Introduction by Kathryn Harrison Commentary by Nathaniel Hawthorne, W. D. Howells, and Carl Van Doren A stark tale of adultery, guilt, and social repression in Puritan New England, The Scarlet Letter is a foundational work of American literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne's exploration of the dichotomy between the public and private self, internal passion and external convention, gives us the unforgettable Hester Prynne, who discovers strength in the face of ostracism and emerges as a heroine ahead of her time. As Kathryn Harrison points out in her Introduction, Hester...
Introduction by Kathryn Harrison Commentary by Nathaniel Hawthorne, W. D. Howells, and Carl Van Doren A stark tale of adultery,...
Introduction by Peter Gay Translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann Commentary by Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, and Gilles Deleuze One hundred years after his death, Friedrich Nietzsche remains the most influential philosopher of the modern era. Basic Writings of Nietzsche gathers the complete texts of five of Nietzsche's most important works, from his first book to his last: The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Case of Wagner, and Ecce Homo. Edited and translated by the great Nietzsche...
Introduction by Peter Gay Translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann Commentary by Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, and Gilles...
Hugely admired by Tolstoy, David Copperfield is the novel that draws most closely from Charles Dickens's own life. Its eponymous hero, orphaned as a boy, grows up to discover love and happiness, heartbreak and sorrow amid a cast of eccentrics, innocents, and villains. Praising Dickens's power of invention, Somerset Maugham wrote: "There were never such people as the Micawbers, Peggotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep and his mother. They are fantastic inventions of Dickens's exultant imagination...you can never quite forget them." This Modern Library...
Hugely admired by Tolstoy, David Copperfield is the novel that draws most closely from Charles Dickens's own life. Its eponymous hero, orphaned as a b...
Rudyard Kipling, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1907, has long been considered an important and vibrant, even controversial, storyteller and poet. The Wish House and Other Stories is a collection of Kipling's finest works, including the stories "In the House of Suddhoo," "The Disturber of Traffic," and "The Eye of Allah," the poems "The Runners," "The Return of the Children," and "The Last Ode," and his famous story about Afghanistan, "The Man Who Would Be King." Each piece was selected by poet and scholar Craig Raine, who writes in his Preface, "We need to think about...
Rudyard Kipling, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1907, has long been considered an important and vibrant, even controversial, storyteller a...
Mosses from an Old Manse is Nathaniel Hawthorne s second story collection, first published in 1846 in two volumes and featuring sketches and tales written over a span of more than twenty years, including such classics as Young Goodman Brown, The Birthmark, and Rappaccini s Daughter. Herman Melville deemed Hawthorne the American Shakespeare, and Henry James wrote that his early tales possess the element of simple genius, the quality of imagination. That is the real charm of Hawthorne s writing this purity and spontaneity and naturalness of fancy. "
Mosses from an Old Manse is Nathaniel Hawthorne s second story collection, first published in 1846 in two volumes and featuring sketches and ta...
Tom, a foundling, is discovered one evening by the benevolent Squire Allworthy and his sister Bridget and brought up as a son in their household; when his sexual escapades and general misbehavior lead them to banish him, he sets out in search of both his fortune and his true identity. Amorous, high-spirited, and filled with what Fielding called the glorious lust of doing good, but with a tendency toward dissolution, Tom Jones is one of the first characters in English fiction whose human virtues and vices are realistically depicted. This edition is set from the text of the Wesleyan Edition of...
Tom, a foundling, is discovered one evening by the benevolent Squire Allworthy and his sister Bridget and brought up as a son in their household; when...
Told by a master storyteller who, according to critic Russell Nye, "combined adventure, action, violence, crisis, conflict, sentimentalism, and sex in an extremely shrewd mixture," Riders of the Purple Sage is a classic of the Western genre. It is the story of Lassiter, a gunslinging avenger in black, who shows up in a remote Utah town just in time to save the young and beautiful rancher Jane Withersteen from having to marry a Mormon elder against her will. Lassiter is on his own quest, one that ends when he discovers a secret grave on Jane's grounds. " Zane Grey's] popularity was...
Told by a master storyteller who, according to critic Russell Nye, "combined adventure, action, violence, crisis, conflict, sentimentalism, and sex in...
While on a sailing trip in the Baltic Sea, two young adventurers-turned-spies uncover a secret German plot to invade England. Written by Childers--who served in the Royal Navy during World War I--as a wake-up call to the British government to attend to its North Sea defenses, The Riddle of the Sands accomplished that task and has been considered a classic of espionage literature ever since, praised as much for its nautical action as for its suspenseful spycraft.
While on a sailing trip in the Baltic Sea, two young adventurers-turned-spies uncover a secret German plot to invade England. Written by Childers--who...
The House Behind the Cedars, which many consider Charles Chesnutt's finest novel, tells of John and Lena Walden, mulatto siblings who pass for white in the postbellum American South. The drama that unfolds as they travel between black and white worlds constitutes a riveting portrait of the shifting and intractable nature of race in American life. This edition revitalizes a much-neglected masterpiece by one of our most important African-American writers. As Werner Sollors writes, -William Dean Howells did not overstate his case when he compared Chesnutt's works with those by...
The House Behind the Cedars, which many consider Charles Chesnutt's finest novel, tells of John and Lena Walden, mulatto siblings who pas...
