New 6x9 inch paperback edition. Regarded as one of the most colorful autobiographies ever written, the chronicle of Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini's life is an epic tale of exaggerated proportions. Cellini's loves, hatreds, passions, delights, brawls and battles, along with extraordinary events, and even supernatural phenomena, are narrated in an energetic, direct, and often racy style. Completed in 1563, Cellini's autobiography is also historically important for its firsthand account of daily life in Renaissance Italy. This 1887 translation, by noted Renaissance scholar John Addington Symonds, has been the most popular English language version for over a century.

New 6x9 inch paperback edition. In addition to "Love," this edition also includes Chekhov's short stories "Lights," "A Story Without an End," "Mari D'elle," "A Living Chattel," "The Doctor," "Too Early ," "The Cossack," "Aborigines," "An Inquiry," "Martyrs," "The Lion and the Sun," "A Daughter of Albion," "Choristers," "Nerves," "A Work of Art," "A Joke," "A Country Cottage," "A Blunder," "Fat and Thin," "The Death of a Government Clerk," "A Pink Stocking," and "At a Summer Villa."

New 6x9 inch paperback edition. "The Virginian" was the first western genre novel introducing the cowboy as a romantic hero. Set in Wyoming, Wister weaves a tale of action, violence, hate, revenge, love and friendship that revolves around the Virginian's confrontations with a rival gambler, chasing cattle thieves, and an ongoing romance with the local schoolteacher from back east who is not used to the wild west. Owen Wister is the "father" of western fiction. Like his friend Teddy Roosevelt, Wister became fascinated with the culture, lore and terrain of the west after his first trip to Wyoming in 1885. Wister was a lifelong friend of the famous western artist Frederic Remington, and Mount Wister in Grand Teton National Park is named after the author.

New 6x9 inch paperback edition. "Riders of the Purple Sage" tells the story of Jane Withersteen and her battle to overcome her persecution by members of her polygamous Mormon Church. A second plot follows Venters and his escape to the wilderness with a girl named Bess, whom he has accidentally shot. Venters falls in love with the girl, and together they escape to the East, while Lassiter, Fay, and Jane, pursued by both Mormons and rustlers, escape into a paradise-like valley by toppling a giant balancing rock, forever closing off the only way in or out. Zane Grey was an American author best known for his popular adventure novels and stories that presented an idealized image of the American frontier. Grey wrote over 100 books, mostly westerns, but also a few history books and many sporting stories about baseball and his favorite pastime, fishing. Grey's books became very popular during his lifetime with countless movies being adapted from them.

New 6x9 inch paperback edition. "A Tale of Two Cities" is a novel set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution, and depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same time period. Charles Dickens was a 19th-century English writer and social critic who created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular.

New 6x9 inch paperback edition. Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment, believes he can rationalize murder without guilt and the story follows this journey from arrogance to repentance and the burden he must carry symbolized by the cross given to him by Sonya. The mental anguish and moral dilemmas expressed in the dialogue, and Raskolnikov's dreams, are cleverly utilized by Dostoyevsky to articulate the broader philosophical debate sweeping through nineteenth-century Europe about nihilism, utopian socialism, utilitarianism, and extreme rationalism.

New 6x9 inch paperback edition. Satirizing a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist about twenty years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, is one of American's favorite authors and humorists. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty. William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature."

New 6x9 inch paperback edition. A governess is hired to care for two children at a remote house in the pastoral countryside, where things turn for the worse when she becomes convinced the children are consorting with a pair of malevolent ghosts. Henry James's classic prose casts an eerie spell and challenges the reader to decide if the governess is merely insane or encounters real ghosts, and the dreadful implications of either conclusion.

New 6x9 inch paperback edition. The second, and most popular, book of the "Leatherstocking Tales" pentalogy, by James Fenimore Cooper, "The Last of the Mohicans" is a historical story set in 1757, during the French and Indian War (the Seven Years' War), when France and Great Britain battled for control of North America.

New 6x9 inch paperback edition. Nine essays on literature by Arthur Schopenhauer.

Written in 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but only appeared to be because they lacked education during that era. Wollstonecraft suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason. New 6x9 inch paperback edition. With the emergence of the feminist movement at the turn of the twentieth century, Wollstonecraft's advocacy of women's equality and critiques of conventional femininity became increasingly important. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers.

New 6x9 inch paperback edition with restored text. Challenging the prevailing morals of the Victorian era, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is considered by many to be the first feminist novel. This is a story of marital betrayal set within a moral framework tempered by an optimistic belief in universal salvation. The main character, Helen, is spirited and forthright, unafraid to speak with frankness to the men in her life. Anne Bronte portrays this approvingly, in contrast to the meekness of Milicent who is trampled and ignored by her unrepentant husband. Helen leaves with her beloved son in tow, arriving at Wildfell Hall, an Elizabethan mansion which has been empty for many years. The second and final novel by Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was first published in 1848 in three volumes under the pseudonym Acton Bell. It achieved instant success, however, after Anne's untimely death the next year, her sister, Charlotte, prevented its re-publication. Six years later the text was edited to fit one volume, and most editions since then have the same omissions. Through careful comparison with the original version, this Peruse Press edition restores the missing sections.

New 6x9 inch paperback edition. Considered by many to be the first existentialist novel, "Notes from Underground" is an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator-the underground man. The first part attacks emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's "What Is to Be Done?" The second part describes events that are destroying and sometimes renewing the underground man.

New 6x9 inch paperback edition. An early example of Joyce's modernist, free indirect speech style of writing, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" is a semi-autobiographical novel that traces the intellectual and religio-philosophical awakening of young Stephen Dedalus as he begins to question and rebel against the Catholic and Irish conventions with which he has been raised. He finally leaves for abroad to pursue his ambitions as an artist. James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish novelist and poet considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century, and is well known for writing in the stream of consciousness technique he perfected.