What dark deed from the past haunts Major Heatherstone? Why does he live like a hermit at Cloomber Hall, forbidding his children to venture beyond the estate grounds? Why is he plagued by the sound of a tolling bell, and why does his paranoia rise to frantic levels each year on the fifth of October? With the sudden appearance of three shipwrecked Buddhist monks, the answers to these questions follow close behind. Arthur Conan Doyle's Gothic ...
Supernatural events, women in distress, and a corrupt clergy were popular themes in the Gothic novels of the 19th century. All of those elements, along with murder, incest, and the excesses of the Spanish Inquisition, are present in The Monk (1796), one of the era's bestselling and most influential novels.Set in a sinister Capuchin monastery in Madrid, the ever-more horrifying narrative recounts the experiences of a lustful and devious abbo ...
Misunderstood Maggie Tulliver is torn. Her rebellious and passionate nature demands expression, while her provincial kin and community expect self-denial. Based closely on the author's own life, Maggie's story explores the conflicts of love and loyalty and the friction between desire and moral responsibility. Written in 1860, The Mill on the Floss was published to instant popularity. An accurate, evocative depiction of English rural li ...
My Ántonia evokes the Nebraska prairie life of Willa Cather's childhood, and commemorates the spirit and courage of immigrant pioneers in America. One of Cather's earliest novels, written in 1918, it is the story of Ántonia Shimerda, who arrives on the Nebraska frontier as part of a family of Bohemian emigrants. Her story is told through the eyes of Jim Burden, a neighbor who will befriend Ántonia, teach her ...
The author of outstanding travel books, autobiographical works and novels, including the classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835–1910) is regarded by many as America's finest humorist and a major writer of short stories.The four selections in this volume span his entire writing career and are among his best-known stories. They include: «The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,» ...
We first meet Nana in the Variety Theatre, where the captivating eighteen-year-old is appearing in the lead role of a musical—even though she can't act or sing. «Nana has something that makes up for everything else,» the theater owner explains, and he's right. Instead of booing her off the stage, the crowd howls with admiration. She has disrobed by the third act, and her career as a femme fatale is off to a sensational start. ...
A massacre at a colonial garrison, the kidnapping of two pioneer sisters by Iroquois tribesmen, the treachery of a renegade brave, and the ambush of innocent settlers create an unforgettable, spine-tingling picture of American frontier life in this classic 18th-century adventure — the most popular of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales.First published in 1826, the story — set in the forests of upper New York St ...
A sense of impending evil hovers over a cathedral town, where one man, an outwardly respectable opium addict, is consumed with jealousy over the engagement of his nephew, Edwin Drood, to a lovely young lady. So enraged is he, that he even plots the younger man's murder. But Drood's sudden disappearance halts further scheming and leaves only one big mystery. What happened to Edwin Drood? And what became of his body?Unfinished at the tim ...
A masterpiece of storytelling, this epic saga pits Ahab, a brooding and fantastical sea captain, against the great white whale that crippled him. In telling the tale of Ahab's passion for revenge and the fateful voyage that ensued, Melville produced far more than the narrative of a hair-raising journey; Moby-Dick is a tale for the ages that sounds the deepest depths of the human soul. Interspersed with graphic sketches of life aboard a whal ...
