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The Crucible: Complete Teacher's Kit (Penguin Modern Classics Ser.)
by Arthur Miller Christopher W. BigsbyA haunting examination of groupthink and mass hysteria in a rural community The place is Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, an enclave of rigid piety huddled on the edge of a wilderness. Its inhabitants believe unquestioningly in their own sanctity. But in Arthur Miller's edgy masterpiece, that very belief will have poisonous consequences when a vengeful teenager accuses a rival of witchcraft--and then when those accusations multiply to consume the entire village.First produced in 1953, at a time when America was convulsed by a new epidemic of witch-hunting, The Crucible brilliantly explores the threshold between individual guilt and mass hysteria, personal spite and collective evil. It is a play that is not only relentlessly suspenseful and vastly moving but that compels readers to fathom their hearts and consciences in ways that only the greatest theater ever can."A drama of emotional power and impact" --New York Postst hysteria inspired by Senator Joseph McCarthy's "witch-hunts" in the United States. Within the text itself, Miller contemplates the parallels, writing: "Political opposition...is given an inhumane overlay, which then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized behavior. A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence." For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
The Hound of the Baskervilles (The Art of the Novella)
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle"It's an ugly business, Watson, an ugly dangerous business, and the more I see of it the less I like it."Sherlock Holmes had been dead for eight years--killed of in another story--when Arthur Conan Doyle decided to bring the famous detective back for a new story that he told friends was turning into "a real creeper". The tale about the chilling re-animation of a curse haunting the Baskerville family since Medieval times, wherein a supernatural beast stalks the gloomy moors, would be the most sensationally successful of all the Holmes stories, and a century later, it is still the most thrilling of them all. Full of moody atmospherics, suspicious characters, and dramatic discoveries, The Hound of the Baskervilles also shows off something often overlooked about Doyle: his wonderful prose. Presented here as it first appeared in The Strand magazine in 1901, this great mystery still strikes many as the best ever written. The Art of The Novella Series Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar (TARZAN #5)
by Edgar Rice BurroughsIn the forgotten city of Opar, the bloodied sacrificial altar of the Flaming God stood above vaults piled high with the gold destined for fabled, lost Atlantis. There La, the beautiful high priestess, still dreamed of Tarzan, who had escaped her knife before. Around her, the hideous priests vowed that he should never escape again. For now Tarzan was returning, and they were waiting for him. Tarzan planned to avoid La and the priests. But he could not avoid the earthquake that struck him down in the vaults and left him without memory of his wife or home - only with what memory he had had as a child among the savage apes who reared him.
A Christmas Carol and Other Stories
by Charles Dickens John IrvingAn immediate bestseller when it was first published in December 1843, A Christmas Carol has endured ever since as a perennial Yuletide favorite. Charles Dickens's beloved tale about the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, who comes to know the meaning of kindness, charity, and goodwill through a haunting Christmas Eve encounter with four ghosts, is a heartwarming celebration of the spirit of Christmas. This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition also includes two other popular Christmas stories by Dickens: "The Chimes," in which a man, persuaded by hypocritical cant that the poor deserve their misery, is shown what his pessimistic resignation might lead to in a vision conjured by the pealing of bells, and "The Haunted Man," Dickens's last Christmas tale, which features one of his great comic families, the Tetterbys.
The Enormous Room (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
by E. E. Cummings Samuel HynesIn 1917 young Edward Estlin Cummings went to France as a volunteer with a Red Cross ambulance unit on the western front. But his free-spirited, insubordinate ways soon got him tagged as a possible enemy of La Patrie, and he was summarily tossed into a French concentration camp at La Ferte-Mace in Normandy. Under the vilest conditions, Cummings found fulfillment of his ever elusive quest for freedom. The Enormous Room, his account of his four-month confinement, reads like a latter-day Pilgrim's Progress, a journey into dispossession, to a place among the most debased and deprived of human creatures. Cummings's hopeful tone reflects the essential paradox of his existence: to lose everything is to become free, and so to be saved.
Burn Girl
by Mandy MikulencakArlie's face was disfigured by burns when her stepfather's meth lab exploded. After that, Arlie discovered the street smarts and survival skills she needed to shelter her addict mother, since the law and Lloyd, her deranged stepfather, are both looking for them. People died in the explosion and everyone wants answers. But Arlie's carefully constructed world is ripped apart when her mother commits suicide shortly after Arlie's sixteenth birthday. Now she can no longer remain hidden. Social Services steps in and before Arlie can make sense of anything, she is following the rules, going to school, and living in a thirty-one-foot Airstream trailer with an eccentric uncle she didn't even know she had. Then she meets a boy who doesn't care about her scars or her past. Just when she begins to think a normal life might be possible, Lloyd shows up. He's looking for the drug money he insists Arlie's mother stole. Will Arlie be able to shield her uncle and her boyfriend from Lloyd? Did Lloyd somehow play a role in her mother's death? And can she get rid of him once and for all before her world blows apart again?
Existentialists and Mystics
by Iris MurdochBest known as the author of twenty-six novels, Iris Murdoch has also made significant contributions to the fields of ethics and aesthetics. Collected here for the first time in one volume are her most influential literary and philosophical essays. Tracing Murdoch's journey to a modern Platonism, this volume includes incisive evaluations of the thought and writings of T. S. Eliot, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvior, and Elias Canetti, as well as key texts on the continuing importance of the sublime, on the concept of love, and the role great literature can play in curing the ills of philosophy. Existentialists and Mystics not only illuminates the mysticism and intellectual underpinnings of Murdoch's novels, but confirms her major contributions to twentieth-century thought.
Hungry Hearts: And Other Stories
by Anzia YezierskaHungry Hearts is a collection of short stories by Jewish/American writer Anzia Yezierska first published in 1920. The short stories deal with the European Jewish immigrant experience from the perspective of fictional female Jews, each story depicting a different aspect of their trials and tribulations in poverty in New York City at the turn of the 20th century. The stories were adapted into a film of the same name.
Hungry Hearts: And Other Stories
by Anzia YezierskaA collection of ten short stories portraying immigrant life in 1920s New York City by the acclaimed Jewish American author of Bread Givers. Anzia Yezierska, known as the &“Cinderella of the Tenements,&” calls upon her own background as a child of immigrants who worked in sweatshops on Manhattan&’s Lower East Side to bring to life stories of women struggling to survive in similar circumstances. From a hardworking woman who becomes the target of her children&’s scorn and indifference when they find success to the young mother and her family who are subjected to humiliating rules and circumstances when offered a vacation in the country, these are tales of women who strive, dream, and fight to hold on to their dignity and identity in a harsh reality. &“Coping with scholarly dependents and chiseling landlords, chafed by the class system, ravenous for learning and desperate for beauty, Anzia Yezierska&’s protagonists have emotions they express in great, big, attention-getting gestures. . . . Louis B. Mayer was so taken by Yezierska&’s stories he brought her to Hollywood: The film adapted from Hungry Hearts is about as loud as silent cinema gets.&” —Tablet, &“101 Great Jewish Books&” &“Poverty makes no one eloquent, and lack of opportunity to learn leaves its scars. Yezierska, despite her literary faults, is a remarkable writer, a recorder of a history that still is attached to us, that still follows us like a shadow.&” —The Los Angeles Times &“These stories . . . are, in fact, slices of life as much as fiction, in that tradition of American social realism which harks back to Dreiser.&” —The Irish Times
The Inimitable Jeeves: Volume 1 (Arena Bks. #1)
by P. G. Wodehouse"To dive into a Wodehouse novel is to swim in some of the most elegantly turned phrases in the English language."--Ben Schott Follow the adventures of Bertie Wooster and his gentleman's gentleman, Jeeves, in this stunning new edition of one of the greatest comic short story collections in the English language. This classic collection of linked stories feature some of the funniest episodes in the life of Bertie Wooster, gentleman, and Jeeves, his gentleman's gentleman--in which Bertie's terrifying Aunt Agatha stalks the pages, seeking whom she may devour, while Bertie's friend Bingo Little falls in love with seven different girls in succession (he marries the last, bestselling romantic novelist Rosie M. Banks). And Bertie, with Jeeves's help, just evades the clutches of the terrifying Honoria Glossop. At its heart is one of Wodehouse's most delicious stories and a comic masterpiece, "The Great Sermon Handicap."
Tarzan and the Ant Men (TARZAN #10)
by Edgar Rice BurroughsTarzan finds himself in a strange country of stone-age savages and knee-high warriors who ride miniature African deer as though they were horses. But the Minunians are not so small that they cannot take the Ape Man captive, and put him to work in their underground quarries.
The Wind in the Willows
by Kenneth Grahame Luanne RiceThe tales of Ratty, Mole, Badger and Toad. When Mole goes boating with the Water Rat instead of spring-cleaning, he discovers a new world. As well as the river and the Wild Wood, there is Toad's craze for fast travel which leads him and his friends on a whirl of trains, barges, gipsy caravans and motor cars and even into battle.
Arrowsmith (The\collected Works Of Sinclair Lewis)
by Sinclair LewisThis satirical novel by the Nobel Prize–winning author of It Can&’t Happen Here examines medicine in the modern world through the eyes of an idealistic man.The assistant of a small-town midwestern doctor, young Martin Arrowsmith is fascinated with the contents of Gray&’s Anatomy. Eager to pursue an adventurous career in medicine and science, he eventually sets off for medical school, where he hopes to dedicate himself to research. But as Martin progresses through life, he encounters qualities in humans more troublesome than any of the specimens he examines under a microscope.Happiness almost eludes him until his mentor offers him a post at a prestigious institute—which soon sends Martin to a plague ravaged Caribbean island. There he must show what he is truly made of . . .A perennial favorite of medical students to this day, Arrowsmith won author Sinclair Lewis the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, which he declined. &“Beyond doubt the best of Mr. Lewis&’s novels . . . Absorbing and illuminating.&” —The Spectator
Emily Climbs
by L. M. MontgomeryEmily Starr was born with the desire to write. As an orphan living on New Moon Farm, writing helped her face the difficult, lonely times. But now all her friends are going away to high school in nearby Shrewsbury, and her old-fashioned, tyrannical aunt Elizabeth will only let her go if she promises to stop writing! All the same, this is the first step in Emily's climb to success. Once in town, Emily's activities set the Shrewsbury gossips buzzing. When Emily has her poems published and writes for the town newspaper, success seems to be on its way--and with it the first whispers of romance.
The Great Gatsby: The Graphic Novel
by F. Scott FitzgeraldAn undisputed masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, this stunning, lavishly designed new edition of The Great Gatsby is perfect for Fitzgerald lovers and classics collectors alike.In his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald explores the paradisiacal illusions of the post–World War One generation, only to shatter them. At the heart of this piercing and defining novel of the Jazz Age is the eponymous romantic, holding tight to the past while pursuing the elusive future of his dreams.Living in a glittering mansion on Long Island, Jay Gatsby is famous for his hedonistic parties that draw strangers like moths to his starlight, even as sensational rumors surround him and his fortune. With the arrival of his new neighbor, Nick Carraway, a modest bond salesman from the Midwest, Gatsby finds a confidant for his burdensome secrets and an arbiter who can help him obtain what he most desires—the luminous socialite across the bay.She is Daisy, the lost and treasured love of his youth, a self-absorbed beauty unsettled in a marriage with the unfaithful Tom Buchanan. Winning her back is the finest and surest of Gatsby’s illusions—a chance to rewrite the past and reclaim the great passion Gatsby is tragically doomed to pursue. One of the most renowned works of American literature, a tale of ambition, desolation, and blinded love, Fitzgerald’s seminal classic will continue to resonate with generations of readers to come.
The Great Gatsby: Large Print
by F. Fitzgerald<P>The exemplary novel of the Jazz Age, F. Scott Fitzgeralds' third book, <i>The Great Gatsby</i> (1925), stands as the supreme achievement of his career. T. S. Eliot read it three times and saw it as the "first step" American fiction had taken since Henry James; H. L. Mencken praised "the charm and beauty of the writing," as well as Fitzgerald's sharp social sense; and Thomas Wolfe hailed it as Fitzgerald's "best work" thus far. <P>The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when, The New York Times remarked, "gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession," it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s that resonates with the power of myth. <P>A novel of lyrical beauty yet brutal realism, of magic, romance, and mysticism, <i>The Great Gatsby</i> is one of the great classics of twentieth-century literature. <P> [This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in English language arts in grades 11-12 at http://www.corestandards.org.]
The Sun Also Rises: The Hemingway Library Edition (Hemingway Library Edition)
by Ernest HemingwayThis new edition celebrates the art and craft of the quintessential story of the Lost Generation. Presented by the Hemingway family with supplementary material from the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library, this edition provides readers with wonderful insight regarding Hemingway's first great literary masterpiece.The Sun Also Rises is a classic example of Hemingway's spare but powerful writing style. A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway's most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love and vanishing illusions. First published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises is "an absorbing, beautifully and tenderly absurd, heartbreaking narrative...a truly gripping story, told in lean, hard, athletic prose" (The New York Times). This new Hemingway Library Edition celebrates Hemingway's classic novel with a personal foreword by Patrick Hemingway, the author's sole surviving son, and a new introduction by Sean Hemingway, grandson of the author. Hemingway considered the extensive rewriting that he did to shape his first novel the most difficult job of his life. Early drafts, deleted passages, and possible titles included in this new edition elucidate how the author achieved his first great literary masterpiece.
Testament Of Youth: An Autobiographical Study Of The Years 1900-1925 (Virago Modern Classics #2116)
by Vera BrittainIn 1914 Vera Brittain was twenty, and as war was declared she was preparing to study at Oxford. Four years later her life - and the life of her whole generation - had changed in a way that would have been unimaginable in the tranquil pre-war era.TESTAMENT OF YOUTH, one of the most famous autobiographies of the First World War, is Brittain's account of how she survived those agonising years; how she lost the man she loved; how she nursed the wounded and how she emerged into an altered world. A passionate record of a lost generation, it made Vera Brittain one of the best loved writers of her time, and has lost none of its power to shock, move and enthral readers since its first publication in 1933.
The Priesthood of Science: A Work of Utopian Fiction (Cangrande)
by William LeissThe global political situation is increasingly volatile, and Hera and her sisters are sealed off from the rest of the world in southern Nevada. She is still tormented by her parents’ decision to genetically modify the brains of their twelve daughters—and by her own agreement to allow a similar procedure to be used on a much larger group of human embryos. That group of engineered embryos has become one thousand young people just turning eighteen, and the gender politics among them is threatening to ruin Hera’s gamble on a new beginning for human society.The Priesthood of Science envisions a future in which scientific research is confined to facilities hidden away from public view and where there is a prohibition against turning scientific discoveries into new technologies in order to keep a world torn apart by religious fanaticism and ethnic hatred under control.
The Sun Also Rises: The Authorized Edition (Harlequin Historical Ser.)
by Ernest HemingwayThis new edition of The Sun Also Rises celebrates the art and craft of Hemingway's quintessential story of the Lost Generation--presented by the Hemingway family with illuminating supplementary material from the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library. <P><P>The Sun Also Rises is a classic example of Hemingway's spare but powerful writing style. <P>A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway's most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. <P>The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. <P>It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions. <P>First published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises is "an absorbing, beautifully and tenderly absurd, heartbreaking narrative...a truly gripping story, told in lean, hard, athletic prose" (The New York Times). <P> This new Hemingway Library Edition celebrates Hemingway's classic novel with a personal foreword by Patrick Hemingway, the author's sole surviving son, and a new introduction by Sean Hemingway, grandson of the author. <P>Hemingway considered the extensive rewriting that he did to shape his first novel the most difficult job of his life. <P>Early drafts, deleted passages, and possible titles included in this new edition elucidate how the author achieved his first great literary masterpiece.
Downright Dencey
by Caroline Dale SnedekerThis treasure of a novel is set on the island of Nantucket just before the War of 1812. Much more than a tale of whaling ships and gentle Quaker eccentricities, it is a tale of friendship-the kind most truly espoused by these 'plain' folk, with all the struggle and complexity one should expect. Dionis (Dencey) Coffyn is a mystery to her mother, Lydia, whose stern exterior hides a heart that breaks every time her husband Captain Tom goes to sea. Within a context of outward simplicity of living and inward intricacy of relationship, Dencey matures from the little girl who, in unquakerly violence of temper, throws a rock that wounds the town outcast. She becomes a young woman ready to bear her part in life with grace and courage. "Downright Dencey" is a probing portrayal of the power of love to overcome social barriers and religious strictures.<P><P> Newbery Medal Honors book
Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928
by Stephen KotkinA magnificent new biography that revolutionizes our understanding of Stalin and his worldIt has the quality of myth: a poor cobbler's son, a seminarian from an oppressed outer province of the Russian empire, reinvents himself as a top leader in a band of revolutionary zealots. When the band seizes control of the country in the aftermath of total world war, the former seminarian ruthlessly dominates the new regime until he stands as absolute ruler of a vast and terrible state apparatus, with dominion over Eurasia. While still building his power base within the Bolshevik dictatorship, he embarks upon the greatest gamble of his political life and the largest program of social reengineering ever attempted: the collectivization of all agriculture and industry across one sixth of the earth. Millions will die, and many more millions will suffer, but the man will push through to the end against all resistance and doubts.Where did such power come from? In Stalin, Stephen Kotkin offers a biography that, at long last, is equal to this shrewd, sociopathic, charismatic dictator in all his dimensions. The character of Stalin emerges as both astute and blinkered, cynical and true believing, people oriented and vicious, canny enough to see through people but prone to nonsensical beliefs. We see a man inclined to despotism who could be utterly charming, a pragmatic ideologue, a leader who obsessed over slights yet was a precocious geostrategic thinker--unique among Bolsheviks--and yet who made egregious strategic blunders. Through it all, we see Stalin's unflinching persistence, his sheer force of will--perhaps the ultimate key to understanding his indelible mark on history.Stalin gives an intimate view of the Bolshevik regime's inner geography of power, bringing to the fore fresh materials from Soviet military intelligence and the secret police. Kotkin rejects the inherited wisdom about Stalin's psychological makeup, showing us instead how Stalin's near paranoia was fundamentally political, and closely tracks the Bolshevik revolution's structural paranoia, the predicament of a Communist regime in an overwhelmingly capitalist world, surrounded and penetrated by enemies. At the same time, Kotkin demonstrates the impossibility of understanding Stalin's momentous decisions outside of the context of the tragic history of imperial Russia.The product of a decade of intrepid research, Stalin is a landmark achievement, a work that recasts the way we think about the Soviet Union, revolution, dictatorship, the twentieth century, and indeed the art of history itself.
The Dain Curse: Red Harvest / The Dain Curse / The Maltese Falcon / The Glass Key / The Thin Man (Murder Room #601)
by Dashiell Hammett'Not just the first of the tough school of crime-writing but the best' THE TIMESMiss Gabriel Dain Leggett is young and wealthy, with a penchant for morphine and religious cults. She also has an unfortunate effect on the people around her. They die - violently. Is she the victim of a family curse? The short, squat, utterly unsentimental Continental Op, the best private detective around, has his doubts and finds himself confronting something infinitely more dangerous.This is the Continental Op's most bizarre case and a tautly crafted masterpiece of suspense.
Emil and the Detectives
by Erich Kastner J. D. Stahl Maurice SendakOriginally published in 1929, Erich Kästner’s engaging tale has delighted readers young and old for generations. It’s Emil’s first train ride alone and he’s excited—and a little nervous. On the train, his fellow passengers are impressed with how polite and grown-up Emil is, and the man in the bowler hat offers him some chocolate—but Emil keeps checking his coat pocket, where he’s pinned the money that he is taking to his grandmother. Soon, though, Emil finds himself getting sleepy . . . and the next thing he knows, the man in the bowler hat is gone— and so is the money! With the help of some new friends Emil becomes a detective and tracks the thief through the city. Filled with enduring themes of leadership, courage, and teamwork, and the delightful illustrations of Walter Trier, Emil and the Detectives is a rollicking, heartwarming tale come alive.
Emil and the Detectives
by Erich Kastner J. D. Stahl Maurice SendakOriginally published in 1929, Erich Kästner's engaging tale has delighted readers young and old for generations. It's Emil's first train ride alone and he's excited--and a little nervous. On the train, his fellow passengers are impressed with how polite and grown-up Emil is, and the man in the bowler hat offers him some chocolate--but Emil keeps checking his coat pocket, where he's pinned the money that he is taking to his grandmother. Soon, though, Emil finds himself getting sleepy . . . and the next thing he knows, the man in the bowler hat is gone-- and so is the money! With the help of some new friends Emil becomes a detective and tracks the thief through the city. Filled with enduring themes of leadership, courage, and teamwork, and the delightful illustrations of Walter Trier, Emil and the Detectives is a rollicking, heartwarming tale come alive.