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Description

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, a fictional autobiography of the eponymous narrator, contains—perhaps surprisingly—little about either his life or opinions, but what it does have is a meandering journey through the adventures of his close family and their associates. The book is famous for being more about the explanatory diversions and rabbit-holes that the narrator takes us down than the actual happenings he set out to describe, but in doing so he paints a vivid picture of the players and their personal stories.

Published two volumes at a time over the course of eight years, Tristram Shandy was an immediate commercial success although not without some confusion among critics. Sterne’s exploration of form that pushed at the contemporary limits of what could be called a novel has been hugely influential, garnering admirers as varied as Marx, Schopenhauer, Joyce, Woolf and Rushdie. The book has been translated into many other languages and adapted for the stage, radio, and film.

Description

Oliver Twist, or The Parish Boy’s Progress was Charles Dickens’ second novel, following The Pickwick Papers, and was published as a serial in the magazine Bentley’s Miscellany between 1837 and 1839. It details the misadventures of its eponymous character, Oliver Twist, born in a Victorian-era workhouse, his mother dying within minutes of his birth. He is raised in miserable conditions, half-starved, and then sent out as an apprentice to an undertaker. Running away from this situation, he walks to London and falls under the influence of a criminal gang run by an old man called Fagin, who wants to employ the child as a pickpocket.

The novel graphically depicts the wretched living conditions of much of the poor people of Victorian times and the disgusting slums in which they were forced to live. It has been accused of perpetrating anti-Semitic stereotypes in the character of Fagin, almost always referred to as “the Jew” in the book’s early chapters. Interestingly, while the serial was still running in the magazine, Dickens was eventually persuaded that he was wrong in this and removed many such usages in later episodes. He also introduced more kindly Jewish characters in such later novels as Our Mutual Friend.

Oliver Twist was immediately popular in serial form, with its often gripping story and lurid details. It has remained one of Dicken’s best-loved novels, and the story has often been made into films and television series, as well as into a very popular musical, Oliver!.

Description

Melville’s pen ranges far and wide in this collection of his short stories and novellas, with subjects including a faraway mountain lodge, a magnificent rooster, a haunted table, and of course the inimitable scrivener Bartleby, whose tale is now viewed as one of the great English short stories. While his earlier novels had been well received, by this point in his career his star had waned, and it was only in the early twentieth century that his work, including these short stories, started to get the recognition it still enjoys today.

This volume collects Melville’s short stories verified to be in the U.S. public domain, in the order they were originally published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and Putnam’s Monthly Magazine (along with “The Piazza” which was written for the collection The Piazza Tales). The racism displayed in “Benito Cereno” against the African slaves is somewhat shocking to modern readers given our greater understanding of their story, but was common in the mid-nineteenth century.

Description

Poirot Investigates is a classic collection of Agatha Christie’s short stories first published in 1924. It follows the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and his companion Arthur Hastings as they solve a series of mysteries. From threatening letters to Egyptian curses to missing wills, Poirot’s little grey cells never falter. While Hastings and the reader are lost in the minutiae of the case, Poirot sees it all—and with impeccable attention to detail, finds the culprit.

Description

Cicero composed these discourses while in his villa in Tusculum as he was mourning the death of his daughter, in order to convey his philosophy of how to live wisely and well. They take the form of fictional dialogues between Cicero and his friends, with each one focusing on a particular Stoic theme. The first, “On the Contempt of Death,” reminds us that mortality is nothing to be upset about. The second, “On Bearing Pain,” reassures us that philosophy is a balm for pains of the body. The third and fourth, “On Grief of Mind” and “Other Perturbations of the Mind,” say that this extends also to mental anguish and unrest. The last, “Whether Virtue Alone Be Sufficient for a Happy Life,” tells us that the key to happiness is already in our hands: it is not to rely on accidents of fate, but on our own efforts in areas of life that are under our own control.

Description

William Sydney Porter, known to readers as O. Henry, was a true raconteur. As a draftsman, a bank teller, a newspaper writer, a fugitive from justice in Central America, and a writer living in New York City, he told stories at each stop and about each stop. His stories are known for their vivid characters who come to life, and sometimes death, in only a few pages. But the most famous characteristic of O. Henry’s stories are the famous “twist” endings, where the outcome comes as a surprise both to the characters and the readers. O. Henry’s work was widely recognized and lauded, so much so that a few years after his death an award was founded in his name to recognize the best American short story (now stories) of the year.

This collection gathers all of his available short stories that are in the U.S. public domain. They were published in various popular magazines of the time, as well as in the Houston Post, where they were not attributed to him until many years after his death.

Description

Eugene Onegin is bored: bored of the city, of parties, and of the superficial St. Petersburg social scene. So when a newly-deceased uncle leaves him his country mansion, he jumps at the chance to play the rural lord. There he meets his new neighbours Lenski, a young poet and stark contrast to Onegin’s affected nonchalance, and Tattiana, a dreamy but introverted romantic, and triggers a set of events with tragic consequences.

Serialized over the course of seven years starting in 1825, Pushkin’s novel in verse was and is a huge influence on Russian literature. Its unusual verse structure combined with Pushkin’s own commentary on the social canvas of the time has meant that it has remained relevant and read to this day. Eugene Onegine has been translated into many different languages, and into many different formats including successful operas and films.

Description

Between 1906 and 1921 John Galsworthy published three novels chronicling the Forsyte family, a fictional upper-middle class family at the end of the Victorian era: The Man of Property, In Chancery, and To Let. In 1922 Galsworthy wrote two interconnecting short stories to bind the three novels together and published the whole as The Forsyte Saga.

While the novels follow the Forsyte family at large, the action centers around Soames Forsyte—the scion of a nouveau-riche London tea merchant—his wife Irene, and their unhappy marriage. Soames and his sprawling family are portrayed as stereotypes of unhappy gilded-age wealth, their family having entered the industrial revolution poor farmers and emerged as wealthy bourgeoise. Their rise was powered by their capacity to acquire, won at the expense of their capacity for almost anything else.

Thematically, the saga focuses on the mores of the wealthy upper-middle class, which was still a newish feature in the class landscape of England at the time; duty, honor, and love; and the rapidly growing differences across generations occurring in a period of war and social change. The characters are complex and nuanced, and the situations they find themselves in—both of their own making, and of the making of society around them—provide a rich field for analyzing the close of the Victorian age, the dawn of the Edwardian age, and the societal frameworks that were forged in that frisson.

Galsworthy went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932 for The Forsyte Saga, one of the rare occasions in which the Swedish Academy has awarded a prize for a specific work instead of for a lifetime of work.

Description

Upper-class New York gentleman Newland Archer is set to wed May Welland in a picture-perfect union when the bride’s cousin, Ellen Olenska, returns from a failed marriage overseas. As Newland endeavors to help Countess Olenska be reinstated into the family’s good graces, his affections for her grow. Newland soon finds himself torn between his desire to conform to the society he knows and his new-found passion for the forbidden Countess.

The Age of Innocence was originally published in 1920 as a four-part series in Pictoral Review, then later that same year as Wharton’s twelfth novel. It went on to win the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the award.

Description

The Water of the Wondrous Isles is a landmark in fantasy fiction. First published a year after Morris’s death in 1897 by Kelmscott Press—Morris’s own printing company—the novel follows Birdalone, a young girl who is stolen as a baby by a witch who takes her to serve in the woods of Evilshaw.

After she encounters a wood fairy that helps her escape the witch’s clutches, Birdalone embarks on a series of adventures across the titular Wondrous Isles. These isles are used by Morris both as parables for contemporary Britain and as vehicles for investigating his radical socialist beliefs. As Birdalone travels through the isles she slowly evolves into the embodiment of the Victorian “new woman,” embracing hard physical labor, healthy exercise, higher education, socialist values, and financial freedom, while rejecting sexual exploitation, physical abuse of both women and children, and the restrictive sexual mores of the era. This makes her unique in the fantasy fiction of the era as one of the genre’s first examples of a strong female hero.

This socialist-feminist allegory is presented in an Arthurian-style fantasy world complete with magic, witches, fairies, knights both chivalrous and evil, and castles (indeed, anyone doubting the allegorical nature of the work only needs to look at the name of the tale’s main redoubt: “The Castle of the Quest”). The language is purposefully archaic, reveling in vocabulary drawn from the language’s Anglo roots; and the prose is lent a hypnotic quality by its lack of quotation marks to offset dialog, and its short chapters characterized by a fairy-tale-narrative voice.