Unique ElementsHistorical ContextDetailed 20th Century Historical MapA Shocking Literary Classic by UPTON SINCLAIRThe Jungle by AMERICAN author UPTON SINCLAIR is a book of literary fiction first published in 1906 in the UNITED STATES.An APALLING classic which was partly censored when it was originally published.Sneak Peak‘Marija had only about twenty-five dollars left. Day after day she wandered about the yards begging a job, but this time without hope of finding it. Marija could do the work of an able-bodied man, when she was cheerful, but discouragement wore her out easily, and she would come home at night a pitiable object. She learned her lesson this time, poor creature; she learned it ten times over. All the family learned it along with her—that when you have once got a job in Packingtown, you hang on to it, come what will’.SynopsisThe Jungle, written in 1906 by novelist and American journalist Upton Sinclair, depicts the lives of immigrants in the United States, particularly in Chicago and other industrialized areas. Readers were primarily concerned with the exposing of health breaches and filthy procedures in the early twentieth-century American meatpacking business, based on Sinclair's investigation for a socialist newspaper. Jurgis Rudkus is a young Lithuanian who immigrated to America in search of opportunity, fortune, and freedom. Soon, it becomes clear that the "packing town," the Chicago stockyards, is a bustling, filthy place where dreams perish in the jungle of human agony. Undercover, Upton documents the laborers' arduous labor, the inequities of "wage-slavery," and the perplexing jumble of urban life. Sinclair's work was so alarming that the government launched an investigation, which is chronicled in this engrossing novel that develops into a seminal piece of social change literature.A Stunning Reprint“A stunning reprint” We've gone to great lengths to guarantee that this book's original integrity has been preserved to the highest degree possible. This means that the texts in this story are unedited and unaltered from the original author's publication, conserving the story in its most raw form for your enjoyment. This is one of the top social investigation books of all time. We're ready to ship this book to you today at lightning speed, so you won't have to wait long to get your hands on it.Title DetailsOriginal 1906 textBook type: Literary fictionSize 5.5 x 8.5 inMatte CoverWhite Paper Read more

The Great Jazz Age Novel_______The 1925 Original Version, with Classroom History_______The Great Gatsby is considered F. Scott Fitzgerald’s magnum opus, exploring themes of decadence, idealism, social stigmas, patriarchal norms, and the deleterious effects of unencumbered wealth in capitalistic society, set against the backdrop of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties. At its heart, it’s a cautionary tale, a revealing look into the darker side to the American Dream.“When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men...” Read more

Enter the dazzling world of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, a tale of wealth, ambition, and the elusive American Dream. Set in the opulent 1920s, the story follows Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire, who pursues his unattainable love, Daisy Buchanan. Amidst extravagant parties and societal excess, Fitzgerald weaves a narrative of love, betrayal, and the dark undercurrents of the Jazz Age. Through vivid prose and complex characters, the novel explores themes of disillusionment, class divide, and the relentless pursuit of an idealized past. With its timeless exploration of human desires and the consequences of unchecked ambition, ""The Great Gatsby"" remains a literary masterpiece that resonates across generations.   A mesmerizing portrayal of the Roaring Twenties' decadence. Intricate character study of love, ambition, and disillusionment. Fitzgerald's evocative prose transports readers to a bygone era. A critique of the American Dream's elusive allure. A classic that captures the essence of a tumultuous era. Read more

Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway's most beloved works. It is his classic memoir of Paris in the 1920s, filled with irreverent portraits of other expatriate luminaries such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein; tender memories of his first wife, Hadley; and insightful recollections of his own early experiments with his craft. It is a literary feast, brilliantly evoking the exuberant mood of Paris after World War I and the youthful spirit, unbridled creativity, and unquenchable enthusiasm that Hemingway himself epitomized. Read more

A stunning collection of all 80 exquisite Little Black Classics from Penguin This spectacular box set of the 80 books in the Little Black Classics series showcases the many wonderful and varied writers in Penguin Black Classics. From India to Greece, Denmark to Iran, the United States to Britain, this assortment of books will transport readers back in time to the furthest corners of the globe. With a choice of fiction, poetry, essays and maxims, by the likes of Chekhov, Balzac, Ovid, Austen, Sappho and Dante, it won't be difficult to find a book to suit your mood. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of the Penguin Classics list - from drama to poetry, from fiction to history, with books taken from around the world and across numerous centuries.The Little Black Classics Box Set includes: ·         The Atheist's Mass (Honoré de Balzac)·         The Beautifull Cassandra (Jane Austen)·         The Communist Manifesto (Fredrich Engels and Karl Marx)·         Cruel Alexis (Virgil) ·         The Dhammapada (Anon)·         The Dolphins, the Whales and the Gudgeon (Aesop)·         The Eve of St Agnes (John Keats)·         The Fall of Icarus (Ovid)·         The Figure in the Carpet (Henry James)·         The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows (Rudyard Kipling)·         Gooseberries (Anton Chekhov)·         The Great Fire of London (Samuel Pepys)·         The Great Winglebury Duel (Charles Dickens) ·         How a Ghastly Story Was Brought to Light by a Common or Garden Butcher's Dog (Johann Peter Hebel) ·         How Much Land Does A Man Need? (Leo Tolstoy) ·         How To Use Your Enemies (Baltasar Gracián) ·         How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing (Michel de Montaigne) ·         I Hate and I Love (Catullus) ·         Il Duro (D. H. Lawrence) ·         It was snowing butterflies (Charles Darwin) ·         Jason and Medea (Apollonius of Rhodes) ·         Kasyan from the Beautiful Mountains (Ivan Turgenev) ·         Leonardo da Vinci (Giorgio Vasari)·         The Life of a Stupid Man (Ryunosuke Akutagawa) ·         Lips Too Chilled (Matsuo Basho) ·         Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (Oscar Wilde)·         The Madness of Cambyses (Herodotus·         The Maldive Shark (Herman Melville)·         The Meek One (Fyodor Dostoyevsky ·         Mrs Rosie and the Priest (Giovanni Boccaccio) ·         My Dearest Father (Wolfgang Mozart)·         The Night is Darkening Round Me (Emily Brontë)·         The nightingales are drunk (Hafez)·         The Nose (Nikolay Gogol) ·         Olalla (Robert Louis Stevenson)·         The Old Man in the Moon (Shen Fu), Miss Brill (Katherine Mansfield)·         The Old Nure's Story (Elizabeth Gaskell)  ·         On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (Thomas De Quincey) ·         On the Beach at Night Alone (Walt Whitman)·         The Reckoning (Edith Wharton) ·         Remember, Body… (C. P. Cavafy)·         The Robber Bridegroom (Brothers Grimm)·         The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue (Anon) ·         Sindbad the Sailor ·         Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) ·         Socrates' Defence (Plato) ·         Speaking of Siva (Anon)·         The Steel Flea (Nikolai Leskov) ·         The Tell-Tale Heart (Edgar Allan Poe) ·         The Terrors of the Night (Thomas Nashe) ·         The Tinder Box (Hans Christian Andersen)·         Three Tang Dynasty Poets (Wang Wei)·         Trimalchio's Feast (Petronius)·         To-morrow (Joseph Conrad), Of Street Piemen (Henry Mayhew)·         Traffic (John Ruskin)·         Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls (Marco Polo) ·         The Voyage of Sir Francis Drake Around the Whole Globe (Richard Hakluyt) ·         The Wife of Bath (Geoffrey Chaucer) ·         The Woman Much Missed (Thomas Hardy) ·         The Yellow Wall-paper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman) ·         Wailing Ghosts (Pu Songling) ·         Well, they are gone, and here must I remain (Samuel Taylor Coleridge) Read more

The Sun Also Rises is a 1926 novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, his first, that portrays American and British expatriates who travel along the Camino de Santiago from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona and watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. An early modernist novel, it received mixed reviews upon publication. Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes that it is now "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work" and Hemingway scholar Linda Wagner-Martin calls it his most important novel. The novel was published in the United States in October 1926 by Scribner. A year later, Jonathan Cape published the novel in London under the title Fiesta. It remains in print. Read more

A guide to understanding the major genres of the story world by the legendary writing teacher and author of The Anatomy of Story, John Truby.Most people think genres are simply categories on Netflix or Amazon that provide a helpful guide to making entertainment choices. Most people are wrong. Genre stories aren’t just a small subset of the films, video games, TV shows, and books that people consume. They are the all-stars of the entertainment world, comprising the vast majority of popular stories worldwide. That’s why businesses―movie studios, production companies, video game studios, and publishing houses―buy and sell them. Writers who want to succeed professionally must write the stories these businesses want to buy. Simply put, the storytelling game is won by mastering the structure of genres.The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works is the legendary writing teacher John Truby’s step-by-step guide to understanding and using the basic building blocks of the story world. He details the three ironclad rules of successful genre writing, and analyzes more than a dozen major genres and the essential plot events, or “beats,” that define each of them. As he shows, the ability to combine these beats in the right way is what separates stories that sell from those that don’t. Truby also reveals how a single story can combine elements of different genres, and how the best writers use this technique to craft unforgettable stories that stand out from the crowd. Just as Truby’s first book, The Anatomy of Story, changed the way writers develop stories, The Anatomy of Genres will enhance their quality and expand the impact they have on the world. Read more

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.The novel was inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island's North Shore in 1922. Following a move to the French Riviera, Fitzgerald completed a rough draft of the novel in 1924. He submitted it to editor Maxwell Perkins, who persuaded Fitzgerald to revise the work over the following winter. After making revisions, Fitzgerald was satisfied with the text, but remained ambivalent about the book's title and considered several alternatives. Painter Francis Cugat's cover art greatly impressed Fitzgerald, and he incorporated aspects of it into the novel.After its publication by Scribner's in April 1925, The Great Gatsby received generally favorable reviews, though some literary critics believed it did not equal Fitzgerald's previous efforts. Compared to his earlier novels, Gatsby was a commercial disappointment, selling fewer than 20,000 copies by October, and Fitzgerald's hopes of a monetary windfall from the novel were unrealized. When the author died in 1940, he believed himself to be a failure and his work forgotten. Read more

Jane Eyre originally published as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography) is a novel by the English writer Charlotte Brontë. It was published under her pen name "Currer Bell" on 19 October 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. of London. The first American edition was published the following year by Harper & Brothers of New York. Jane Eyre is a Bildungsroman that follows the experiences of its eponymous heroine, including her growth to adulthood and her love for Mr Rochester, the brooding master of Thornfield Hall.The novel revolutionized prose fiction by being the first to focus on its protagonist's moral and spiritual development through an intimate first-person narrative, where actions and events are coloured by psychological intensity. Charlotte Brontë has been called the "first historian of the private consciousness", and the literary ancestor of writers like Marcel Proust and James Joyce. Read more

Discover the magical bond between an adorable stuffed toy and the boy he cherishes in Margery Williams’ classic The Velveteen Rabbit, illustrated by William Nicholson.When he is gifted to a young boy for Christmas, the little Velveteen Rabbit finally learns what it means to be loved for the first time. But once he meets the rest of the boy’s toys in the nursery, the Velveteen Rabbit realizes he doesn’t look as clean and new as the other toys. He feels forgotten and abandoned until the unexpected happens…In the summer, the Velveteen Rabbit meets two real rabbits, and he’s fascinated by them. They can do so much more than he can. They can run, and jump, and hop, and even dance! But even these two make fun of the Velveteen Rabbit because he isn't real. Little does he know that a touch of fairy magic is about to change everything.When the little boy finally starts playing with his Velveteen Rabbit once again, they become inseparable. Weeks pass, and even though the Rabbit grows very old and shabby, the boy loves him just as much. Can this love transform him into more than just a stuffed toy?Simply but elegantly told, and beautifully illustrated with soft watercolors by William Nicholson, The Velveteen Rabbit is a moving story that continues to captivate hearts young and old as a beautiful reminder of unconditional love.Discover more features in this adorable and cozy tale:Original artwork by William Nicholson with eight gorgeous colorful illustrations.New and fun ways to better understand the story with a quiz at the end of the book.A beautiful cover design for your collection.New comfortable formatting for a smooth reading experience.Hailed as one of the greatest children's books of all time, The Velveteen Rabbit is the perfect winter read and the best present for book lovers! Read more

An illumination of writing’s mysteries through examining the words and ideas that were edited out of renowned novels, poems, and plays. Imagine looking over your favorite author’s shoulder and witnessing the moment they begin writing the opening chapter of their best-loved novel. What you might see is that the author has to write, cut, and rewrite their words—often many times—in order to find the right form. Unearthing what has been jettisoned, moved, or edited can give us valuable insights into the creative process. Editorial decisions are documented in an extraordinary number of literary manuscripts, notebooks, and letters preserved in libraries and archives. What would Frankenstein have looked like if Mary and Percy Shelley had not collaborated on the draft? Would we view The Wind in the Willows differently if its title had remained The Mole & the Water Rat? This highly illustrated book invites you to explore these roads not taken and discover ideas that did not make it into renowned novels, poems, and plays. With insights into the drafting techniques of writers as varied as Jane Austen, Christina Rossetti, Raymond Chandler, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, John le Carré, Barbara Pym, Philip Pullman, and Alice Oswald, this is a fascinating unveiling of the mysteries of writing, cutting, rewriting, and publishing creative works. Read more

The Divine Comedy is an Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed around 1321, shortly before the author's death. It is widely considered the pre-eminent work in Italian literature and one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem's imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval worldview as it existed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It helped establish the Tuscan language, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.The poem discusses "the state of the soul after death and presents an image of divine justice meted out as due punishment or reward", and describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Allegorically, the poem represents the soul's journey towards God, beginning with the recognition and rejection of sin (Inferno), followed by the penitent Christian life (Purgatorio), which is then followed by the soul's ascent to God (Paradiso). Dante draws on medieval Catholic theology and philosophy, especially Thomistic philosophy derived from the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. Consequently, the Divine Comedy has been called "the Summa in verse". Read more

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (also simply known as Tom Sawyer) is an 1876 novel by Mark Twain about a boy growing up along the Mississippi River. It is set in the 1840s in the town of St. Petersburg, which is based on Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain lived as a boy. In the novel, Tom Sawyer has several adventures, often with his friend Huckleberry Finn. Originally a commercial failure, the book ended up being the best-selling of Twain's works during his lifetime. Though overshadowed by its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the book is considered by many to be a masterpiece of American literature. It was one of the first novels to be written on a typewriter. Read more

Notes from Underground also translated as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld) is a novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky, first published in the journal Epoch in 1864. It is a first-person narrative in the form of a "confession": the work was originally announced by Dostoevsky in Epoch under the title "A Confession".The novella presents itself as an excerpt from the memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man), who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. Although the first part of the novella has the form of a monologue, the narrator's form of address to his reader is acutely dialogized. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, in the Underground Man's confession "there is literally not a single monologically firm, undissociated word". The Underground Man's every word anticipates the words of an other, with whom he enters into an obsessive internal polemic. Read more

Narrative innovation is typically seen as the domain of the avant-garde. However, techniques such as nonlinear timelines, multiple points of view, and unreliable narration have long been part of American popular culture. How did forms and styles once regarded as “difficult” become familiar to audiences?In Perplexing Plots, David Bordwell reveals how crime fiction, plays, and films made unconventional narrative mainstream. He shows that since the nineteenth century, detective stories and suspense thrillers have allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. Tales of crime and mystery became a training ground where audiences learned to appreciate artifice. These genres demand a sophisticated awareness of storytelling conventions: they play games with narrative form and toy with audience expectations. Bordwell examines how writers and directors have pushed, pulled, and collaborated with their audiences to change popular storytelling. He explores the plot engineering of figures such as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Dorothy Sayers, and Quentin Tarantino, and traces how mainstream storytellers and modernist experimenters influenced one another’s work. A sweeping, kaleidoscopic account written in a lively, conversational style, Perplexing Plots offers an ambitious new understanding of how movies, literature, theater, and popular culture have evolved over the past century. Read more

A Picador Paperback Original"The Paris Review is one of the few truly essential literary magazines of the twentieth century--and now of the twenty-first. Frequently weird, always wonderful."--Margaret Atwood How do great writers do it? From James M. Cain's hard-nosed observation that "writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational," to Joan Didion's account of how she composes a book--"I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm"--The Paris Review has elicited some of the most revelatory and revealing thoughts from the literary masters of our age. For more than half a century, the magazine has spoken with most of our leading novelists, poets, and playwrights, and the interviews themselves have come to be recognized as classic works of literature, an essential and definitive record of the writing life. They have won the coveted George Polk Award and have been a contender for the Pulitzer Prize. Paris Review former editor Philip Gourevitch introduces an entirely original selection of sixteen of the most celebrated interviews. Often startling, always engaging, these encounters contain an immense scope of intelligence, personality, experience, and wit from the likes of Elizabeth Bishop, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Rebecca West, and Billy Wilder. This is an indispensable book for all writers and readers. Read more

An assemblage of reflections on the nature of writing and the writer from one the greatest American writers of the twentieth century.Throughout Hemingway’s career as a writer, he maintained that it was bad luck to talk about writing—that it takes off “whatever butterflies have on their wings and the arrangement of hawk’s feathers if you show it or talk about it.” Despite this belief, by the end of his life he had done just what he intended not to do. In his novels and stories, in letters to editors, friends, fellow artists, and critics, in interviews and in commissioned articles on the subject, Hemingway wrote often about writing. And he wrote as well and as incisively about the subject as any writer who ever lived… This book contains Hemingway’s reflections on the nature of the writer and on elements of the writer’s life, including specific and helpful advice to writers on the craft of writing, work habits, and discipline. The Hemingway personality comes through in general wisdom, wit, humor, and insight, and in his insistence on the integrity of the writer and of the profession itself. —From the Preface by Larry W. Phillips Read more

Neoreaction is not your grandfather's conservatism, but the web 2.0 era marriage between modern engineering principles and classical anti-democratic thought. Its central tenet is that the Enlightenment was a mistake, and in The Dark Enlightenment, Nick Land burns progressivism to the ground, salts the earth around its ashes, and raises an altar to anti-humanism in its place.Land explicates the main ideas of neoreaction-the Cathedral, neocameralism, formalism, etc.-always viewing democracy, liberalism, and politics in general through the lens of Darwinism. The result is something like Thomas Hobbes as ghostwritten by H. P. Lovecraft. Included in this volume is an unreleased essay by Land on the writing and impact of The Dark Enlightenment.Absolutely none of this incendiary work has been proven wrong in the ten years since it was written. No doubt it will remain relevant for many years to come. Read more

The acclaimed author of Lolita offers unique insight into works by James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Jane Austen, and others—with an introduction by John Updike.   In the 1940s, when Vladimir Nabokov first embarked on his academic career in the United States, he brought with him hundreds of original lectures on the authors he most admired. For two decades those lectures served as the basis for Nabokov’s teaching, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, as he introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction.   This volume collects Nabokov’s famous lectures on Western European literature, with analysis and commentary on Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Gustav Flaubert’s Madam Bovary, Marcel Proust’s The Walk by Swann’s Place, Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and other works. This volume also includes photographic reproductions of Nabokov’s original notes, revealing his own edits, underlined passages, and more.  Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson BowersIntroduction by John Updike Read more

The acclaimed author presents his unique insights into the works of great Russian authors including Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Gogol, Gorki, and Chekhov.   In the 1940s, when Vladimir Nabokov first embarked on his academic career in the United States, he brought with him hundreds of original lectures on the authors he most admired. For two decades those lectures served as the basis for Nabokov’s teaching, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, as he introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction.   This volume collects Nabokov’s famous lectures on 19th century Russian literature, with analysis and commentary on Nikolay Gogol’s Dead Souls and “The Overcoat”; Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons; Maxim Gorki’s “On the Rafts”; Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilych; two short stories and a play by Anton Chekhov; and several works by Fyodor Dostoevski, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Possessed.   This volume also includes Nabokov’s lectures on the art of translation, the nature of Russian censorship, and other topics. Featured throughout the volume are photographic reproductions of Nabokov’s original notes.  “This volume . . . never once fails to instruct and stimulate. This is a great Russian talking of great Russians.” —Anthony Burgess  Introduction by Fredson Bowers Read more