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VINTAGE CLASSICS' AMERICAN GOTHIC SERIESSpine-tingling, mind-altering and deliciously atmospheric, journey into the dark side of America with nine of its most uncanny classics.Hester Prynne is a beautiful young woman. She is also an outcast. In the eyes of her neighbours she has committed an unforgivable sin. Everyone knows that her little daughter, Pearl, is the product of an illicit affair but no one knows the identity of Pearl's father. Hester's refusal to name him brings more condemnation upon her. But she stands strong in the face of public scorn, even when she is forced to wear the sign of her shame sewn onto her clothes: the scarlet letter 'A' for 'Adulteress'

Stephen Crane's immortal masterpiece about the nightmare of war was first published in 1895 and brought its young author immediate international fame. Set during the Civil War, it tells of the brutal disillusionment of a young recruit who had dreamed of the thrill and glory of war, only to find himself fleeing the horror of a battlefield. Shame over his cowardice drives him to seek to redeem himself by being wounded-earning what he calls the "red badge of courage." Praised for its psychological insight and its intense and unprecedented realism in portraying the experience of men under fire, The Red Badge of Courage has been a beloved bestseller for more than a century.

The epic grandeur of Dante's masterpiece has inspired readers for 700 years, and has entered the human imagination. But the further we move from the late medieval world of Dante, the more a rich understanding and enjoyment of the poem depends on knowledgeable guidance. Robert Hollander, a renowned scholar and master teacher of Dante, and Jean Hollander, an accomplished poet, have written a beautifully accurate and clear verse translation of the first volume of Dante's epic poem, the Divine Comedy. Featuring the original Italian text opposite the translation, this edition also offers an extensive and accessible introduction and generous commentaries that draw on centuries of scholarship as well as Robert Hollander's own decades of teaching and research. The Hollander translation is the new standard in English of this essential work of world literature.

Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative of the making of a young American soldier.Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this beautifully modulated novel, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her ardor for missionary work, and dissatisfied with farming, Claude is an idealist without an ideal to cling to. It is only when his country enters the First World War that Claude finds what he has been searching for all his life.In One of Ours Willa Cather explores the destiny of a grandchild of the pioneers, a young Nebraskan whose yearnings impel him toward a frontier bloodier and more distant than the one that vanished before his birth. In doing so, she creates a canny and extraordinarily vital portrait of an American psyche at once skeptical and romantic, restless and heroic.BONUS: The edition includes an excerpt fromThe Selected Letters of Willa Cather.

From the publication of his first book in 1926, Langston Hughes was America's acknowledged poet of color, the first to commemorate the experience-and suffering-of Black Americans in a voice that no reader could fail to hear.The poems in The Panther and the Lash are the last testament of a great American writer who grappled fearlessly and artfully with the most compelling issues of his time.In this, his last collection of verse, Hughes's voice-sometimes ironic, sometimes bitter, always powerful-is more pointed than ever before, as he explicitly addresses the racial politics of the sixties in such pieces as "Prime," "Motto," "Dream Deferred," "Frederick Douglas: 1817-1895," "Still Here," "Birmingham Sunday." " History," "Slave," "Warning," and "Daybreak in Alabama."

For daring to peer into the heart of an adulteress and enumerate its contents with profound dispassion, the author of Madame Bovary was tried for offenses against morality and religion. What shocks us today about Flaubert's devastatingly realized tale of a young woman destroyed by the reckless pursuit of her romantic dreams is its pure artistry: the poise of its narrative structure, the opulence of its prose (marvelously captured in the English translation of Francis Steegmuller), and its creation of a world whose minor figures are as vital as its doomed heroine. In reading Madame Bovary, one experiences a work that remains genuinely revolutionary almost a century and a half after its creation.

Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American ReadWith the same suppleness, energy, and range of voices that won their translation of The Brothers Karamazov the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, Pevear and Volokhonsky offer a brilliant translation of Dostoevsky's classic novel that presents a clear insight into this astounding psychological thriller. "e;The best (translation) currently available"e;--Washington Post Book World.

Although Katherine Mansfield was closely associated with D.H. Lawrence and something of a rival of Virginia Woolf, her stories suggest someone writing in a different era and in a vastly different English. Her language is as transparent as clean glass, yet hovers on the edge of poetry. Her characters are passionate men and women swaddled in English reserve -- and sometimes briefly breaking through. And her genius is to pinpoint those unacknowledged and almost imperceptible moments in which those people's relationships -- with one another and themselves -- change forever. This collection includes such masterpieces as "e;Prelude,"e; "e;At the Bay"e; "e;Bliss,"e; "e;The Man Without a Temperament"e; and "e;The Garden Party"e; and has a new introduction by Jeffrey Meyers.

WillaCather's lyrical andbittersweet novel of a middle-aged man losing control of his lifeis a brilliant study in emotional dislocation and renewal. Professor Godfrey St. Peter is a man in his fifties who has devoted his life to his work, his wife, his garden, and his daughters, and achieved success with all of them. But when St. Peter is called on to move to a new, more comfortable house, something in him rebels. And although at first that rebellion consists of nothing more than mild resistance to his family's wishes, it imperceptibly comes to encompass the entire order of his life. The Professor's House combines a delightful grasp of the social and domestic rituals of a Midwestern university town in the 1920s with profound spiritual and psychological introspection.BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt fromThe Selected Letters of Willa Cather.

In this haunting 1935 novel, the Pulitzer Prizewinning author of My ntonia performscrystalline variations on the themes that preoccupy her greatest fiction: the impermanence of innocence, the opposition between prairie and city, provincial American values and world culture, and the grandeur, elation, and heartache that await a gifted young woman who leaves her small Nebraska town to pursue a life in art.At the age of eighteen, Lucy Gayheart heads for Chicago to study music. She is beautiful and impressionable and ardent, and these qualities attract the attention of Clement Sebastian, an aging but charismatic singer who exercises all the tragic, sinister fascination of a man who has renounced life only to turn back to seize it one last time. Out of their doomed love affairand Lucy's fatal estrangement from her originsWilla Cather creates a novel that is as achingly lovely as a Schubert sonata.BONUS: The edition includes an excerpt fromThe Selected Letters of Willa Cather.

A Lost Lady is the portrait of a frontier woman who reflects the conventions of her age even as she defies them.To the people of Sweet Water, a fading railroad town on the Western plains, Mrs. Forrester is the resident aristocrat, at once gracious and comfortably remote. To her aging husband she is a treasure whose value increases as his powers fail. To Niel Herbert, who falls in love with her as a boy and becomes her confidant as a man, Mrs. Forrester is by turns steadfast and faithless, dazzling and pathetic: a woman whose charm is intertwined with a terrifying vulnerability.BONUS: The edition includes an excerpt fromThe Selected Letters of Willa Cather.

Famous for his enormously influential poetry and plays, Alexander Pushkin is also beloved for his short stories. This collection showcases his tremendous range, which enabled him to portray the Russian people through romance, drama, and satire. The sparkling humor of the five ';Tales of Belkin' contrasts with a dark fable of gambling and obsessive greed in ';The Queen of Spades' and the masterful historical novella, ';The Captain's Daughter,' a story of love and betrayal set during a rebellion in the time of Catherine the Great. Translated by Natalie Duddington and T. Keane

Edith Wharton's lacerating satire on marriage and materialism in turn-of-the-century New York features her most selfish, ruthless, and irresistibly outrageous female character.Undine Spragg is an exquisitely beautiful but ferociously acquisitive young woman from the Midwest who comes to New York to seek her fortune. She achieves her social ambitionsbut only at the highest cost to her family, her admirers, and her several husbands. Wharton lavished on Undine an imaginative energy that suggests she was as fascinated as she was appalled by the alluring monster she had created. It is the complexity of her attitude that makes The Custom of the Countrywith its rich social and emotional detail and its headlong narrative powerone of the most fully realized and resonant of her works.

Edith Wharton's most widely read work is a tightly constructed and almost unbearably heartbreaking story of forbidden love in a snowbound New England village.This brilliantly wrought, tragic novella explores the repressed emotions and destructive passions of working-class people far removed from the elevated social milieu usually inhabited by Wharton's characters. Ethan Frome is a poor farmer, trapped in a marriage to a demanding and controlling wife, Zeena. When Zeena's young cousin Mattie enters their household she opens a window of hope in Ethan's bleak life, but his wife's reaction prompts a desperate attempt to escape fate that goes horribly wrong. Ethan Frome is an unforgettable story with the force of myth, featuring realistic and haunting characters as vivid as any Wharton ever conjured.

Alexander's Bridge, Willa Cather's first novel, is a taut psychological drama about the fragility of human connections. Published in 1912, just a year before O Pioneers! made Cather's name, it features high society on an international stage rather than the immigrant prairie characters she later became known for. The successful and glamorous life of Bartley Alexander, a world-renowned engineer and bridge builder, begins to unravel when he encounters a former lover in London. As he shuttles among his wife in Boston, his old flame in London, and a massive bridge he is building in Canada, Alexander finds himself increasingly tormented. But the threatened collapse of his marriage presages a more fatal catastrophe, one he will risk his life to try to prevent.BONUS: The edition includes an excerpt from The Selected Letters of Willa Cather.

In her final novel, Willa Cather departed from her usual Great Plains settings to plumb the turbulent relationships between slaves and their owners in the antebellum South. Sapphira and the Slave Girl is set in Virginia just before the Civil War. Sapphira is a slave owner who feels she has come down in the world and channels her resentments into jealousy of her beautiful mulatto slave, Nancy. Sapphira's daughter Rachel, an abolitionist, opposes her mother's increasingly shocking attempts to persecute Nancy. The struggles of these three strong-willed women provide rich material for Cather's narrative art and psychological insight.BONUS: The edition includes an excerpt fromThe Selected Letters of Willa Cather.

A new selection for the NEA's Big Read program A compact selection of Poe's greatest stories and poems, chosen by the National Endowment for the Arts for their Big Read program. This selection of eleven stories and seven poems contains such famously chilling masterpieces of the storyteller's art as ';The Tell-tale Heart,' ';The Fall of the House of Usher,' ';The Cask of Amontillado,' and ';The Pit and the Pendulum,' and such unforgettable poems as ';The Raven,' ';The Bells,' and ';Annabel Lee.' Poe is widely credited with pioneering the detective story, represented here by ';The Purloined Letter,' ';The Mystery of Marie Roget,' and ';The Murders in the Rue Morgue.' Also included is his essay ';The Philosophy of Composition,' in which he lays out his theory of how good writers write, describing how he constructed ';The Raven' as an example.

Working from the earliest surviving draft of Frankenstein, Charles E. Robinson presents two versions of the classic novelas Mary Shelley originally wrote it and a subsequent version clearly indicating Percy Shelley's amendments and contributions. For the first time we can hear Mary's sole voice, which is colloquial, fast-paced, and sounds more modern to a contemporary reader. We can also see for the first time the extent of Percy Shelley's contributionsome 5,000 words out of 72,000and his stylistic and thematic changes. His occasionally florid prose is in marked contrast to the directness of Mary's writing. Interesting, too, are Percy's suggestions, which humanize the monster, thus shaping many of the major themes of the novel as we read it today. In these two versions of Frankenstein we have an exciting new view of one of literature' s greatest works.

Written over the course of Leskov's career, each story in The Enchanted Wanderer elucidates the very essence of the human condition; themes of love, despair, loneliness, and revenge are explored against the backdrop of nineteenth-century working-class Russia. Leskov deftly layers social satire and subtle criticism atop myth and fable, resulting in a richly entertaining collection.BONUS MATERIAL:This edition includes an excerpt from Jonathan Lethem'sDissident Gardens.

A vibrant translation of Tolstoy's most important short fiction by the award-winning translators of War and Peace.Here are eleven masterful stories from the mature author, some autobiographical, others moral parables, and all told with the evocative power that was Tolstoy's alone. They include ';The Prisoner of the Caucasus,' inspired by Tolstoy's own experiences as a soldier in the Chechen War, ';Hadji Murat,' the novella Harold Bloom called ';the best story in the world,' ';The Devil,' a fascinating tale of sexual obsession, and the celebrated ';The Death of Ivan Ilyich,' an intense and moving examination of death and the possibilities of redemption.Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation captures the richness, immediacy, and multiplicity of Tolstoy's language, and reveals the author as a passionate moral guide, an unflinching seeker of truth, and ultimately, a creator of enduring and universal art.

As part of the wonderful Collector's Library series, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is one of the best-loved children's classics of all time. This attractive volume contains the complete and unabridged story with 8 full color illustrations, plus numerous black & white illustrations throughout. The deluxe edition features a full piece cloth case, a four color illustrated onlay on the front cover, foil stamping on front and spine, stained edges on three sides, printed endpapers with book plate and a satin ribbon marker. This book should have an honored place in any child's library.

This Vintage edition of The Plays_of Oscar Wilde contains the plays that made Wilde one of the most important dramatists of his time, including The Importance of Being Earnest, one of the great works of modern literature.Oscar Wilde's plays demonstrate once again why their author must be seen as both an inaugurator and a master of modernism. In his best work, the subversive insights embedded in his wit continue to challenge our common assumptions. Wilde's ability to unsettle and startle us anew with his radical vision of the artifice inherent in the self's construction makes him our contemporary.This edition is introduced by John Lahr, author of Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton. The plays included are Lady Windermere's Fan, Salome, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest.