Classic Essays

American writer Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain has given us some literary gems with Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and his travel adventures in 19th-century Europe and to Australia and New Zealand. In How to Tell a Story and Other Essays, Twain discusses the telling of stories, rather than providing more stories.

The March sisters' story extends far beyond a single novel. This collection brings together Little Women, Little Men, Jo's Boys, and five additional novels by Louisa May Alcott, offering a broad journey through family life, ambition, work, education, loss, and independence. At its center are Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy, four characters whose different visions of adulthood continue to speak to generations of readers. The annotated edition includes critical and biographical material that places Alcott's fiction within her life, reformist background, and nineteenth-century America. A substantial ...

The text that inspired Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and movements of peaceful resistance around the world—now in a new accessible edition with introduction and notes by Henry Bugalho. In 1849, Henry David Thoreau published one of the most influential essays in the history of political thought. Jailed for refusing to pay taxes that would finance the war against Mexico and the maintenance of slavery, Thoreau transformed his night in prison into a devastating reflection on the limits of obedience to the State. When the law is unjust, to obey is to collaborate with injustice. Civil ...

A book that contains another book — a fictional play in two acts whose second act drives every reader insane. The play does not exist. Robert W. Chambers never wrote it. What he wrote instead, in 1895, was one of the most audacious works of horror fiction in the English language. This Erato Press critical edition reads The King in Yellow as the structurally radical and genuinely disturbing book it has always been. Published at the height of the decadent movement — the same moment that produced Oscar Wilde's trial and The Yellow Book — Chambers drew on his years as an art student in ...

A woman stands on a scaffold, an infant in her arms and a scarlet letter stitched to her breast. The crowd stares. The magistrates demand a name. She refuses to speak. With that single act of silence, Hester Prynne enters the mythology of American literature — not as a sinner, but as the first character in the American novel to choose disgrace over surrender. The Scarlet Letter is the founding novel of American literary fiction. Published in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne's dark masterpiece transformed the Puritan past into a psychological landscape where guilt, desire, and hypocrisy become ...

Over the shoulder of a hill, on a day that is deathly calm, comes a whistling that is neither of heaven nor of earth — and a wolf-dog lifts its head, a black stallion turns, and Whistling Dan Barry rides into American literature. So begins The Untamed, and so begins the strangest career the Western ever produced. This volume gathers SEVENTEEN classic Western novels by Max Brand — the pen name of Frederick Faust, the most prolific storyteller the English language has ever known. He wrote some thirty million words under twenty masks, created Destry and Dr. Kildare, despised the cowboy ...

Intended to be a defense of the Christian religion, Pensées is a penetrating collection of thoughts on faith, reason, and theology. Unfinished at the time of Pascal's death, the book consists of philosophical fragments on the "wretchedness" of man and the controversial schisms of the church at the time. It includes the philosopher's infamous wager encouraging belief over agnosticism, as well as his thoughts on numerous other topics. Endlessly quotable, Pensées overflows with pearls of wisdom, each elusive sentence pregnant with a universe of thought.

To save her life, a woman tells a story — and breaks it off at dawn, on a cliff, so the king who has sworn to kill her by morning must let her live one more day to hear the end. A thousand nights and one night later, Scheherazade has talked her way out of death and given the world its greatest treasury of tales. This Erato Press edition presents the Nights complete and unabridged — the full nine-volume cycle in the first complete English translation, made by the poet John Payne (1842–1916). Payne was the first to render the entire Arabic compendium into English; Richard Burton's more ...

"The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places." It is the novel that made Ernest Hemingway the defining voice of his generation — and one of the greatest love stories, and war stories, ever written. On the Italian front in the First World War, Frederic Henry, a young American serving as an ambulance driver in the Italian army, meets Catherine Barkley, an English nurse. What begins almost as a game becomes the one true thing in a world that is coming apart. Around them the war grinds on toward catastrophe — the disastrous retreat from Caporetto, the rain,...

The complete Oz — all fourteen novels by L. Frank Baum in one volume, with a critical essay you will not find in any other edition Edited with a critical essay by Henry Bugalho — philosopher, writer, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Published by Erato Press. In 1900, L. Frank Baum created something unprecedented: an American fairy tale. Not an imitation of Grimm or Andersen, but something native to the prairies, the dust, the vast democratic optimism of a country that believed it was inventing the future. A girl from Kansas is carried by a tornado to a land where scarecrows ...

Every tale of terror, every poem of unearthly beauty, every essay of dark philosophy — collected in one definitive volume. This is the complete and unabridged collection of Edgar Allan Poe's works: the gothic horror tales that invented a genre, the poems that still haunt the English language, the mystery stories that created the detective novel, and the critical essays that changed how we think about literature. Includes all tales of horror and suspense: "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Black Cat," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "...

Every Sherlock Holmes story ever written — in one volume. This edition of The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle brings together all four novels and all fifty-six short stories in a single, carefully organized collection. From the first meeting at Bart's Hospital in A Study in Scarlet to the final bow in Shoscombe Old Place, every case, every deduction, every fog-drenched London street is here — the complete Sherlock Holmes series as Conan Doyle wrote it. But this is not just another reprint. WHAT MAKES THIS EDITION DIFFERENT Each of the nine books in the Sherlock Holmes...

Six novels. One life. The complete arc of the most beloved heroine in Canadian literature — from the red-haired girl who arrived uninvited at Green Gables to the woman who sent her sons to war. Lucy Maud Montgomery published Anne of Green Gables in 1908 after years of rejection. The manuscript had been turned down so many times she had put it away in a hat box. When it finally appeared, it sold out within months and made her famous overnight. She spent the rest of her life writing sequels she hadn't planned, living a life considerably less free than the one she had imagined for Anne. Anne...

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a leader in the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He is best known for his political philosophy and ideological thoughts on the moral worth of the individual and his work greatly influenced many of the great thinkers of his time, including Henry David Thoreau.

This audiobook, read by Audie award-winning narrators, includes unabridged recordings of all Fyodor Dostoyevky's greatest works: 15 novels and novellas, 18 short stories, a short study of Dostoyevsky by Virginia Woolf, and two books of non-fiction - his Letters and European travel journal.

Legendary author and essayist E. B. White writes, "The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest." Covering a large number of subjects, this classic collection features 31 of White's most memorable essays.

The four novels that gave American literature its voice — and two essays that explain why one of them changed everything. Mark Twain invented American literature twice. The first time was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876 — a boy's world of summer, caves, and the Mississippi River, told with the warmth of a man who remembered childhood as a country you could never return to. The second time was Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884, where the same river becomes a moving argument about freedom, race, and the cost of conscience. Hemingway said all modern American literature comes from...

The founding texts of modern science fiction — in a landmark new English translation. Jules Verne did not merely write adventure stories. He invented a new grammar of the imagination — one grounded in the science of his age, yet reaching toward the unknown with the precision of a cartographer mapping seas no one had sailed. Extraordinary Voyages gathers four of his greatest novels in a complete new English translation by Henry Bugalho, accompanied by critical essays that reveal the philosophical ambition concealed beneath the spectacle of his adventures. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under ...

One of the founding works of modern science fiction — and one of the greatest adventure novels ever written. In 1866, ships of every nation begin to sink in deep ocean. A monstrous creature — vast, phosphorescent, faster than any vessel — is glimpsed in the waters of the world. The American government sends out the frigate Abraham Lincoln to hunt it down. On board: the French marine biologist Pierre Aronnax, his servant Conseil, and the Canadian harpooner Ned Land. What they find is not a creature. It is a submarine — the Nautilus — captained by a brilliant, embittered, ...

The fall of Troy. A hero carrying his father out of the flames. A queen on a burning pyre. The founding of the greatest empire the world has known. Virgil's Aeneid is the poem that gave Rome its myth and gave Europe one of its founding epics — the story of Aeneas, the Trojan prince who escapes his city's ruin and sails west, through storm and war and the underworld itself, to found the race that will become Rome. This Erato Press edition presents the Aeneid complete in the classic verse translation of John Dryden, with an original critical essay and a life of the poet. THE POEM From the ...