A selection of short stories from a twentieth-century "American master" (Dan Cryer, Newsday).A contemporary of Ann Beattie and Tobias Wolff, Frederick Busch was a master craftsman of the form; his subjects were single-event moments in so-called ordinary life. The stories in this volume, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, are tales of families trying to heal their wounds, save their marriages, and rescue their children. In "Ralph the Duck,"...

One of the great novelist’s most popular works, Oliver Twist is also the purest distillation of Dickens’s genius.This tale of the orphan who is reared in a workhouse and runs away to London is a novel of social protest, a morality tale, and a detective story. Oliver Twist presents some of the most sinister characters in Dickens: the master thief, Fagin; the leering Artful Dodger; the murderer, Bill Sikes…along with some of his most sentimental and...

A New York Times Notable BookIn the unrelenting cold and bitter winter of upstate New York, Jack and his wife, Fanny, are trying to cope with the desperate sorrow they feel over the death of their young daughter. The loss forms a chasm in their relationship as Jack, a sardonic Vietnam vet, looks for a way to heal them both.Then, in a nearby town, a fourteen-year-old girl disappears somewhere between her home and church. Though she is just one of the hundreds of chi...

On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that "Nobody can read like a writer," Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the essay, about what elements of fiction...

The French Revolution comes to vivid life in Charles Dickens's famous novel about the best of times and the worst of times...The storming of the Bastille…the death carts with their doomed human cargo…the swift drop of the guillotine blade—this is the French Revolution that Charles Dickens vividly captures in his famous work A Tale of Two Cities. With dramatic eloquence, he brings to life a time of terror and treason, a starving people rising in frenzy and ...

An immensely powerful story, The Night Inspector follows the extraordinary life of William Bartholomew, a maimed veteran of the Civil War, as he returns from the battlefields to New York City, bent on reversing his fortunes. It is there he meets Jessie, a Creole prostitute who engages him in a venture that has its origins in the complexities and despair of the conflict he has left behind. He also befriends a deputy inspector of customs named Herman Melville who, largely forgotten as a writ...

Dickens’s scathing portrait of Victorian industrial society.Coketown, the depressed mill town that is the setting for one of Charles Dickens’s most powerful and unforgettable novels, is all brick, machinery, and smoke-darkened chimneys. Its emblematic citizen, the schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind, lives to impose his version of education: facts and statistics that feed the mind while starving the soul and spirit. Inflexible and unyielding, he places conformity above c...

First pblished in the year 1837, the present novel 'The Pickwick Papers' was the famous Victorian realist novelist Charles Dickens's first novel. It was published in the serialized form following the success of his 'Sketches by Boz', under his pseudonym Boz.

A satirical critique of British bureaucracy and the impossibility of social mobility, Little Dorrit tells the story of kind-hearted Amy Dorrit and Arthur Clennam, both of whom are unaware that their family histories have been fabricated to cover a complex web of secrets and lies. After living with his father in China for twenty years, Arthur returns home to London to inform his mother of his father's death. Before he died, however, his father gave him a mysterious watch. This gift...

Dombey and Son Charles Dickens - The story opens with the death of Mrs. Dombey, who has left her husband the proud possessor of a baby son and heir. He neglects his daughter Florence and loves Paul, in whom all his ambitions and worldly hopes are centred; but the boy dies. Mr. Dombey marries a beautiful woman, who is as cold and proud as he, and who has sold herself to him to escape from a designing mother. She grows fond of Florence, and this friendship is so displeasing to Mr. Dombey tha...

The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby - Charles Dickens - The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby is a novel by Charles Dickens. Originally published as a serial from 1838 to 1839, it was Dickens's third novel.The novel centres on the life and adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, a young man who must support his mother and sister after his father dies.