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...

A thrilling tale of a boy caught between two worlds, now in a beautiful gift edition for the Union Square & Co. Signature Children’s Signature Clothbound Editions line.Follow Mowgli, the man-cub raised by wolves, on his adventure-filled journey through the heart of the jungle. With guidance from the wise bear Baloo and the graceful panther Bagheera, he learns the complex rules of the wild—but when the fearsome tiger Shere Khan threatens his world, Mowgli must confr...

Two unforgettable jungle guardians take center stage in these classic tales of survival, belonging, and courage. A fearless young mongoose named Rikki-tikki-tavi is washed into an English bungalow in India and instantly turns protector, while Mowgli, a human child raised by wolves, grows up under the strict, mysterious Law of the Jungle. Both stories open with danger at the doorstep and the question of who truly belongs. Rikki-tikki quickly makes the bungalow his home, but he discovers tha...

Rudyard Kipling's sober history of the First Battalion of the Irish Guards follows the regiment from its mobilization in August 1914 to the Armistice, drawing on diaries, papers, and firsthand accounts to preserve what combat history often cannot: the lived truth of war. From Wellington Barracks to Southampton, Havre, Wassigny, Mons, and the long retreat through Belgium and northern France, the battalion moves through the defining campaigns of the First World War with mounting fatigue, con...

Rudyard Kipling's wartime portraits capture the New Army in the act of becoming itself: recruits, instructors, and officers moving through confusion, discipline, and hard-earned pride. In camp, on estates turned into barracks, and in rain-soaked yards of mud and machinery, he finds humor in clumsy drill, improvised kit, and civilian habits not yet shed, but he also honors the seriousness with which ordinary men learn to serve. Miners, laborers, clerks, mechanics, and shop assistants emerge...

From the mustering of a second battalion at Warley Barracks to the shattered trenches beyond Boesinghe, this account follows the Irish Guards into the Great War with unsparing realism. Officers and reservists from across the Empire build a new regiment in the shadow of the 1st Battalion, learning discipline, identity, and endurance before crossing to France and the front at St. Omer and Acquin. Their first encounters with veterans, villagers, and the machinery of war lead into Loos, where ...

The Imperial War Graves Commission emerges as a vast multinational undertaking, created to honor the dead of the First World War with permanence, dignity, and shared imperial responsibility. Born from wartime grave registration and family inquiries, it brings together the governments of the Empire in a solemn effort to remember every sacrifice, wherever the fighting reached. Its vision extends from the cemeteries of France and Flanders to remote graves in deserts, jungles, and islands, all...

In The Bridge-Builders, Rudyard Kipling turns the construction of the Kashi Bridge across the Ganges into a gripping test of endurance, leadership, and human ingenuity. Engineer Findlayson and his young assistant Hitchcock have spent years wrestling with delays, bureaucracy, disease, and unrest to raise a monumental bridge of piers and iron girders above a river that seems to resist being mastered. Their work depends not only on discipline and nerve, but on the practical brilliance of Pero...

The Five Nations is a vigorous, wide-ranging collection in which sea power, empire, labor, memory, and belonging are tested against fate and time. From the elemental contrast of "The Sea and the Hills" to the martial force of "The Bell Buoy," "Cruisers," and "The Destroyers," Kipling turns the ocean into a living realm of vigilance, danger, and predatory energy. Other poems widen the scope to inheritance and civic duty: "The Dykes" laments complacency before disaster, "The Second Voyage" a...

Rudyard Kipling's tales of work and crisis turn engineering and relief duty into tests of nerve, loyalty, and endurance. On the Kashi Bridge, rising over the Ganges, weary Public Works officer Findlayson and his young assistant Hitchcock have spent years battling delays, disease, bureaucracy, labor troubles, and the river itself, building a monument to colonial ambition and human perseverance. Beside them stands Peroo, a fierce Lascar serang whose practical genius, rough humor, and hidden ...

A Fleet in Being is Rudyard Kipling's vivid, unsentimental account of two journeys with the Channel Squadron, where the everyday life of the Royal Navy becomes a study in power, discipline, and national purpose. From the confusion of maneuvers off the Irish coast to the precision of gun practice, he captures a world ruled by signals, rumor, drill, and the constant possibility of disaster. His sharp, ironic eye finds both comedy and menace in cruiser squadrons, dockyard politics, and the ti...

From Washington Irving's early American hauntings to Virginia Woolf's modernist unease, this sweeping collection gathers thirty tales of ghosts, curses, and things that should not be. Mary Shelley's gothic imagination, Charles Dickens's haunted houses, M. R. James's antiquarian terrors, and Henry James's psychological dread sit alongside Oscar Wilde's wit and H. G. Wells's speculative chills, tracing the occult and supernatural short story across a century of English-language fiction. Whet...