turtle, and a number of other interesting passages not published in the First Folio are also included.'This is a glorious edition of one of the world's most important books. It's the essential reference book for anyone who's ever been in love, felt jealousy, hatred, or desire. All human life is here — and every home should have one.'-Dame Judi Dench'A splendid edition … the general introduction is among the best 50-page guides to Shakespeare you could hope to find, while the short essays prefixed to each play are informative, thought-provoking and humane. Marginal notes help readers imagine what's happening onstage … the RSC's edition allows you to lose yourself in the wonder of the works.'-Dr Colin Burrow, Oxford University'A triumphant addition to our times.'-Fiona Shaw, The Times'The scholarly apparatus is discreet, elegant and pertinent. For each play, we get brief accounts of plots, dates and sources … footnotes are found snugly and legibly at the bottom of each page … there is a universe to be found in these annotations: the Renaissance world of power and fate, sex and death, language and philosophy … an edition full of endless fascination.'-Tom Deveson, Times Educational Supplement'Bate's general introduction to Shakespeare's life, stage and reputation is superb, and the short introductions to individual works are among the best of their kind available … they manage to speak about what really matters about the plays.'-Professor Michael Dobson, London Review of Books'Excellent, succinct notes and introductions to each play.'-John Carey, Sunday Times'Outstanding … Jonathan Bate writes with as much elegance as insight about the making of theatre and the creation of the plays … an impeccably informative introduction gives a comprehensive theatrical, social, political and biographical context to the plays … exemplary notes at the foot of each page translate verbal and topical obscurities … for actors and directors it will be incomparably useful, but for any curious reader of Shakespeare's plays it provides an invaluable guide to reading them not as novels or dramatic poems, but as they were intended to be read: blueprints for live performance.'-Richard Eyre, Sunday Telegraph

A Clean Well Lighted Place


Ernest Hemingway - 1926
    Have you read 'A Clean Well-Lighted Place'?... It is masterly. Indeed, it is one of the best short stories ever written..."

The Oxford Book of American Short Stories


Joyce Carol OatesWilliam Carlos Williams - 1992
    Why, she asks, when writers such as Samuel Clemens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, and John Updike have among them written hundreds of short stories, do anthologists settle on the same two or three titles by each author again and again? Isn't the implicit promise of an anthology that it will, or aspires to, present something different, unexpected? In The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Joyce Carol Oates offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction, in a collection of fifty-six tales that combines classic works with many different, unexpected gems, and that invites readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers. Some selections simply can't be improved on, Oates admits, and she happily includes such time-honored works as Irving's Rip Van Winkle, Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, and Hemingway's A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. But alongside these classics, Oates introduces such little-known stories as Mark Twain's Cannibalism in the Cars, a story that reveals a darker side to his humor (That morning we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I ever sat down to...a perfect gentleman, and singularly juicy). From Melville come the juxtaposed tales The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, of which Oates says, Only Melville could have fashioned out of 'real' events...such harrowing and dreamlike allegorical fiction. From Flannery O'Connor we find A Late Encounter With the Enemy, and from John Cheever, The Death of Justina, one of Cheever's own favorites, though rarely anthologized. The reader will also delight in the range of authors found here, from Charles W. Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, and Sarah Orne Jewett, to William Carlos Williams, Kate Chopin, and Zora Neale Hurston. Contemporary artists abound, including Bharati Mukherjee and Amy Tan, Alice Adams and David Leavitt, Bobbie Ann Mason and Tim O'Brien, Louise Erdrich and John Edgar Wideman. Oates provides fascinating introductions to each writer, blending biographical information with her own trenchant observations about their work, plus a long introductory essay, in which she offers the fruit of years of reflection on a genre in which she herself is a master. This then is a book of surprises, a fascinating portrait of American short fiction, as filtered through the sensibility of a major modern writer.

The Open Boat and Other Stories


Stephen Crane - 1898
    Four prized selections by one of America's greatest writers: "The Open Boat," based on a harrowing incident in the author's life: the 1897 sinking of a ship on which he was a passenger; "The Blue Hotel" and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," reflecting Crane's early travels in Mexico and the American Southwest; and the novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a galvanizing portrait of life in the slums of New York City.