Originally censored by its British publisher, The Beach at Fales is a scathing critique of colonialism and economic imperialism that bravely takes on many of the 19th Century' s strongest taboos: miscegenation, imperialism, and economic exploitation. It does so with a story that features a surprising and beguiling romance between an adventurous British trader and a young island girl, against a background of increasing-and mysterious-hostility. Are the native islanders plotting against the couple, or is it the other white traders? The result is a denouement that is astonishing in its violence. Told in the unadorned voice of the trader, it is a story that deftly combines the form of the exotic adventure yarn with the moral and psychological questing of great fiction

Kidnapped has become a classic of historical romance the world over and is justly famous as a novel of travel and adventure set deep in the Scottish landscape. Stevenson's vivid descriptive powers were never better than in this account of remote places and dangerous action in the Highlands in the years following Culloden. Introduced by Barry Menikoff, with a preface by Louise Welsh.

David Balfour: The Original Text was originally published by Huntington Library Press and is now distributed by Stanford University Press. This edition of David Balfour, which continues the epic story begun in Kidnapped, is based upon the original manuscript at Harvard University's Houghton Library, and presents-for the first time-the text as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote it. The introductory essay by Barry Menikoff restores the novel to its rightful place, alongside Kidnapped, as Stevenson's finest achievement in fiction, while Menikoff's extensive notes and glossary open up the political, cultural, and linguistic world of eighteenth-century Scotland for today's reader. Striking color illustrations from the original oil paintings of N.C. Wyeth, created in 1924, accompany the text.

One of the 20th century's essential novels depicting Fascism's rise in Italy.
Set and written in Fascist Italy, this book exposes that regime's use of brute force for the body and lies for the mind. Through the story of the once-exiled Pietro Spina, Italy comes alive with priests and peasants, students and revolutionaries, all on the brink of war.

The complexity and range of Robert Louis Stevenson’s short fiction reveals his genius perhaps more than any other medium. Here, leading Stevenson scholar Barry Menikoff arranges and introduces the complete selection of Stevenson’s brilliant stories, including the famed masterpiece Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as “The Beach of Falesá” and Stevenson’s previously uncollected stories. Arthur Conan Doyle has written that “[Stevenson’s] short stories are certain to retain their position in English literature. His serious rivals are few indeed.”

This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition includes explanatory notes, a Scots’ Glossary, and a unique appendix dedicated to Stevenson’s influence on the Oxford English Dictionary.

Beloved for generations as one of Robert Louis Stevenson's most thrilling adventure novels, Kidnapped tells the story of David Balfour, a shrewd and orphaned Lowlander, and Alan Breck Stewart, the brave and flamboyant Jacobite rebel. Together with its less familiar sequel, David Balfour, Kidnapped constitutes what many scholars consider to be Stevenson's greatest achievement in fiction. In this reinterpretation, Barry Menikoff questions the traditional understanding of these twin novels as mere adventure stories. He suggests instead that Stevenson wrote the volumes with a broader and more searching purpose in mind. Although Stevenson chose to cloak himself in the guise of an entertainer with no aim beyond relating amusing and romantic tales from the past, Menikoff reveals that the writer was a serious student of Scottish history and culture. His true project was nothing less than the reconstitution of his country's history in the period just after the collapse of the Jacobite rebellion. Menikoff contends that in Kidnapped and David Balfour Stevenson imaginatively reconstructed that culture, in part for the sake of his nation, and for its posterity. Narrating Scotland traces the Scottish writer's weaving together of source material from memoirs, letters, histories, and records of trials. Menikoff uncovers the documentary basis for reading Kidnapped and David Balfour as political allegories and reveals the skill with which Stevenson offered a narrative that British colonizers could enjoy without being offended by its underlying condemnation. Menikoff shows that Stevenson's experiments in fiction, which would anticipate such works as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, successfully inscribed his country's loss of indigenous culture upon an epic narrative that for more than a century has masqueraded as a common adventure story.

A finely honed, stirring adventure about the orphan David Balfour, who is kidnapped by his villainous uncle and escapes through the Scottish highlands, only to become involved in the Scottish struggle for independence. This edition features a new introduction by Margot Livesey.