Caliban to King Kong, Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, the films of David Lynch, Beauty and the Beast, The Wizard of Oz, E.T., Richard Yates’s domestic realism, B-horror movies, and the fairy tales of Angela Carter—how such a short novel could contain all of these disparate elements is a testament to its startling and singular charm.

    The novel focuses on Sip, a mill worker, and Miss Kelso, the silent partner in the mill after her father’s death. The lives of these two women intersect as worker and owner as they both reject marriage proposals in favor of new vocations—underscoring Phelps’s vision that, regardless of class, women can be united around their right to work.

    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.

    Prior is a man living with AIDS whose lover Louis has left him and become involved with Joe, an ex-Mormon and political conservative whose wife, Harper, is slowly having a nervous breakdown. These stories are contrasted with that of Roy Cohn (a fictional re-creation of the infamous American conservative ideologue who died of AIDS in 1986) and his attempts to remain in the closet while trying to find some sort of personal salvation in his beliefs.

    The country has been invaded and is being governed by a secret organization. There is destruction everywhere; great walls of ice overrun the world. Together with the narrator, the reader is swept into a hallucinatory quest for this strange and fragile creature with albino hair. Acclaimed upon its 1967 publication as the best science fiction book of the year, this extraordinary and innovative novel has subsequently been recognized as a major work of literature in its own right.

    . . . Carver is a writer of astonishing compassion and honesty. . . . his eye set only on describing and revealing the world as he sees it. His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart” (Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World).From the eBook edition.

    He finds himself a solitary guest in the foreboding, inscrutable Usher mansion. A mysterious ailment has possessed Roderick Usher, lord of the manor, which has resisted all medical treatment and threatens to extinguish the line of Usher forever. Yet a darker enigma faces Powell, and the further he probes the more obscure and horrifying seems the truth. Building to its heart-stopping climax this classic tale of the macabre by the great American author Edgar Allan Poe has been faithfully adapted for the stage preserving much of the beloved text in the script. It is sure to delight all Poe fans and to convert the uninitiated.