Critic Collection

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...

"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,...

One hundred patients. One emergency department. Every decision made against the clock. The man in the waiting room whose indigestion was really a heart attack. The bride who collapsed at her own reception. The toddler with a fever and a few purple spots that changed everything. The teenager pulled from a frozen reservoir, and the long hours of not knowing whether she would wake up. In Critical, Volume One, an emergency physician looks back on twenty years of nights and tells one hundred stories from the front line of medicine. Each is short, vivid, and grounded in real emergency care: the ...

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 word Shakespeare ever wrote — in one volume. This edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare brings together all 38 plays, 154 sonnets, and longer poems in a single, carefully organized collection. From the youthful chaos of The Comedy of Errors to the existential depths of Hamlet, from the passionate tragedy of Romeo and Juliet to the strange grace of The Winter's Tale — the entire Shakespeare canon is here, reorganized by genre and accompanied by original critical material throughout. But this is not just another reprint. WHAT MAKES THIS EDITION DIFFERENT Each of the ...

One hundred more patients. One more year of nights. The danger is rarely where anyone is looking. The man who came in with a familiar kidney stone and collapsed with a rupturing aorta. The couple who started feeling better after eating wild mushrooms, just before their livers began to fail. The girl whose weakness kept climbing until someone found a tick hidden in her hair. The three farmworkers who went into a manure pit one after another, each trying to save the man ahead of him. In Critical, Volume Three, we return for one hundred new stories. Each is short, vivid, and grounded in real ...

Everything Agatha Christie would become begins in these thirteen books. This annotated collection includes: • A 15,000-word critical study of the author's first decade • A full life of the author, from wartime dispenser to Queen of Crime • An introduction: how to read the early work • A Note on the Texts and their United States public-domain status • Thirteen complete works, 1920–1930, in one volume Everything the world's best-selling novelist would become begins in these thirteen books. Between 1920 and 1930 an unknown Englishwoman published the novels that invented modern ...

There is a photograph of Tolstoy in a peasant's blouse, barefoot behind a plow, much reproduced and much mocked as theater. But it is the truest image of the man who wrote the six tales in this volume, because the real scandal here is not that a nobleman wrote simple stories for peasants. It is that the greatest novelist alive wrote them, at the height of his powers, having just given the world War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and having decided that such books were very nearly a sin. These tales, written between 1881 and 1886, are the first fruits of the spiritual conversion Tolstoy would ...

The most beloved American novel of boyhood — complete, annotated, and freshly typeset. Before Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain wrote Tom Sawyer. Before he gave America its greatest novel, he gave America its most enduring boy. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) is the book that established Twain as the defining voice of American literature — funny, irreverent, sharply observant, and quietly subversive beneath its sunlit Missouri surface. In the river town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, sometime before the Civil War, a boy named Tom Sawyer is in trouble again. He has skipped school. He has ...

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...

Meet the gentleman-burglar who out-thinks every detective alive — and once humiliated Sherlock Holmes himself. Six classic adventures of Arsène Lupin, the most charming criminal in literature, gathered in a single annotated volume. Before there was a master thief in any heist film, there was Arsène Lupin: thief, escape artist, master of disguise, and France's national hero. Maurice Leblanc (1864–1941) created him as the laughing mirror-image of Sherlock Holmes — and when Leblanc set the two against each other, Conan Doyle's lawyers objected, so Lupin's rival became the thinly veiled...

"I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire... I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it." It is one of the greatest novels in the English language — and one of the most demanding. This edition is built to help you read it. The Sound and the Fury tells the story of the fall of the Compsons, a once-proud Southern family rotting from within, through four narrators and across three decades. It opens inside the mind of Benjy, who cannot tell past from present; moves to his ...

Eight complete Victorian novels by George MacDonald, the Scottish minister whose hope for every soul got him expelled from his pulpit: tutors, curates, surgeons and a mute street boy, each taught to listen to a voice they had been trained to ignore. With a critical afterword and a biography. Before he wrote the fantasies that later readers know, George MacDonald (1824-1905) wrote realist fiction of Scottish and English village life, with a minister’s conscience and a storyteller’s ear. This volume gathers eight of those novels, complete, in the order of their first publication: David ...

Every cynical detective who ever walked down a mean street with a gun and a code owes him a debt. Every hard-boiled cop, every burned-out private eye, every noir thriller on the shelf today traces back to one man — a former Pinkerton operative who had actually done the work, and who taught American crime fiction to stop being a parlor puzzle and start drawing blood. Before Dashiell Hammett, the detective story was a genteel game of clues. After him, it was literature. This volume collects the first three novels — written in a furious burst between 1929 and 1930, the books that invented ...

A girl walks most of the night with forty-one dollars and sixty-five cents in her handbag. She finds a real estate office being demolished on a corner lot, buys it from the wrecking crew for ten dollars, finds a widow with two maple trees willing to lend the ground, and by nightfall the building has been jacked, hauled, and set between the trees. Only after the roof is secured does Not Under the Law (1924) turn to the state of its heroine's soul — and her one prayer during the entire transaction is about the transaction itself. This is the twentieth of the twenty-one books gathered here, ...

The detective who solved crimes not by reading clues but by reading souls. The most radical inversion of Sherlock Holmes ever written — and, a century later, still the strangest and most morally serious detective fiction in the English language. This Erato Press critical edition brings together four complete Father Brown collections with a critical essay that examines what Chesterton was actually doing: smuggling theology into the detective story and making it work. In 1910, G. K. Chesterton introduced a small, round-faced Catholic priest who carried a shabby umbrella and solved crimes by...

“The Sand-man, the terrible Sand-man, is the old advocate Coppelius who often comes to dine with us.” The most quoted line in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fiction reveals that the monster haunting a child’s nightmares is not a sorcerer or a devil. He is a lawyer with an established local practice, who dines with the family. That is the key to everything in these eleven tales. This edition reprints, complete and unabridged, both volumes of the 1885 Scribner’s translation by J. T. Bealby: The Cremona Violin, The Fermata, Signor Formica, The Sand-Man, The Entail and Arthur’s Hall in Volume ...

Are the choices you make helping you grow—or are they holding you back?Every single day, you make decisions that shape your future. But if you’re acting on impulse,struggling to break bad habits, or feeling stuck in the same cycles, you're not setting yourself up for positive growth.It’s...

Both Alice novels, complete — with all 92 of John Tenniel’s illustrations and three critical essays that change how you read them. Lewis Carroll published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 and Through the Looking-Glass in 1871. Together they have been translated into at least 174 languages, quoted in Supreme Court opinions, claimed by the Surrealists as a forerunner, and mined by logicians and philosophers of language for examples ever since. They remain two of the strangest, funniest, and most intellectually subversive books in English. Most editions give you the text and ...

The book that invented modern short fiction. Fifteen stories. One city. A new kind of literature. When James Joyce published Dubliners in 1914, after nine years of fighting with terrified publishers and threatened printers, English-language fiction changed permanently. The stories collected here — written between 1904 and 1907, when Joyce was in his early twenties — created the modern short story as we know it: stripped of plot machinery, oriented toward the epiphany, written in a prose of such restraint and precision that every word seems weighed against silence. There is nothing like ...