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The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel HawthorneNathaniel Hawthorne’s masterpiece: A searing portrait of sin and redemption in Puritan New England When Hester Prynne, a young Puritan woman in seventeenth-century Boston, becomes pregnant out of wedlock, the unforgiving society in which she lives judges her harshly. Sentenced to wear a scarlet A emblazoned on her dress, Hester raises her daughter, Pearl, on the outskirts of town—an exile meant to cause her shame for the remainder of her life. In refusing to name Pearl’s father, Hester seeks to protect the minister Arthur Dimmesdale from sharing her fate. As the years pass, Dimmesdale grows weaker, eroded by his guilt, while Hester finds renewal in a defiant reclamation of her strength and identity. Their diverging paths lead to a searing final scene that stands among the most powerful in American literature. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
The Scarlet Pimpernel
by Otto Penzler Baroness OrczyThe breathtaking debut of the one man brave enough to stand up to the Reign of TerrorThe Revolution has begun, and the streets of Paris run red with blood. Every aristocrat has been declared a traitor; the guillotine awaits them all. At the city’s West Gate, the tyrannical Sergeant Bibot toys with desperate families, allowing them to think for a moment that escape is a possibility. It is not. Every last member of the nobility—man, woman, and child—will pay the ultimate price. Only one man stands in the way of the ruthless mobs. The Scarlet Pimpernel, his name taken from the flower he leaves as a calling card, has infiltrated Paris to bring as many innocent nobles to safety across the English Channel as he can. Savior of the aristocracy, scourge of the executioner, the Pimpernel is a hero like no other. But who is he? Marguerite Blakeney, whose dandy of a British husband has been nothing but a disappointment, would love to find out. This ebook features a new introduction by Otto Penzler and has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
The Semi-Attached Couple
by Emily EdenThe worst thing to happen to the season’s perfect couple: marriage When the young and gorgeous Helen Eskdale met the wealthy aristocrat Lord Teviot, everything clicked. This was a couple that was meant to be—the match of the year, if not the ages. But in the rush to the altar, there was no time for bride and groom to actually get to know each other. Now the question is: Can they keep their marriage from falling apart?The Semi-Attached Couple explores the upstairs-downstairs intrigues and comic misunderstandings central to the classic English romance with all the wit, style, and charm of a Jane Austen novel. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
The Long Voyage: Selected Letters Of Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1987
by Malcolm CowleyCritic, poet, editor, chronicler of the Lost Generation, elder statesman of the Republic of Letters, Malcolm Cowley (1898-1989) was an eloquent witness to American literary and political life. His letters, mostly unpublished, provide a self-portrait of Cowley and his time and make possible a full appreciation of his long, varied career.
The Long Voyage: Selected Letters Of Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1987
by Malcolm CowleyCritic, poet, editor, chronicler of the Lost Generation, elder statesman of the Republic of Letters, Malcolm Cowley (1898-1989) was an eloquent witness to American literary and political life. His letters, mostly unpublished, provide a self-portrait of Cowley and his time and make possible a full appreciation of his long, varied career.
The Untold Story of the Talking Book
by Matthew RuberyHistories of the book often move straight from the codex to the digital screen. Left out is nearly 150 years of audio recordings. Matthew Rubery uncovers this story, from Edison to today’s billion-dollar audiobook industry, and breaks from convention by treating audiobooks as a distinctive art form that has profoundly influenced the way we read.
Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literature
by Aamir R. MuftiWorld literature advocates have promised to move humanistic study beyond postcolonial theory and antiquated paradigms of national literary traditions. Aamir Mufti scrutinizes these claims and critiques the continuing dominance of English as both a literary language and the undisputed cultural system of global capitalism.
Flaubert
by Michel WinockMichel Winock situates Flaubert in France’s century of great democratic transition. Wary of the masses, Flaubert rejected universal suffrage, but above all he hated the vulgar, ignorant bourgeoisie, a class that embodied every vice of the democratic age. His loathing became a fixation—and a source of literary inspiration.
Empire of Chance: The Napoleonic Wars And The Disorder Of Things
by Anders Engberg-PedersenAnders Engberg-Pedersen shows how the Napoleonic Wars inspired a new discourse on knowledge in the West. Soldiers returning from battle were forced to reconsider what it is possible to know and how decisions are made in a fog of imperfect knowledge. Chance no longer appeared exceptional but normative—a prism for understanding the modern world.
American Niceness: A Cultural History
by Carrie Tirado BramenThe cliché of the Ugly American—loud, vulgar, materialistic, chauvinistic—still expresses what people around the world dislike about their Yankee counterparts. Carrie Tirado Bramen recovers the history of a different national archetype—the nice American—which has been central to ideas of American identity since the nineteenth century.
What Was Literary Impressionism?
by Michael Fried“My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is every-thing.” So wrote Joseph Conrad in the best-known account of literary impressionism, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movement featuring narratives that paint pictures in readers’ minds. If literary impressionism is anything, it is the project to turn prose into vision. But vision of what? Michael Fried demonstrates that the impressionists sought to compel readers not only to see what was described and narrated but also to see writing itself. Fried reads Conrad, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, W. H. Hudson, Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells, Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Erskine Childers, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, and Edgar Rice Burroughs as avatars of the scene of writing. The upward-facing page, pen and ink, the look of written script, and the act of inscription are central to their work. These authors confront us with the sheer materiality of writing, albeit disguised and displaced so as to allow their narratives to proceed to their ostensible ends. What Was Literary Impressionism? radically reframes a large body of important writing. One of the major art historians and art critics of his generation, Fried turns to the novel and produces a rare work of insight and erudition that transforms our understanding of some of the most challenging fiction in the English language.
The Lives of Frederick Douglass
by Robert S. LevineFrederick Douglass’s changeable sense of his own life story is reflected in his many conflicting accounts of events during his journey from slavery to freedom. Robert S. Levine creates a fascinating collage of this elusive subject—revisionist biography at its best, offering new perspectives on Douglass the social reformer, orator, and writer.
Scholarship, Commerce, Religion: The Learned Book In The Age Of Confessions, 1560-1630
by Ian MacleanThis study of the learned book trade of the late Renaissance reveals how many features of today’s publishing world were in place even then. Beginning in Frankfurt, Maclean surveys the authors, publishers, censors, and sellers who operated in this fraught religious atmosphere and overheated market, and ends with the market’s decline in the 1620s.
Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, And Shakespeare's Sonnets
by Brian BoydWhy Lyrics Last turns an evolutionary lens on lyric verse, placing the writing of verse within the human disposition to play with pattern. Boyd takes as an extended example the many patterns to be found within Shakespeare’s Sonnets. There, the Bard avoids all narrative and demonstrates the power that verse can have when liberated of story.
Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov
by Martin Hägglund Martin HägglundNovels by Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov have been read as expressions of a desire to transcend time. Hägglund gives them another reading entirely: fear of time and death is generated by investment in temporal life. Engaging with Freud and Lacan, he opens a new way of reading the dramas of desire as they are staged in both philosophy and literature.
The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics Of Justice From The Revolution To The Civil War
by Caleb SmithCaleb Smith explores the confessions, trial reports, maledictions, and martyr narratives that juxtaposed law and conscience in antebellum America’s court of public opinion and shows how writers portrayed struggles for justice as clashes between human law and higher authority, giving voice to a moral protest that transformed American literature.
Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between The Wars
by David TrotterThe period between the World Wars was one of the richest and most inventive in the long history of British literature. Interwar literature stood apart by virtue of the sheer intelligence of the enquiries it undertook into the technological mediation of experience. After around 1925, literary works began to examine the sorts of behavior made possible for the first time by virtual interaction. And they began to fill up, too, with the look, sound, smell, taste, and feel of the new synthetic and semi-synthetic materials that were reshaping everyday modern life. New media and new materials gave writers a fresh opportunity to reimagine both how lives might be lived and how literature might be written. Today, such material and immaterial mediations have become even more decisive. Communications technology is an attitude before it is a machine or a set of codes. It is an idea about the prosthetic enhancement of our capacity to communicate. The writers who first woke up to this fact were not postwar, postmodern, or post-anything else: some of the best of them lived and wrote in the British Isles in the period between the World Wars.
Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals
by Mark EdmundsonAn ARTery Best Book of the Year An Art of Manliness Best Book of the Year In a culture that has become progressively more skeptical and materialistic, the desires of the individual self stand supreme, Mark Edmundson says. We spare little thought for the great ideals that once gave life meaning and worth. Self and Soul is an impassioned effort to defend the values of the Soul. “An impassioned critique of Western society, a relentless assault on contemporary complacency, shallowness, competitiveness and self-regard…Throughout Self and Soul, Edmundson writes with a Thoreau-like incisiveness and fervor…[A] powerful, heartfelt book.” —Michael Dirda, Washington Post “[Edmundson’s] bold and ambitious new book is partly a demonstration of what a ‘real education’ in the humanities, inspired by the goal of ‘human transformation’ and devoted to taking writers seriously, might look like…[It] quietly sets out to challenge many educational pieties, most of the assumptions of recent literary studies—and his own chosen lifestyle.” —Mathew Reisz, Times Higher Education “Edmundson delivers a welcome championing of humanistic ways of thinking and living.” —Kirkus Reviews
Pagan Virtue in a Christian World: Sigismondo Malatesta and the Italian Renaissance
by Anthony F. D'EliaIn 1462 Pope Pius II performed the only reverse canonization in history, damning a living man to an afterlife of torment. What had Sigismondo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini and a patron of the arts, done to merit this fate? Anthony D’Elia shows how the recovery of classical literature and art during the Italian Renaissance led to a revival of paganism.
Fighting Fantasy: The Gates Of Death (Fighting Fantasy Series (PDF))
by Charlie Higson_Young Bond_ maestro Charlie Higson brings his special brand of thrills to this cult series. Zero or hero? Only YOU can decide your destiny - but we're pretty sure big thrills lie ahead! The kingdom of Allansia is in trouble again, which is kind of a good thing. (No trouble, no adventures. Okay?) Now it's up to YOU to travel to the Temple of Miracles in the Invisible City. Think that sounds easy? Think again. You'll have to cross the Gates of Death and defeat the Queen of Darkness. And if you're still alive, it's time for a stroll through the Kingdom of the Dead. Live or die, run or fight, you'll never forget this quest... * A thrilling new book for this cult fantasy gaming series * Written by bestselling _Young Bond_ author Charlie Higson * Action, terrifying monsters and heart-stopping choices * Read the story, roll the dice and decide your destiny!
Walden’s Shore: Henry David Thoreau And Nineteenth-century Science
by Robert M. ThorsonWalden's Shore explores Thoreau's understanding of the "living rock" on which life's complexity depends--not as metaphor but as physical science. Robert Thorson's subject is Thoreau the rock and mineral collector, interpreter of landscapes, and field scientist whose compass and measuring stick were as important to him as his plant press.
Brightstorm: A Sky-ship Adventure
by Vashti HardyTwins Arthur and Maudie receive word in Lontown that their famous explorer father died in a failed attempt to reach South Polaris. Not only that, but he has been accused of trying to steal fuel from his competitors before he died! The twins don't believe the news, and they answer an ad to crew a new exploration attempt, headed by the vivacious Captain Harriet Culpepper, in the hope of learning the truth and repairing their family's reputation. As the winged ship Aurora sets sail, the twins must keep their wits about them and prove themselves worthy of the rest of the crew. Will Arthur and Maudie find the evidence they need to prove their Dad's innocence? And can one-armed Arthur discover where he fits in the world?
Baghdad: The City In Verse
by Reuven SnirBaghdad: The City in Verse captures the essence of life lived in one of the world's enduring metropolises. This unusual anthology offers original translations of 170 Arabic poems from Bedouin, Muslim, Christian, Kurdish, and Jewish poets--most for the first time in English--from Baghdad's founding in the eighth century to the present day.
A New Republic of Letters: Memory And Scholarship In The Age Of Digital Reproduction
by Jerome McGannJerome McGann's manifesto argues that the history of texts and how they are preserved and accessed for interpretation are the overriding subjects of humanist study in the digital age. Theory and philosophy no longer suffice as an intellectual framework. But philology--out of fashion for decades--models these concerns with surprising fidelity.
Lightning Girl
by Alesha DixonHigh-voltage fiction from a top TV judge! When life gets dark, can Aurora save the world with her totally _flash_ superpowers? Aurora Beam is utterly (yawn) normal. There's nothing special about her. She can't even do a proper cartwheel. That is, until the day she spots a bully picking on her little sis - and sparks suddenly fly! Seriously: there are beams of light shooting out of Aurora's fingers. What's going on? That's when Mum drops a life-changing bombshell. She's a secret superhero - and now it's time for Aurora to join the crusade against crime!