The Piazza Tales

Unlike Melville's earlier works, The Piazza Tales is not a full-length novel but a collection of six short pieces. One of these, The Piazza, was written by Melville to serve as a title piece to the volume; the other five had previously been published in Putnam's Monthly Magazine. The title story takes the narrator on a trek from his isolated Central American home to a still more isolated house seen in the distance were he meets - but the less said the better. It's a memorable, unlikely yet plausible tale of two human beings' incapacity to communicate. "The Encantadas" and "Benito Cereno" are sea stories, while "Bartleby, the Scrivener" unfolds in a depressing, viewless Wall Street office, not the venue one expects for a work by Melville. It is - not unlike other Melville works, but to a much greater degree - a very sociological work...