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Showing 1 - 16 of 16 items
By William Wells Brown. 2004
The first novel by an African-American, this dramatic tale revolves around the fate of a child fathered by Thomas Jefferson…
with one of his slaves. Although born into slavery, author William Wells Brown escaped bondage to become a prominent reformer and historian. His emotionally powerful depiction of slavery and racial conflict in the antebellum South resounds with the immediacy and honesty of his own experiences. Brown weaves a variety of contemporary sources -- sermons, lectures, political pamphlets, and newspaper advertisements -- into this innovative work, which appears here in an unabridged republication of the 1853 first edition.By Andy Rotman. 2008
Divine Stories is the inaugural volume in a landmark translation series devoted to making the wealth of classical Indian Buddhism…
accessible to modern readers. The stories here, among the first texts to be inscribed by Buddhists, highlight the moral economy of karma, illustrating how gestures of faith, especially offerings, can bring the reward of future happiness and ultimate liberation. Originally contained in the Divyavadana, an enormous compendium of Sanskrit Buddhist narratives from the early Common Era, the stories in this collection express the moral and ethical impulses of Indian Buddhist thought and are a testament to the historical and social power of narrative. Long believed by followers to be the actual words of the Buddha himself, these divine stories are without a doubt some of the most influential stories in the history of Buddhism.By Yasushi Inoue. 2000
In The Counterfeiter, a writer is commissioned to write the biography of a famous painter but becomes fascinated by a…
man who produced forgeries of the artist's work. Obasute concerns a man's obsession with a legend of old women being taken to a mountain and abandoned, and his interpretation of the actions of the members of his family in light of this legend. The Full Moon is a story of company politics, particularly the rise and fall of the firm's president, told largely through incidents at annual company parties.By Peter Khoroche, Haribhatta. 2017
Written in Kashmir around 400 CE, Haribhatta’s Jåtakamåla is a remarkable example of classical Sanskrit literature in a mixture of…
prose and verse that for centuries was known only in its Tibetan translation. But between 1973 and 2004 a large portion of the Sanskrit original was rediscovered in a number of anonymous manuscripts. With this volume Peter Khoroche offers the most complete translation to date, making almost 80 percent of the work available in English. Haribhatta’s Jåtakamålå is a sophisticated and personal adaptation of popular stories, mostly non-Buddhist in origin, all illustrating the future Buddha’s single-minded devotion to the good of all creatures, and his desire, no matter what his incarnation—man, woman, peacock, elephant, merchant, or king—to assist others on the path to nirvana. Haribhatta’s insight into human and animal behavior, his astonishing eye for the details of landscape, and his fine descriptive powers together make this a unique record of everyday life in ancient India as well as a powerful statement of Buddhist ethics. This translation will be a landmark in the study of Buddhism and of the culture of ancient India.By Stephen Crane. 1997
In his brief but productive lifetime, Stephen Crane (1871-1900) wrote vividly and sensitively about a variety of subjects. In his…
work he displayed a rare ability to combine astute characterization, colorful settings, and an ironic tone in memorable tales offering perceptive explorations of human psychology and motivation.He is perhaps famous as author of The Red Badge of Courage, the quintessential Civil War classic. However, Crane wrote seven other stories involving this monumental conflict. All are gathered together in this volume. They include "A Mystery of Heroism," "A Gray Sleeve," "Three Miraculous Soldiers," "The Little Regiment," "An Indiana Campaign," "An Episode of War," and "The Veteran," which features Henry Fleming, protagonist of The Red Badge of Courage, years after the war.Attractive and sturdily bound, this modestly priced edition will find an enthusiastic audience among admirers of Crane's work, students of American literature, and Civil War buffs alike. All will enjoy the work of an author now recognized as one of the most innovative, influential writers of his generation -- an acknowledged master of the short story.By Ambrose Bierce. 1994
Newspaperman, short-story writer, poet, and satirist, Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) is one of the most striking and unusual literary figures America…
has produced. Dubbed "Bitter Bierce" for his vitriolic wit and biting satire, his fame rests largely on a celebrated compilation of barbed epigrams, The Devil's Dictionary, and a book of short stories (Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, 1891). Most of the 16 selections in this volume have been taken from the latter collection.The stories in this edition include: "What I Saw at Shiloh," "A Son of the Gods," "Four Days in Dixie," "One of the Missing," "A Horseman in the Sky," "The Coup de Grace," "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," "The Story of Conscience," "One Kind of Officer," "Chickamauga," and five more.Bierce's stories employ a buildup of suggestive realistic detail to produce grim and vivid tales often disturbing in their mood of fatalism and impending calamity. Hauntingly suggestive, they offer excellent examples of the author's dark pessimism and storytelling power.Since its publication in 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper" has always been recognized as a powerful statement about…
the victimization of a woman whose neurasthenic condition is completely misdiagnosed, mistreated, and misunderstood, leaving her to face insanity alone, as a prisoner in her own bedroom. Never before, however, has the story itself been portrayed as victimized.In this first critical edition of Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper," accompanied by contemporary reviews and previously unpublished letters, Julie Bates Dock examines the various myth-frames that have been used to legitimize Gilman's story. The editor discusses how modern feminist critics' readings (and misreadings) of the available documents uphold a set of legends that originated with Gilman herself and that promulgate an almost saintly view of the pioneering feminist author. The documents made available in the collection enable scholars and students to evaluate firsthand Gilman's claims regarding the story's impact on its first audiences.Dock presents an authoritative text of "The Yellow Wall-paper" for the first time since its initial publication. Included are a textual commentary, full descriptions of all relevant texts, lists of editorial emendations and pre-copy-text substantive variants, a complete historical collation that documents all the variants found in important editions after 1892, and a listing of textual sources for more than one hundred reprintings of the story in anthologies and textbooks.Other documents in the casebook that illuminate the story's publication and reception histories include Gilman's successive and varying accounts of the story's history, her diary and manuscript log entries and letters pertaining to the story, W. D. Howells's correspondence with Gilman and Horace Scudder, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and his remarks on the story when he reprinted it in Great American Short Stories, and more than two dozen reviews of the story by Gilman's contemporaries.Taken together, the criticism, text, documents, and annotations constitute a rich and valuable contribution to Gilman scholarship, calling into question the feminist literary criticism that has helped to shape interpretations of a literary masterpiece.By Hermann Hesse, Sherab Chodzin Kohn. 1877
This classic of twentieth-century literature chronicles the spiritual evolution of a man living in India at the time of the…
Buddha--a spiritual journey that has inspired generations of readers. Here is a fresh translation from Sherab Chödzin Kohn, a gifted translator and longtime student of Buddhism and Eastern philosophy. Kohn's flowing, poetic translation conveys the philosophical and spiritual nuances of Hesse's text, paying special attention to the qualities of meditation experience. This edition also includes an introduction exploring Hesse's own spiritual journey as evidenced in his journals and personal letters.By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. 2019
For the first time in Penguin Classics, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's bestselling Civil War classicElizabeth Stuart Phelps's 1868 Reconstruction-era novel The…
Gates Ajar, in its portrait of inconsolable grief following the American Civil War, helped to shape enduring American ideas about heaven and demonstrated that for American women, the war didn't simply end at Appomattox. When Mary Cabot loses her beloved brother, Union soldier Royal, in the war, she feels as though she will never feel peace again until the arrival of her widowed aunt Winifred. Sharing the wisdom that has comforted her through her grief, Winifred offers Mary a groundbreaking view of the afterlife: a place of loving reunion with all those who were lost. As Winifred ministers to Mary, her vision of the afterlife circulates in the community and attracts local adherents who have similarly suffered losses in the war. Written with the intention of illuminating and bettering the lives of women after the war, The Gates Ajar is an empowering manifesto on conquering grief and a timeless manual for optimism.By Harriet Beecher Stowe.
One of the most popular, influential, and controversial books written by an American, Uncle Tom's Cabin is a rich, panoramic…
novel passionately dramatizing why the whole of America is implicated in and responsible for slavery. It is the story of the slave Tom, who is devout and loyal and is sold and sent down South, where he endures brutal treatment at the hands of plantation owner Simon Legree. It is the exploration of society’s failures and the asking of a profound question: What is it to be a moral human being? And, moreover, it is the novel that helped move a nation to battle these injustices.By Fred Lewis Pattee, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Joshua R. Brown. 2012
Fred Lewis Pattee, long regarded as the father of American literary study, also wrote fiction. Originally published in 1905 by…
Henry Holt, The House of the Black Ring was Pattee’s second novel—a local-color romance set in the mountains of Central Pennsylvania. The book’s plot is driven by family feud, forbidden love, and a touch of the supernatural. This new edition makes this novel accessible to new generations of modern-day readers. General readers will find in The House of the Black Ring a thriller that preserves details of rural life and language during the late nineteenth century. Scholars will read it as an expression of cultural anxiety and change in the decades after the Civil War. An introduction by poet and essayist Julia Spicher Kasdorf situates the novel within the context of social and literary history, as well as Pattee’s own biography, and provides a compelling argument for its importance, not only as a literary artifact or record of local customs, but also as a reflection of Pattee’s own story intertwined with the history of Penn State at the turn of the twentieth century. Joshua Brown draws on his expertise in Pennsylvania German ethno-linguistics to interpret the dialect writing and to give readers a clearer view of the customs and regionalisms depicted in the book.By Michael Downs. 2012
Fire sweeps along the wall of a circus tent while inside thousands of people enjoy a Ringling Brothers and Barnum…
and Bailey matinee. Within minutes, flames consume the canvas and vast sections collapse, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more.Inspired by the 1944 Hartford Circus Fire, the interconnected stories in Michael Downs's The Greatest Show explore the aftermath of a disaster in a world of clowns, elephants, and childhood fantasies. In the opening story, Ania Liszak, a young Polish housemaid, steals circus tickets from her employer to take her three-year-old son, Teddy, to the matinee. The fire nearly kills both and leaves them scarred in different ways: Teddy's mother enjoys the beautiful strangeness of the scar on her face, but the patches across Teddy's body inspire cruel schoolmates to call him "Lizard Liszak." Over time, his mother transforms her pain into drama, while Teddy, having no memory of that day, seeks ways to return to it.These and other captivating characters appear throughout the book, creating a portrait of an American city and its people over five decades, raising questions about wounds and healing, memory and forgetting, and about the human capacity for kindness -- with all its futility and power -- in the midst of great loss.By Rafe Martin, Gene Reeves. 2010
Stories are ancient and wondrous tools with the mysterious power to transform lives. And the stories and parables of the…
Lotus Sutra-one of the world's great religious scriptures and most influential texts-are among the most fascinating and dramatic. In this fun, engaging, and plain-English book, Gene Reeves-the translator of Wisdom's critically acclaimed and bestselling edition of the Lotus Sutra-presents the most memorable and remarkable of the Lotus Sutra's many stories and parables, along with a distillation of his decades of reflection on them in an accessible, inspiring, and naturally illuminating way. The Stories of the Lotus Sutra is the perfect companion to Reeve's breathtaking translation of this scriptural masterpiece as well as a thoroughly enjoyable stand-alone volume for those who want to bring the inspiring teachings of the bodhisattva path into their daily lives.Since its publication in 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper" has always been recognized as a powerful statement about…
the victimization of a woman whose neurasthenic condition is completely misdiagnosed, mistreated, and misunderstood, leaving her to face insanity alone, as a prisoner in her own bedroom. Never before, however, has the story itself been portrayed as victimized.In this first critical edition of Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper," accompanied by contemporary reviews and previously unpublished letters, Julie Bates Dock examines the various myth-frames that have been used to legitimize Gilman's story. The editor discusses how modern feminist critics' readings (and misreadings) of the available documents uphold a set of legends that originated with Gilman herself and that promulgate an almost saintly view of the pioneering feminist author. The documents made available in the collection enable scholars and students to evaluate firsthand Gilman's claims regarding the story's impact on its first audiences.Dock presents an authoritative text of "The Yellow Wall-paper" for the first time since its initial publication. Included are a textual commentary, full descriptions of all relevant texts, lists of editorial emendations and pre-copy-text substantive variants, a complete historical collation that documents all the variants found in important editions after 1892, and a listing of textual sources for more than one hundred reprintings of the story in anthologies and textbooks.Other documents in the casebook that illuminate the story's publication and reception histories include Gilman's successive and varying accounts of the story's history, her diary and manuscript log entries and letters pertaining to the story, W. D. Howells's correspondence with Gilman and Horace Scudder, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and his remarks on the story when he reprinted it in Great American Short Stories, and more than two dozen reviews of the story by Gilman's contemporaries.Taken together, the criticism, text, documents, and annotations constitute a rich and valuable contribution to Gilman scholarship, calling into question the feminist literary criticism that has helped to shape interpretations of a literary masterpiece.By Fred Lewis Pattee. 2012
Fred Lewis Pattee, long regarded as the father of American literary study, also wrote fiction. Originally published in 1905 by…
Henry Holt, The House of the Black Ring was Pattee’s second novel—a local-color romance set in the mountains of Central Pennsylvania. The book’s plot is driven by family feud, forbidden love, and a touch of the supernatural. This new edition makes this novel accessible to new generations of modern-day readers. General readers will find in The House of the Black Ring a thriller that preserves details of rural life and language during the late nineteenth century. Scholars will read it as an expression of cultural anxiety and change in the decades after the Civil War. An introduction by poet and essayist Julia Spicher Kasdorf situates the novel within the context of social and literary history, as well as Pattee’s own biography, and provides a compelling argument for its importance, not only as a literary artifact or record of local customs, but also as a reflection of Pattee’s own story intertwined with the history of Penn State at the turn of the twentieth century. Joshua Brown draws on his expertise in Pennsylvania German ethno-linguistics to interpret the dialect writing and to give readers a clearer view of the customs and regionalisms depicted in the book.By Elizabeth Cullinan. 2024
A captivating collection unveiling the intricacies of love, life, and legacyThese twelve stories, told from the viewpoint of young women…
in life’s mid-passage, explore the splendors and miseries of love, both carnal and spiritual, and cast back through sickness and health to the engraving experiences of childhood and forward to the rituals and release of death and its occasion for recall.They tell us of a dutiful but not guiltless daughter faced with the wreckage a father has made of his life, of the pain of trying to steer steadily through a doomed affair with a dearly loved married man, and of the ironies attending the funeral of a priest uncle and the birthday of an aged mother.From the outwardly unremarkable frame of a single day—on Fire Island or in New York—an entire life and an encompassment of humanity are movingly conveyed. Then, with inverted telescope, the most subjective of inner realms is explored—through a hospital stay, a sudden name change, or the surprising end of all those dreaded piano lessons.Taken together, these stories are a far greater whole than the sum of their remarkable parts, an unforgettable exploration of the paradoxical toughness and vulnerability that define the mortal condition.