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Description

Pygmalion is a 5-act play by George Bernard Shaw. It was written in 1912 and first produced in 1913. The plot revolves around Professor Henry Higgins’ bet with a colleague over whether he can transform a low-class flower girl, Liza Doolittle, into the equivalent of a Duchess in just 6 months. Pygmalion was a Greek mythological figure who fell in love with a sculpture he had carved and was a popular theme in Victorian drama.

Most people would be familiar with the characters Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins from the hit 1956 musical My Fair Lady, which was adapted from Pygmalion, though the plots differ in small but significant ways. In particular Shaw wanted to avoid any sense of a “happy ending” and, after viewing a performance of the play where an extra scene had been added, he wrote a sequel which definitively states what came after. The sequel was included in the published edition.

Description

The Conjure Woman is a collection of fantastical stories narrated by Julius, a former slave, about life on the nearby plantations prior to the Civil War. Each involves an element of magic, be it a vine that dooms those who eat from it or a man transformed into a tree to avoid being separated from his wife. Julius’s audience, a married couple who have just moved to the South to cultivate grapes, listen on with mixed sympathy and disbelief. They disagree on whether Julius is telling the truth and whether there is some deeper significance to the tales. At turns humorous and unsettling, these stories provide a surprising lens into the realities of slavery.

The text is notable for spelling out Julius’s spoken accent. Although Julius has some stereotypical features of a simple-minded old slave, he is often regarded as a more clever and complicated figure. He seems to tell his tales not only to entertain his listeners, but to trick them to his advantage.

Many of these stories first appeared in national magazines, where they received popular acclaim, before being assembled as their own volume in 1899. Charles W. Chesnutt’s race was not mentioned by the publisher, nor could many guess his African heritage based on his appearance. However, Chesnutt embraced his African-American identity and was a prominent activist for black rights. The Conjure Woman, his first book, is considered an important early work of African-American fiction.

This edition includes four additional Julius tales that appeared in magazines but were not collected during Chesnutt’s lifetime.

Description

Greenmantle is the second of John Buchan’s novels to feature Richard Hannay, a Scottish intelligence office in the British army, and as such is the sequel to The Thirty-Nine Steps.

The book gives the account of Hannay and his associate’s separate journeys through war-torn Europe to Constantinople to thwart an uprising that is poised to throw the Middle East, India, and North Africa into disarray, changing the course of the war.

The book was popular when first published and although it has never been made into a film, the director Alfred Hitchcock was said to prefer Greenmantle to The Thirty-Nine Steps, and considered filming it on several occasions.

Description

Written in 1881, when melodrama and farce were still at their peak of popularity, Ibsen’s Ghosts is a three-act tragedy that explores uncomfortable, even forbidden themes. It is also a highly critical commentary on the morality of the day. The play centers around the widow of a prominent Norwegian sea captain whose son returns home and, with tragic consequences, revives the ghosts of the past that she has long labored to put to rest.

Ghosts immediately became a source of controversy for its inclusion of topics like venereal disease, incest, and euthanasia, and it was banned from being performed in England for many years. Its arrival signals a shift in the nature of theatre and, despite negative criticism, it was translated into other languages and performed in Sweden, Germany, and New York within a few years of its debut. It stands now as one of the works considered to have ushered in the era of modern drama.

Description

Gustave Flaubert was an influential novelist who had both the characteristics of a romanticist and a realist. The short stories in this collection put that dichotomy on display.

Flaubert wrote the first story, “The Dance of Death” when he was only 17 years old. It is written in a play format—though sometimes referred to as a prose poem—and features a conversation between Death, Satan and Nero. “The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller” is a story about Julian the Hospitaller, a man who shares some similarities with Oedipus; “A Simple Soul” tells the story of a servant girl named Felicité; and lastly “Herodias” retells the beheading of St. John the Baptist.

Description

Ivan Bunin was a Russian author, poet and diarist, who in 1933 (at the age of 63) won the Nobel Prize in Literature “for the strict artistry with which he has carried on the classical Russian traditions in prose writing.” Viewed by many at the time as the heir to his friend and contemporary Chekhov, Bunin wrote his poems and stories with a depth of description that attracted the admiration of his fellow authors. Maxim Gorky described him as “the best Russian writer of the day” and “the first poet of our times,” and his translators include D. H. Lawrence and Leonard Woolf.

This collection includes the famous The Gentleman from San Francisco, partially set on Capri where Bunin spent several winters, and stories told from the point of view of many more characters, including historic Indian princes, emancipated Russian serfs, desert prophets, and even a sea-faring dog. The short stories collected here are all of the available public domain translations into English, in chronological order of the original Russian publication. They were translated by S. S. Koteliansky, D. H. Lawrence, Leonard Woolf, Bernard Guilbert Guerney, and The Russian Review.

Description

Arthur Pinero wrote The Second Mrs. Tanqueray in 1893 after penning several successful farces. Playing on the “woman with a past” plot that was popular in melodramas, Pinero steered it in a more serious direction, centering the play around the social consequences arising when Aubrey Tanqueray remarries in an attempt to redeem a woman with a questionable past.

The play’s structure is based on the principles of the “well-made play” popular throughout the 19th-century. But just as Wilde manipulated the conventions of the “well-made play” to produce a new form of comedy, so did Arthur Pinero manipulate it, forgoing the happy ending to produce an elevated form of tragedy.

The Second Mrs. Tanqueray was first performed in 1893, at the St. James Theatre, London, at a time when England was still resisting the growing movement in Europe towards realism and the portrayal of real social problems and human misconduct. But while it was regarded as shocking, it ran well and made a substantial profit. Theatre historian J. P. Wearing phrased it thus: “although not as avant-garde as Ibsen’s plays, Tanqueray confronted its fashionable St. James’s audiences with as forceful a social message as they could stomach.”

Description

Charles Swinburne and his friend, the private detective Rupert Grant, are startled when Major Brown recounts the things that happened to him that morning. Along with Rupert’s brother, the ex-judge Basil Grant, they launch headlong into their investigation only to discover that the antagonist is a member of the Club of Queer Trades. Over the course of six short stories, the secrets of the Club come to light in surprising ways.

The Club of Queer Trades was one of G. K. Chesterton’s earlier works, and was originally serialized in Harper’s Weekly in 1904 before being collected into a novel in 1905. In recent years it was produced as a six-part radio drama by the BBC.

Description

Arkady, a university graduate, returns from St. Petersburg to his father’s estate with his mentor Bazarov—a nihilist.

Fathers and Children (also known as Fathers and Sons) is a novel written in 1862 by Russian writer Ivan Turgenev and published in Moscow by The Russian Messenger.

The main theme of the novel is the conflict between two generations—the “fathers,” the liberal serf owners, and the “children,” nihilists who reject their authority and traditions.

Turgenev’s novel also helped popularize the term “nihilism,” especially after the word’s use by an influential Russian nihilist movement in the 1860s.

Despite being harshly criticized in Russia, the novel was very well received in Europe, being praised by influential novelists like Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant, making it the first Russian novel to gain recognition in the Western literary world.

Description

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe’s classic interpretation of the Dr. Faustus legend, was first performed in London by the Admiral’s Men around 1592. It is believed to be the first dramatization of this classic tale wherein Faustus, a German scholar, trades his soul to Lucifer in return for magical powers and the command over the demon Mephistopheles. Faustus at first seeks to expand his knowledge of the universe, but soon finds that a deal with the devil brings little satisfaction. All too soon the contract expires, and Faustus is faced with the prospect of eternal damnation.

Two principal versions of this play exist, one based on the 1604 quarto (the A text) and a longer, emended version published in 1616 (the B text). This edition is based on Havelock Ellis’s 1893 edition of the 1604 text (the A text is currently believed by many scholars to be the closest to Marlowe’s original).

Often considered to be Marlowe’s greatest work, Doctor Faustus builds on the ancestry of the medieval morality play, but brings a more sympathetic view to the straying hero than those precursors to Elizabethan drama, and even ventures to pose questions of common Christian doctrine. This is the last play written by Marlowe before he was killed in a Deptford tavern.