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Notes from Underground is widely considered the forerunner of modernist literature and one of Dostoevsky''s greatest literary achievements. The novel recounts the thoughts and encounters of a civil servant known only as The Underground Man who has quit his job and lives in a basement flat on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, surviving on a small inheritance. His humiliation turns to an inward-turning aggression that further reinforces his alienation from mainstream society.Includes a contribution by Patrick Maxwell, the letter that Dostoevsky wrote to his brother on the day he was to be executed, a biographical timeline, and suggested reading.

The Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson''s short novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is a classic of Victorian gothic fiction. The story of an upstanding, educated gentleman who seeks to access his own dark sides and gets caught in a maelstrom of evil captivated late nineteenth-century London readers and then the world. Today Jekyll and Hyde has become the universal reference for "man''s double being," but the story''s revelatory ending shows that Stevenson did far more than create an archetype in this compelling eerie tale. Frequently adapted for stage and screen, the story continues to mesmerize readers and belongs among the great works of world literature, alongside Mary Shelley''s Frankenstein, Oscar Wilde''s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Joseph Conrad''s Heart of Darkness.

First published in 1688, Oroonoko follows the tragic love story of a charismatic African prince and his beloved Imoinda. The eponymous hero is tricked into slavery and sold to European colonists in Surinam. Behn''s moving and deeply empathetic tale is structured as a first-person account of Oroonoko''s life, love, rebellion, and execution. This Warbler Classics edition includes an historically illuminating article by George Jay Smith from 1925 and an essay that provides context for Oroonoko, Behn''s most famous story, by Janet Todd, whose biography Aphra Behn: A Secret Life was published in 2017.

One of the most famous pieces of English literature of all time, Dracula is a towering work of Gothic fiction whose archetypal characters-Count Dracula and Abraham Van Helsing-have permeated popular culture since their first appearance in 1897. Drawing on Transylvanian folklore, Bram Stoker weaves his tale of horror through newspaper articles and the letters, diary entries, journals, telegrams, and ship's logs of a small cast of characters whose perilous encounters with Dracula have harrowing if not fatal consequences. Dracula has been adapted for film more than thirty times-though seldom with complete fidelity to the original narrative that continues to captivate countless readers the world over and inspire adaptations of all kinds.This Warbler Classics edition includes an essay on Dracula criticism over time and a biographical note on the life and work of Bram Stoker.

Kate Chopin''s absorbing 1899 novel The Awakening tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a married woman in New Orleans who, during a summer holiday, begins to question her conventional life. In this path-breaking novel, Chopin speculates more daringly than any before her about the consequences for middle-class women of late-nineteenth-century society''s unleashing of female desire. Celebrated today as a key text in American literature, it scandalized early critics and, precisely because of its boldness, jeopardized Chopin''s career. In this annotated, modernized edition-specially tailored for twenty-first-century readers-Rafael Walker highlights Chopin''s awareness of the privileged class''s exploitation of the the less-privileged, and includes a number of neglected stories that foreground Chopin''s feminist proclivities.

First published in 1923, Cane is a significant work of Modernist fiction and a literary Goliath of the Harlem Renaissance. In this wholly original novel Jean Toomer highlights issues of class and caste in a three-part pastiche of poems, vignettes, and play-like stories. The audacious, non-traditional structure of the book reflects the prismatic nature of the material itself. Toomer's close observations during a stint as school principal in Sparta, Georgia, primarily informed what Houston A. Baker, Jr. calls a "mysterious brand of Southern psychological realism that has been matched only in the best work of William Faulkner." This edition includes Jean Toomer's essay, "The Crock of Problems," in which the author discusses race in America and his own diverse ethnic heritage, and an extensive biographical note.

The Essential Poe gathers the most thrilling and enthralling of Poe's poems and short stories, including "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Black Cat," and "The Raven" as well as two illuminating essays on the nature of poetry and the art of storytelling. Sweeping yet concise, this new edition offers an engaging introduction written specifically for contemporary readers, pivotal excerpts from French poet Charles Baudelaire's path-breaking essays on Poe, and a detailed biographical timeline of Poe's brief, turbulent life.

From the dawn of storytelling we have been mesmerized, entertained, and fascinated by stories of other-worldly visitations. Our earliest folklore and oral tales suggest that even before recorded time, on every continent and in every language, we created narratives to animate our fear of the unknown. The classic stories in this anthology have been selected for their literary style, psychological complexity, and enduring power to electrify both the imagination and the senses. As varied, rooted in, and intriguingly expressive of their time and place, these stories give expression to a universal hunch that we live among ghosts-whether of the past or in the form of portending presences. From Edgar Allan Poe's timeless "The Tell-Tale Heart" to M. R. James's "Count Magnus" to Algernon Blackwood's subtly unnerving "The Willows" each of these tales rise to-and in many ways define-the high water mark of the genre. Includes the full text of H. P. Lovecraft's superb essay, On the Supernatural in Poetry, an illuminating history and exploration of the art of the weird story-along with brief author biographies.

When a dead body, carefully arranged and naked except for a pince-nez, is discovered in a bathtub, amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, deducing the man is not who he appears to be, takes it upon himself to solve the mystery, leading to an array of twists and turns that make Whose Body a masterful, intricate, immersive, and supremely intelligent whodunit-the novel that established Dorothy L. Sayers as a master of the mystery novel, while introducing the inimitable, brilliant, aristocrat Wimsey, one of the most unforgettable and popular heroes of the genre. This unique edition contains the full text of Whose Body, handsomely designed, plus commentary by P. D. James and a wonderful short treatise on the importance of reading by Sayers herself.

Recalling the great confessional narratives from St. Augustine to Jean Jacques Rousseau, from Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass to Henry Adams, James Weldon Johnson relates the emotionally gripping tale of a mixed-race piano prodigy who can pass for white in turn-of-the-century America. Forced into impossible choices created by an unjust society, the narrator describes his experiences as he travels from Jacksonville to New York City, the rural South to Paris, London, and beyond. The earliest first-person novel published by an African American author, Johnson''s powerfully unsentimental story examines the significance of chance and choice, the particularly American investment in self-invention, and the role of identity in shaping our lives. Its influence extends to Richard Wright, Ralph Waldo Ellison''s Invisible Man and even Barack Obama''s Dreams from my Father. Includes several of Johnson''s influential and still timely New York Age editorials and a detailed biographical timeline.

Includes The New York Times article on the obituary Wells wrote for himself in 1936, ten years before his death, and a detailed biographical timeline.In Victorian England a gentleman inventor identified simply as the Time Traveller tells a dinner tale of his journey to 802,701 A.D. where the world is populated by the peaceful if apathetic Eloi, a society of childlike adults, and the brutal tunnel-dwelling Morlocks. After a harrowing escape and witnessing horrific futuristic landscapes he returns to the present day where he has been away for only three hours. His incredulous listeners are speechless when the Time Traveller produces proof of his journey. With this slender yet fully realized work of imagination Wells created a colossal classic of enduring fascination.The Warbler Classics edition pairs The Time Machine with Wells’ short story “The Star.” As a burning star hurdles through space on a collision course with Earth, the warnings of scientists fail to arouse public alarm—even while flooding, earthquakes, intense heat, and melting ice caps due to climate change cause massive havoc.

Jack London’s beloved 1903 masterpiece, The Call of the Wild, is unsurpassed as the gripping adventure of Buck, a California wolf-dog enjoying the good life who is brutally kidnapped and sold into the Canadian Yukon as a sled-dog during the gold rush of the 1890s. Buck quickly has to shed his civilized ways to survive the harsh new laws of fang and club, but after terrifying challenges he triumphs by discovering his true nature, which leads him to authentic love and finally an authentic life. Far more than a deeply moving animal fable, London’s harrowing and sublime tale probes fundamental questions of human existence and our relationship to the natural world.Includes London’s haunting short story “To Build a Fire,” his 1903 article “How I Became a Socialist,” his 1910 essay The Other Animals, an afterword by Ulrich Baer, and a biographical timeline.

Heart of Darkness describes a steamboat voyage up and down the Congo River by a British sea captain named Charles Marlow, who is commissioned to fetch a renegade ivory collector called Kurtz. On the trip Marlow witnesses scenes of shocking abuse, culminating in his encounter with Kurtz. Even while Africa and its people remain opaque to Marlow, the hunt for Kurtz becomes a haunting journey of self-discovery and a spectacular indictment of European imperialism. This complex meditation on colonialism, civilization, and corruptibility has enthralled readers for more than a hundred years and inspired dozens of adaptations, including Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now (1979).

Frankenstein is the most celebrated horror story ever written and one of the best-selling books of all time. It is the tale of Victor Frankenstein, a scientist whose unbridled quest for the secret of life unleashes a creature that embodies our deepest fears about the moral bounds of human progress. Ever since its publication in 1818, readers have been fascinated with the iconic image of Frankenstein’s monster and the unresolved ethical questions his creation challenges us to answer.At once a cautionary tale and a gripping novel about the destructive potential in human ingenuity and the desperate search for love and attachment, Frankenstein lives on in countless re-imaginings in literature and film. This Warbler Classics edition uses Shelley’s original 1818 text and includes an afterword by Ulrich Baer, Mary Shelley’s introduction to the 1831 edition, and a detailed biographical timeline.

Edwin A. Abbott's hallucinatory tale has captivated readers for more than a hundred years-including contemporary scientists such as Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking. In this mind-expanding satire, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions describes a two-dimensional world organized by strict caste system of geometrical forms. The narrator, A. Square, introduces us to Flatland before describing his revelatory explorations of Lineland, a one-dimensional world, and Pointland, a world of no dimensions, and the hitherto inconceivable three-dimensional world of Spaceland, through which he is ushered by his Virgil-like guide, Sphere. In Flatland, Square is regarded as a heretic and imprisoned for his belief in the existence of a third, and possibly even a fourth, dimension. Although it did not achieve popular success on its publication in 1884, Flatland gained a broad audience after the publication of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which focused attention on the concept of a fourth dimension. The book enjoyed another renaissance with the advent of modern science fiction in the late 1930s and is now widely acknowledged as a pioneering work of mathematical fiction.Includes the author's original illustrations and a short biography.

The publication of Encounters in1923 launched what would become a luminous forty-year writing career that spanned the advent of modernist literature, the Second World War, and the fraught years preceding the political turmoil of "the Troubles" in Ireland. These gem-like stories display Elizabeth Bowen's uncanny ability to represent un-belonging, dispossession, and the fragility of selfhood. With astonishing literary adroitness and psychological acuity, she depicts the comedy of British class society, the fracturing of external perception, the pervasive influence of suppressed sexuality, and the abiding force of adolescent epiphanies. Her deft use of language to convey the interior atmosphere of her characters' lives renders these tales as moving as they are timeless.

This essential trilogy gathers Kahlil Gibran's The Madman (1918), The Forerunner (1920), and his masterpiece, The Prophet (1923), which has sold millions of copies in more than twenty countries. In The Madman Gibran introduces the themes that preoccupy his subsequent writings-among them truth, love, forgiveness, grief, work, pleasure, death, and freedom. Gibran's second collection of parables and poems, The Forerunner, anticipates The Prophet both in its concerns and its mastery of Gibran's timeless, pure, lyrical style. Approachable, profound, and wise, The Prophet remains a work of singular transcedence. Together, all three works reveal why Gibran remains an inspiring touchstone and guide for millions of readers.A NEW INTRODUCTION illumines Gibran's beguilingly simple poems and tales, drawing attention to the radical proposal they contain. Also included is a biographical timeline that provides a succinct overview of Gibran's personal life and the key events of his artistic career.