A unique collection of the finest Golden Age mysteries – puzzling whodunnits that have entertained and delighted readers for centuries.With Edgar Award-winning Otto Penzler as guide, delve into an irresistible collection of the finest Golden Age American whodunits, including household names and master storytellers, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ellery Queen and Mary Roberts Rinehart, as well as

Fifty essential works, one sweeping introduction to the world's greatest storytellers. This first volume gathers Jane Austen's social wit, Charles Dickens's unforgettable characters, Fyodor Dostoevsky's psychological depth, Victor Hugo's romantic grandeur, Herman Melville's seafaring epic, and Edgar Allan Poe's dark imagination alongside giants from Cervantes to Tolstoy, the Bronte sisters to Shakespeare. Spanning centuries and continents, from the Spanish Golden Age to Gothic romance, Vic...

The second volume in this essential library gathers James Joyce's modernist vision, Mark Twain's American wit, Jules Verne's boundless imagination, Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure and suspense, Oscar Wilde's epigrammatic brilliance, and Bram Stoker's gothic terror alongside voices from Tolstoy to Tagore, Stendhal to Sienkiewicz. Ranging from French Enlightenment fiction to Victorian sensation novels, Russian realism to early global literature, this collection widens the canon begun in V...

This book, newly updated, contains now several HTML tables of contents that will make reading a real pleasure!The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.This 2nd volume contains the following 50 works...

"My clothes are different, my face is different, my hair is different, but I am somebody. I am black, brown, white. I speak a different language. But I must be respected, protected, never rejected. I am God’s child. ⁣I am somebody.” —Jesse JacksonFew figures loom as large as Reverend Jesse Jackson in the history of American civil rights. From marching in the 1960s with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to forming the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, to his historic presidential ...

Billy Budd is the final novel from legendary author Herman Melville. Published posthumously almost thirty years after his death, the novel is renowned for its richness of character and its thematic ambiguity.Melville couches his tale of morality inside an exciting nautical adventure set during the tumultuous times of the Napoleonic Wars. The novel follows the titular Billy Budd, a handsome and charismatic sailor conscripted aboard a British Man 'O War name...

A gentleman's son with no money signs on as a boy before the mast for the Liverpool run, and finds that the sea is a trade like any other, staffed by men who despise him. Melville wrote it in ten weeks for money, called it beggarly work done to buy tobacco, and produced the truest account of a first voyage in American literature — the starving family in the Liverpool cellar is the passage no reader forgets.

Two sailors desert a whaler in the Marquesas and walk into a valley whose people treat them with perfect kindness and will not let them leave. Melville had done exactly this at twenty-two; the book made him famous as the man who lived among cannibals, his publisher cut the attacks on the missionaries, and he spent the rest of his life being asked whether it was true.

Melville and a shipmate are put in irons for refusing duty aboard a whaler, jailed by a comic English consul in Tahiti, escape, and go beachcombing across the island — planting potatoes, dodging missionaries and watching a culture being dismantled by people who mean well. He had done all of it himself two years earlier; the sequel to Typee sold on the scandal, and the London missionary societies wrote furious letters.

For readers of Bill Bryson and Ed Yong, a cross-country road trip to America’s ancient trees, reveling in natural wonder and exploring what old trees reveal about our environment, our history, and our futureWe often think of ourselves as the stewards of the forests. But since before the spark of civilization, trees have been silent engineers of ecosystems and even shaped human evolution. Trees made us, have sustained us, and we couldn’t survive without them. The pr...

Some journeys cross oceans; others take us into the deepest reaches of the human spirit. In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville creates one of the most ambitious and enduring masterpieces of American literature. Combining adventure, rich symbolism, philosophical reflection, and unforgettable storytelling, this monumental novel takes readers into a world shaped by the vastness of the sea and the powerful forces that drive human ambition. Blending nautical adventure with literary fiction and philosop...

Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) tells the story of the arrival of an enigmatic copyist at a lawyer's office on Wall Street. Quiet, diligent, and seemingly exemplary, Bartleby one day begins responding to every request with a simple yet unsettling phrase: "I would prefer not to." His passive, inexplicable, and increasingly unwavering refusal gradually transforms the lives of those around him, forcing his employer to confront questions for which he can find no answers. With restrained prose a...