An indispensable and provocative compilation of witty essays dealing with Biblical stories and their inconsistencies from America's master satirist, Mark Twain.
"The Bible According to Mark Twain" is a selection of essays spanning forty years of his writing career, which touch on and satirize stories and figures from the Bible. In his characteristic style, Twain illustrates the inherent comedy and inconsistencies found within Holy Scripture, simultaneously entertaining and provoking questions about man's place in the world and his relationship with God. An important installment in the Twain canon, this book is perfect for fans of America's master satirist.

Written in epistolary form and drawn from actual events, Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789) and Foster’s The Coquette (1797) were two of the earliest novels published in the United States. Both novels reflect the eighteenth-century preoccupation with the role of women as safekeepers of the young country’s morality.

A desperate young man plans the perfect crime -- the murder of a despicable pawnbroker, an old women no one loves and no one will mourn. Is it not just, he reasons, for a man of genius to commit such a crime, to transgress moral law -- if it will ultimately benefit humanity? So begins one of the greatest novels ever written: a powerful psychological study, a terrifying murder mystery, a fascinating detective thriller infused with philosophical, religious and social commentary. Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in a garret in the gloomy slums of St. Petersburg, carries out his grotesque scheme and plunges into a hell of persecution, madness and terror. Crime And Punishment takes the reader on a journey into the darkest recesses of the criminal and depraved mind, and exposes the soul of a man possessed by both good and evil ... a man who cannot escape his own conscience.

"The story of the monster man whose horrible deformities cause fear and terror, his search for love and acceptance, and his haunting of the opera house in Paris is told in very simple language. Beautifully adapted, the story flows along so easily that readers will be immediately caught up in the tangle of events and emotions. McMullan conveys all of the anger, grief, joy, and love that make the phantom a truly believable character. Will attract reluctant readers."--School Library Journal.  


From the Trade Paperback edition.

This, the fourth of Cooper's celebrated Leatherstocking Tales, continues the adventures of Natty Bumppo, noble woodsman, champion of the Indians, and hero of the American frontier. In The Pathfinder Cooper undertook the hazardous experiment of resurrecting one of his most popular characters, for he had killed off Bumppo in his previous incarnation, the Trapper, in The Prairie (1827). But in 1839, at his English publisher's instigation, Cooper began work on a romance, setting the story of his hero's unsuccessful courtship on the mist-shrouded shores of Lake Ontario during the French and Indian Wars.

In one volume, the two short-story collections that established Kate Chopin as one of America's best-loved realist writers.

The first English-language edition of a major work by George Sand. Translated by the winner of the 1994 BOMC-PEN Translation Award. "A courageous work, nowadays unjustly neglected". -- Renee Winegarten "Sand develops her most advanced political, social and sexual views in this classic work". -- Feminist Bookstore News

A historical adventure reminiscent of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley romances, Cooper’s novel centers on Harvey Birch, a common man wrongly suspected of being a spy for the British.

A story about a nineteenth-century woman’s search for a meaningful life through work outside the family sphere, Work is at once Alcott’s exploration of her personal challenges and a social critique of America.

This classic literary critique of turn-of-the-century capitalism in the United States reveals Norris's powerful story of an obsessed trader intent on cornering the wheat market and the consequences of his unchecked greed.

From setting foot in Asia in 1849 (or was it 1845?) as Anna Crawford (or was it Anna Edwards?) to waltzing with Yul Brynner in glorious technicolor, Anna Leonowens and her romanticized experiences as the only Westerner behind the walls of Nang Harm (the walled harem of the king of Siam) have had a long, colourful, and often controversial existence.

Hawthorne's novel of Americans abroad, the first novel to explore the influence of European cultural ideas on American morality. Although it is set in Rome, the fictive world of The Marble Faun depends not on Italy's social or historical significance, but rather on its aesthetic importance as a definer of 'civilization'. As in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne is concerned here with the nature of transgression and guilt. A murder, motivated by love, affects not only Donatello, the murderer, but his beloved Miriam and their friends Hilda and Kenyon. As he explores the reactions of each to the crime, Hawthorne dramatizes both the freedoms a new cultural model inspires and the self-censoring conformities it requires. His examination of the influence of European culture on American travellers lay the groundwork for such later works of American fiction as Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad and Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady.

One of the first American Gothic novels, Edgar Huntly (1787) mirrors the social and political temperaments of the postrevolutionary United States.

The final novel in Cooper’s epic, The Prairie depicts Natty Bumppo at the end of his life, still displaying his indomitable strength and dignity.

A candid inquiry into the intertwining of religious and sexual fervor, and a telling portrait of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, this novel foreshadows the rise of naturalism in American literature.

Alger’s characteristic theme of youths achieving the American dream through hard work, resistance to temptation, and goodwill is presented in these two tales that reflect nineteenth-century life.

The story of a philandering, dishonest Boston journalist and the woman who divorces him, this is the first serious treatment of divorce in American writing and a powerful example of realism in literature.

The Portable Stephen Crane allows us to appreciate the full scope and power of this writer's vision. It contains three complete novels—Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, George's Mother, and Crane's masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage; nineteen short stories and sketches, including "The Blue Hotel" and "The Open Boat", a barely fictionalized account of his own escape from shipwreck while covering the Cuban revolt against Spain; the previously unpublished essay "Above All Things"; letters and poems, plus a critical essay and notes by the noted Crane scholar Joseph Katz.

Thomas Love Peacock is literature's perfect individualist. He has points in common with Aristophanes, Plato, Rabelais, Voltaire, and even Aldous Huxley, but resembles none of them; we can talk of the satirical novel of ideas, but his satire is too gay and good-natured, his novel too rambling, and his ideas too jovially destructive for the label to stick.

A romantic in his youth and a friend of Shelley, he happily made hay of the romantic movement in Nightmare Abbey, clamping Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley himself in a kind of painless pillory. And in Crotchet Castle he did no less for the political economists, pitting his gifts of exaggeration and ridicule against scientific progress and the March of Mind.

Yet the romantic in him never died: the long, witty and indecisive talk of his characters is set in wild, natural scenery which Peacock describes with true feeling.

Many cultures identify mourning as the very source of poetry and music, what Elizabeth Bishop calls the art of losing. That might well be the title of this collection. Not every poem is cornered with death, but all are about loss. The poems chosen traverse a surprisingly wide range of emotions from despair to joy, resignation to anger, all articulated in language of the greatest power and beauty . All the major verse forms of mourning are represented here: epitaph, requiem and lament. Three great elergies by Milton, Whitman and Rilke are surrounded by a wide variety of shorter poems. Naturally, the pathos of death predominates, but its comedy has not been neglected, whether in the savage poems of World War I or the gentle teasing of seventeenth-century satire. Poets include: Akhmatova, Auden, Bishop, Brodsky, Browning, Carew, Cory, Cowley, Dickinson, Donne, Dryden, Dyer, Fletcher, Graves, Gurney, Hardy, Harrison, Herrick, Hopkins, Horace, King, Leopardi, Lowell, MacCaig, Mandelstam, Milosz, Philips, Propertius, Roethke, Smith, Tennyson, Dylan Thomas, Edward Thomas and Wordsworth.

First published in 1873, The Gilded Age is both a biting satire and a revealing portrait of post-Civil War America-an age of corruption when crooked land speculators, ruthless bankers, and dishonest politicians voraciously took advantage of the nation's peacetime optimism. With his characteristic wit and perception, Mark Twain and his collaborator, Charles Dudley Warner, attack the greed, lust, and naivete of their own time in a work which endures as a valuable social document and one of America's most important satirical novels.

Emma es una novela en la que peculiarmente el dialogo es accion y la accion es dialogo, la verdad es mentira y la mentira verdad, donde reir y llorar es lo mismo. La historia de una joven inglesa de la clase media alta cuyas magnificas dotes intelectuales la precipitan a amanar las relaciones amorosas de los demas pensando que esta construyendo una pequena sociedad perfecta hasta que descubre con una desdicha transitoria que lo que ha construido es su perfecta pequenez.

Las aventuras de una joven abandonada por su madre al nacer, sus correrias como ladrona y estafadora, su estancia en la carcel, su final como prospera heredera de una plantacion dejada por su madre en una atmosfera de penitencia y prosperidad, hacen de Moll Flanders el personaje picaresco femenino mas popular de la literatura universal.

Set in seventeenth-century New England in the aftermath of the Pequod War, Hope Leslie not only chronicles the role of women in building the republic but also refocuses the emergent national literature on the lives, domestic mores, and values of American women.