The Count of Monte Cristo (French: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo) is an adventure novel written by French author Alexandre Dumas (père) completed in 1844. It is one of the author's most popular works, along with The Three Musketeers. Like many of his novels, it was expanded from plot outlines suggested by his collaborating ghostwriter Auguste Maquet.The story takes place in France, Italy, and islands in the Mediterranean during the historical events of 1815–1839: the era of the Bourbon Restoration through the reign of Louis-Philippe of France. It begins on the day that Napoleon left his first island of exile, Elba, beginning the Hundred Days period when Napoleon returned to power. The historical setting is a fundamental element of the book, an adventure story centrally concerned with themes of hope, justice, vengeance, mercy, and forgiveness.Before he can marry his fiancée Mercédès, Edmond Dantès, a French nineteen-year-old first mate of the Pharaon, is falsely accused of treason, arrested, and imprisoned without trial in the Château d'If, a grim island fortress off Marseille. A fellow prisoner, Abbé Faria, correctly deduces that romantic rival Fernand Mondego, envious crewmate Danglars, and double-dealing magistrate De Villefort are responsible. Over the course of their long imprisonment, Faria educates Dantès and tells him of a cache of treasure he found. After Faria dies, Dantès escapes and finds the treasure. As the powerful and mysterious Count of Monte Cristo, he enters the fashionable Parisian world of the 1830s to avenge himself. 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

From their acclaimed biographer, a final, powerful book about how Emerson, Thoreau, and William James forged resilience from devastating loss, changing the course of American thoughtIn Three Roads Back, Robert Richardson, the author of magisterial biographies of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James, tells the connected stories of how these foundational American writers and thinkers dealt with personal tragedies early in their careers. For Emerson, it was the death of his young wife and, eleven years later, his five-year-old son; for Thoreau, it was the death of his brother; and for James, it was the death of his beloved cousin Minnie Temple. Filled with rich biographical detail and unforgettable passages from the journals and letters of Emerson, Thoreau, and James, these vivid and moving stories of loss and hard-fought resilience show how the writers’ responses to these deaths helped spur them on to their greatest work, influencing the birth and course of American literature and philosophy.In reaction to his traumatic loss, Emerson lost his Unitarian faith and found solace in nature. Thoreau, too, leaned on nature and its regenerative power, discovering that “death is the law of new life,” an insight that would find expression in Walden. And James, following a period of panic and despair, experienced a redemptive conversion and new ideas that would drive his work as a psychologist and philosopher. As Richardson shows, all three emerged from their grief with a new way of seeing, one shaped by a belief in what Emerson called “the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.”An inspiring book about resilience and the new growth and creativity that can stem from devastating loss, Three Roads Back is also an extraordinary account of the hidden wellsprings of American thought. 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

This 1st volume contains the following 50 works, arranged alphabetically by authors’ last names:Alcott, Louisa May: Little WomenAusten, Jane: Pride and PrejudiceAusten, Jane: EmmaBalzac, Honoré de: Father GoriotBarbusse, Henri: The InfernoBrontë, Anne: The Tenant of Wildfell HallBrontë, Charlotte: Jane EyreBrontë, Emily: Wuthering HeightsBurroughs, Edgar Rice: Tarzan of the ApesButler, Samuel: The Way of All FleshCarroll, Lewis: Alice’s Adventures in WonderlandCather, Willa: My ÁntoniaCervantes, Miguel de: Don QuixoteChopin, Kate: The AwakeningCleland, John: Fanny HillCollins, Wilkie: The MoonstoneConrad, Joseph: Heart of DarknessConrad, Joseph: NostromoCooper, James Fenimore: The Last of the MohicansCrane, Stephen: The Red Badge of CourageCummings, E. E.: The Enormous RoomDefoe, Daniel: Robinson CrusoeDefoe, Daniel: Moll FlandersDickens, Charles: Bleak HouseDickens, Charles: Great ExpectationsDostoyevsky, Fyodor: Crime and PunishmentDostoyevsky, Fyodor: The IdiotDoyle, Arthur Conan: The Hound of the BaskervillesDreiser, Theodore: Sister CarrieDumas, Alexandre: The Three MusketeersDumas, Alexandre: The Count of Monte CristoEliot, George: MiddlemarchFielding, Henry: Tom JonesFlaubert, Gustave: Madame BovaryFlaubert, Gustave: Sentimental EducationFord, Ford Madox: The Good SoldierForster, E. M.: A Room With a ViewForster, E. M.: Howards EndGaskell, Elizabeth: North and SouthGoethe, Johann Wolfgang von: The Sorrows of Young WertherGogol, Nikolai: Dead SoulsGorky, Maxim: The MotherHaggard, H. Rider: King Solomon’s MinesHardy, Thomas: Tess of the D’UrbervillesHawthorne, Nathaniel: The Scarlet LetterHomer: The OdysseyHugo, Victor: The Hunchback of Notre DameHugo, Victor: Les MisérablesHuxley, Aldous: Crome YellowJames, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady 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

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

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This book contains now several HTML tables of contents that will make reading a real pleasure!NovelsJerome, Jerome K.: "Three Men in a Boat"Joyce, James: "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"Joyce, James: "Ulysses"Kingsley, Charles: "The Water-Babies"Kipling, Rudyard: "Kim"La Fayette, Madame de: "The Princess of Clèves"Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de: "Dangerous Liaisons"Lawrence, D. H.: "Sons and Lovers"Lawrence, D. H.: "The Rainbow"Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan: "In a Glass Darkly"Lewis, Matthew Gregory: "The Monk"Lewis, Sinclair: "Main Street"London, Jack: "The Call of the Wild"Lovecraft, H. P.: "At the Mountains of Madness"Mann, Thomas: "Royal Highness"Maugham, W. Somerset: "Of Human Bondage"Maupassant, Guy de: "Bel-Ami"Melville, Herman: "Moby-Dick"Poe, Edgar Allan: "The Fall of the House of Usher"Proust, Marcel: "Swann's Way"Radcliffe, Ann: "The Mysteries of Udolpho"Richardson, Samuel: "Clarissa"Sand, George: "The Devil's Pool"Scott, Walter: "Ivanhoe"Shelley, Mary: "Frankenstein"Sienkiewicz, Henryk: "Quo Vadis"Sinclair, May: "Life and Death of Harriett Frean"Sinclair, Upton: "The Jungle"Stendhal: "The Red and the Black"Stendhal: "The Chartreuse of Parma"Sterne, Laurence: "Tristram Shandy"Stevenson, Robert Louis: "Treasure Island"Stoker, Bram: "Dracula"Stowe, Harriet Beecher: "Uncle Tom's Cabin"Swift, Jonathan: "Gulliver's Travels"Tagore, Rabindranath: "The Home and the World"Thackeray, William Makepeace: "Vanity Fair"Tolstoy, Leo: "War and Peace"Tolstoy, Leo: "Anna Karenina"Troloppe, Anthony: "The Way We Live Now"Turgenev, Ivan: "Fathers and Sons"Twain, Mark: "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"Verne, Jules: "Journey to the Interior of the Earth"Wallace, Lew: "Ben-Hur"Wells, H. G.: "The Time Machine"West, Rebecca: "The Return of the Soldier"Wharton, Edith: "The Age of Innocence"Wilde, Oscar: "The Picture of Dorian Gray"Xueqin, Cao: "The Dream of the Red Chamber"Zola, Émile: "Germinal" Read more

One of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists offers his take on the Spanish classic.   The author of Lolita and Pale Fire was not only a master of fiction but a distinguished literary critic as well. In this collection of lectures, which he delivered at Harvard in the early 1950s, Vladimir Nabokov shares insights based on a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the seventeenth-century novel by Miguel de Cervantes, a timeless classic and one of the most deeply influential works in all of Western literature.   Rejecting the common interpretation of Don Quixote as a warm satire, Nabokov perceives the work as a catalog of cruelty through which the gaunt knight passes. Edited and with a preface by Fredson Bowers, this volume offers “a powerful, critical, and dramatic elaboration of the theme of illusion” (V. S. Pritchett, The New York Review of Books).   Read more

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • A VANITY FAIR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR“Riveting and darkly funny and in all senses of the word, unclassifiable.” – The New York TimesA wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America—from the acclaimed author of ThrownWho are you? You are data about data. You are a map of connections—a culmination of everything you have ever posted, searched, emailed, liked, and followed. In this groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction, Kerry Howley investigates the curious implications of living in the age of the indelible. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs tells the true story of intelligence specialist Reality Winner, a lone young woman who stuffs a state secret under her skirt and trusts the wrong people to help. After printing five pages of dangerous information she was never supposed to see, Winner finds herself at the mercy of forces more invasive than she could have possibly imagined.Following Winner’s unlikely journey from rural Texas to a federal courtroom, Howley maps a hidden world, drawing in John Walker Lindh, Lady Gaga, Edward Snowden, a rescue dog named Outlaw Babyface Nelson, and a mother who will do whatever it takes to get her daughter out of jail. Howley’s subjects face a challenge new to history: they are imprisoned by their past selves, trapped for as long as the Internet endures. A soap opera set in the deep state, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs is a free fall into a world where everything is recorded and nothing is sacred, from a singular writer unafraid to ask essential questions about the strangeness of modern life. 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

*NATIONAL BESTSELLER* “A lively adventure of the mind...The tone of the prose...is one of unqualified enthusiasm: energy, vigor, intellectual curiosity, and what might be called an ecstasy of imaginative journalism.” —The New York Times Book ReviewAt the age of forty-eight, writer and film critic David Denby returned to Columbia University and re-enrolled in two core courses in Western civilization to confront the literary and philosophical masterpieces -- the "great books" -- that are now at the heart of the culture wars. In Great Books, he leads us on a glorious tour, a rediscovery and celebration of such authors as Homer and Boccaccio, Locke and Nietzsche. Conrad and Woolf. The resulting personal odyssey is an engaging blend of self-discovery, cultural commentary, reporting, criticism, and autobiography -- an inspiration for anyone in love with the written word. Read more

A New York Times Editors’ ChoiceA Publisher’s Weekly Most Anticipated Book of 2022Living and Dying with Marcel Proust is the result of a lifetime’s reading of, reflection on, and love for Proust’s masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time.One of the masterpieces of twentieth-century fiction, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time describes a unique journey, combining elements drawn from the timeless narratives of great expectations and lost illusions. In this lively and entertaining book, Christopher Prendergast traces that journey as it unfolds on an arc defined by the polarities in his title: living and dying.At once a careful contemplation Proust’s masterwork and an exploration of the rich sensory and impressionistic tapestry of a lived world, Living and Dying with Marcel Proust addresses such disparate Proustian obsessions as insomnia, food, digestion, color, addiction, memory, breath and breathing, breasts, snobbism, music, and humor.Entertaining and erudite, Prendergast’s book will surely become the companion for all readers either about to reembark on Proust’s three-million-word journey or setting out for the first time.“Splendid... Reading [it] feels like, say, seeing all of Venice in a gondola, seated beside a patient, smiling, all-knowing art historian.”—Edmund White, The New York Times Book Review Read more

PROSE Awards Subject Category Finalist, 2021—Biological Anthropology, Ancient History, and Archaeology Analyzing a wide variety of late-nineteenth-century sources, Sex, Skulls, and Citizens argues that Argentine scientific projects of the era were not just racial encounters, but were also conditioned by sexual relationships in all their messy, physical reality. The writers studied here (an eclectic group of scientists, anthropologists, and novelists, including Estanislao Zeballos, Lucio and Eduarda Mansilla, Ramón Lista, and Florence Dixie) reflect on Indigenous sexual practices, analyze the advisability and effects of interracial sex, and use the language of desire to narrate encounters with Indigenous peoples as they try to scientifically pinpoint Argentina's racial identity and future potential.Kerr's reach extends into history of science, literary studies, and history of anthropology, illuminating a scholarly time and place in which the lines betwixt were much blurrier, if they existed at all. Read more

A noted screenwriter himself, Pulitzer Prize–winner Larry McMurtry knows Hollywood—in Film Flam, he takes a funny, original, and penetrating look at the movie industry and gives us the truth about the moguls, fads, flops, and box-office hits.With successful movies and television miniseries made from several of his novels—Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove, and Hud—McMurtry writes with an outsider's irony of the industry and an insider's experience. In these essays, he illuminates the plight of the screenwriter, cuts a clean, often hilarious path through the excesses of film reviewing, and takes on some of the worst trends in the industry: the decline of the Western, the disappearance of love in the movies, and the quality of the stars themselves. From his recollections of the day Hollywood entered McMurtry's own life as he ate meat loaf in Fort Worth to the pleasures he found in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Film Flam is one of the best books ever written about Hollywood. Read more

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires comes a nostalgic and unflinchingly funny celebration of the horror fiction boom of the 1970s and ’80s.   Take a tour through the horror paperback novels of two iconic decades . . . if you dare. Page through dozens and dozens of amazing book covers featuring well-dressed skeletons, evil dolls, and knife-wielding killer crabs! Read shocking plot summaries that invoke devil worship, satanic children, and haunted real estate! Horror author and vintage paperback book collector Grady Hendrix offers killer commentary and witty insight on these trashy thrillers that tried so hard to be the next Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby. Complete with story summaries and artist and author profiles, this unforgettable volume dishes on familiar authors like V. C. Andrews and R. L. Stine, plus many more who’ve faded into obscurity. Also included are recommendations for which of these forgotten treasures are well worth your reading time and which should stay buried. Read more

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The definitive edition of Emily Dickinson’s correspondence, expanded and revised for the first time in over sixty years.Emily Dickinson was a letter writer before she was a poet. And it was through letters that she shared prose reflections—alternately humorous, provocative, affectionate, and philosophical—with her extensive community. While her letters often contain poems, and some letters consist entirely of a single poem, they also constitute a rich genre all their own. Through her correspondence, Dickinson appears in her many facets as a reader, writer, and thinker; social commentator and comedian; friend, neighbor, sister, and daughter.The Letters of Emily Dickinson is the first collected edition of the poet’s correspondence since 1958. It presents all 1,304 of her extant letters, along with the small number available from her correspondents. Almost 300 are previously uncollected, including letters published after 1958, letters more recently discovered in manuscript, and more than 200 “letter-poems” that Dickinson sent to correspondents without accompanying prose. This edition also redates much of her correspondence, relying on records of Amherst weather patterns, historical events, and details about flora and fauna to locate the letters more precisely in time. Finally, updated annotations place Dickinson’s writing more firmly in relation to national and international events, as well as the rhythms of daily life in her hometown. What emerges is not the reclusive Dickinson of legend but a poet firmly embedded in the political and literary currents of her time.Dickinson’s letters shed light on the soaring and capacious mind of a great American poet and her vast world of relationships. This edition presents her correspondence anew, in all its complexity and brilliance. Read more

In this volume, which reaffirms the uncompromising brilliance of his mind, Cioran strips the human condition down to its most basic components, birth and death, suggesting that disaster lies not in the prospect of death but in the fact of birth, "that laughable accident." In the lucid, aphoristic style that characterizes his work, Cioran writes of time and death, God and religion, suicide and suffering, and the temptation to silence. Through sharp observation and patient contemplation, Cioran cuts to the heart of the human experience. “A love of Cioran creates an urge to press his writing into someone’s hand, and is followed by an equal urge to pull it away as poison.”—The New Yorker “In the company of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard."—Publishers Weekly "No modern writer twists the knife with Cioran's dexterity. . . . His writing . . . is informed with the bitterness of genuine compassion."—Boston Phoenix Read more