Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852) is a novel by American writer Herman Melville. Published the year after Moby-Dick-a critical and commercial failure-Pierre: or, The Ambiguities is a psychological novel in the tradition of Gothic fiction. Melville struggled to find a publisher who would pay him in advance for the book, and its appearance prompted widespread ridicule and condemnation in the press, with some critics claiming that Melville himself had...

Like the blues--sweet, sad, and full of truth--this masterful work of fiction rocks us with powerful emotions. In it are anger and pain, but above all, love--the affirmative love of a woman for her man, the sustaining love of the black family. Fonny, a talented young artist, finds himself unjustly arrested and locked in New York's infamous Tombs. But his girlfriend, Tish, is determined to free him, and to have his baby, in this starkly realistic tale...

A gifted American artist finds fame, fortune, and tragedy in Europe in this classic tale. Working in obscurity, sculptor Roderick Hudson finds a generous patron in Rowland Mallet, an art aficionado so captivated by the young man's work, he offers to take Hudson with him to Europe. Mallet soon falls in love with Miss Mary Garland, a distant cousin of Hudson's who lives with the family and tends to his aging mother. Unfortunately, Hudson has already...

"In just two decades--she died in 1965, at the age of 48--Shirley Jackson created a weird and distinctive world of fiction, one in which a grinning death's head lies just behind the smiling mask of so-called everyday life. She first displayed her genius for conjuring daylight demons in The Lottery, the classic collection whose world-famous title story is an allegory of bloodlust and blind obedience to tradition. She perfected it in two great Gothic...

"The road from Wellmouth Centre to East Wellmouth is not a good one; even in dry weather and daylight it is not that. For the first two miles it winds and twists its sandy way over bare hills, with cranberry swamps and marshy ponds in the hollows between. Then it enters upon a three-mile stretch bordered with scrubby pines and bayberry thickets, climbing at last a final hill to emerge upon the bluff with the ocean at its foot. And, fringing that bluff...

"Written from the perspective of a male narrator, Willa Cather's classic novel is an American version of "Madame Bovary". It is a portrait of a talented woman trapped in the conventions and economic restraints of a marriage. It is the story of a woman who defies expectations, and whose personal changes coincide with the transforming American Frontier. In this work, Willa Cather expressed her profoundly modern feminist views in the life of an ordinary...

Banned in America for almost thirty years because of its explicit sexual content, this companion volume to Miller's Tropic of Cancer chronicles his life in 1920s New York City. Famous for its frank portrayal of life in Brooklyn's ethnic neighboorhoods and Miller's outrageous sexual exploits, Tropic of Capricorn is now considered a cornerstone of modern literature. -- Book cover.

In her portrait of Myra and in her excquisitely nuanced depiction of her marriage, Cather shows the evolution of a human spirit as it comes to bridle against the constraints of ordinary happiness and seek an otherworldly fulfillment. 'My Mortal Enemy' is a work whose drama and intensely moral imagination make it unforgettable.

Celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of "The Adventures of Augie March," and reflects the mid-twentieth-century's psychological turmoil from more inhibited times in a volume that also includes "The Victim" and "Dangling Man."

An anthology of sixteen previously unpublished works includes selections from the iconic writer's early literary career and is complemented by more than a dozen of his original works of art.