Books published by publisher Shaf Digital Library

The Road is an autobiographical memoir by Jack London, first published in 1907. It is London's account of his experiences as a hobo in the 1890s, during the worst economic depression the United States had experienced up to that time. He describes his experiences hopping freight trains, "holding down" a train when the crew is trying to throw him off, begging for food and money, and making up extraordinary stories to fool the police. He also tells of the thirty days that he spent in the Erie County Penitentiary, which he described as a place of "unprintable horrors," after being "pinched" (arrested) for vagrancy. In addition, he recounts his time with Kelly's Army, which he joined up with in Wyoming and remained with until its dissolution at the Mississippi River.

David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 - 2 March 1930) was an important and controversial English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, sexuality, and instinctive behaviour. Lawrence's unsettling opinions earned him many enemies and he endured hardships, official persecution, censorship and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature, although some feminists object to the attitudes toward women and sexuality found in his works.Lawrence only became really famous after his death. His reputation lapsed in the 1930s: he had written too unconventionally and made too many enemies. By the 1960s he was widely seen as one of the great novelists of the twentieth century. By the 1990s his reputation was again in decline; neither a modernist revolutionary like Joyce, nor – like Virginia Woolf – reacting as a woman against the social and literary world which confined her, Lawrence occupied a problematic position in the writing history of the century: and he was unthinkingly branded both fascist and sexist. The republication of his work in a scholarly edition – and in particular the publication in full of the letters which are one of his greatest achievements – ensures that he will be seen differently in future. He was a writer far more concerned with the careful revision and linguistic precision of his work than his early reputation as an uneducated and unthinking genius suggested; he was ahead of his time in many of his attitudes to the individual and society; and he was a writer who explored an extraordinary range of subjects, in particular the need for a language of relationship which does not depend upon love. He was also precise about what he saw as the malign influence of Freud, and strikingly modern in his expression of man's need to be ecologically aware. He never believed in right-wing governments and hated the fascism he saw in Italy and Germany, though he always believed in human beings' need for authority; his writing certainly concentrated on female sexuality, but that was his particular (and in his period a strikingly original) focus. He was a writer who constantly struggled to find and to articulate the experience, not of a body or mind or spirit, but of the whole person. This was what he wrote about most tellingly, and what he himself insisted on remaining, to the end of his life.

This early work by Philip K. Dick was originally published in 1952 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'Beyond Lies the Wub' is a short story about a curious pig-like alien and its unusual intelligence. Philip Kindred Dick was born on December 16 1928, in Chicago, Illinois. Dick and his family moved to the Bay Area of San Francisco when he was young, and later on to Washington DC following his parents divorce. Dick attended Elementary school and then a Quaker school before the family moved back to California. It was around this time that Dick began to take an active interest in the science fiction genre, reading his first magazine 'Stirring Science Stories', at age twelve. Dick married five times between 1959 and 1973, and had three children. He sold his first story in 1951 and from that point on he wrote full-time, selling his first novel in 1955. In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote an estimated 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote an estimated 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. After his death, many of his stories made the transition to the big screen, with blockbuster films such as Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report being based on his works.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 — April 21, 1910), better known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American humorist, satirist, writer, and lecturer. Twain is most noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has since been called the Great American Novel, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He is also known for his quotations. During his lifetime, Clemens became a friend to presidents, artists, leading industrialists, and European royalty. Clemens enjoyed immense public popularity, and his keen wit and incisive satire earned him praise from both critics and peers. American author William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature." Other work of Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life On The Mississippi (1883), Roughing It (1872), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), The $30,000 Bequest and other short stories (1906), Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896), The War Prayer (1916), The Jumping Frog (1865)

At the peak of his career, Abraham "Bram" Stoker (November 8, 1847 – April 20, 1912) was working as an assistant for his friend, Shakespearean actor Sir Henry Irving, a well known and acclaimed actor in his day. But it would be the assistant whose name would outshine the boss’s. Stoker, an Irish novelist and short story writer, is known around the globe for his Gothic horror character Dracula. Inspired in part by his friend Irving, as well as the notorious Vlad the Impaler, Stoker studied stories about vampires, but ultimately his Count Dracula would become synonymous with the famous monsters. And drawing off his experience as a newspaper writer, Stoker wrote Dracula as a collection of realistic diary entries, telegrams, letters, ship's logs, and newspaper clippings, all of which made the story that much scarier and unique.

John Buchan (1st Baron Tweedsmuir) was a Scottish novelist and public servant who combined a successful career as an author of thrillers, historical novels, histories and biographies with a parallel career in public life. At the time of his death he was Governor-General of Canada. Buchan was born in Scotland and educated at Glasgow and Oxford Universities. After a brief career in law he went to South Africa in 1902 where he contributed to the reconstruction of the country following the Boer War. His love for South Africa is a recurring theme in his fiction.On returning to Britain, Buchan built a successful career in publishing with Nelsons and Reuters. During the first world war, he was Director of Information in the British government. He wrote a twenty-four volume history of the war, which was later abridged.Alongside his busy public life, Buchan wrote superb action novels, including the spy-catching adventures of Richard Hannay, whose exploits are described in The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle, Mr. Standfast, The Three Hostages, and The Island of Sheep.Apart from Hannay, Buchan created two other leading characters in Dickson McCunn, the shrewd retired grocer who appears in Huntingtower, Castle Gay, and The House of the Four Winds; and the lawyer Sir Edward Leithen, who features in the The Power-House,John Macnab, The Dancing Floor, The Gap in the Curtain and Sick Heart River.From 1927 to 1935 Buchan was Conservative M.P. for the Scottish Universities, and in 1935, on his appointment as Governor-General to Canada, he was made a peer, taking the title Baron Tweedsmuir. During these years he was still productive as a writer, and published notable historical biographies, such as Montrose, Sir Walter Scott, and Cromwell.

George Eliot was considered one of the greatest writers of the Victorian era and in this classic 1876 work, the last that she had completed, we find the only novel set in that era. "Daniel Deronda" begins by exploring the romantic relationship of its title character with Gwendolen Harleth and then through two separate flashbacks explores the history of the two characters. The novel, which was controversial for its exploration of the Jewish Zionist movement, is a mixture of social satire and an exploration of the morality of Victorian society. "Daniel Deronda" remains one of Eliot's most popular works and is an excellent example of the author's immense literary talent.

Lady Susan is a short epistolary novel by Jane Austen, possibly written in 1794 but not published until 1871.This epistolary novel, an early complete work that the author never submitted for publication, describes the schemes of the main character—the widowed Lady Susan—as she seeks a new husband for herself and one for her daughter. Although the theme, together with the focus on character study and moral issues, is close to Austen's published work (Sense and Sensibility was also originally written in the epistolary form), its outlook is very different, and the heroine has few parallels in 19th-century literature. Lady Susan is a selfish, unscrupulous and scheming woman, highly attractive to men, who tries to trap the best possible husband while maintaining a relationship with a married man. She subverts all the standards of the romantic novel: she has an active role, she is not only beautiful but intelligent and witty, and her suitors are significantly younger than she is (in contrast with Sense and Sensibility and Emma, which feature marriages by their female protagonists to men who are 16 years older). Although the ending includes a traditional reward for morality, Lady Susan herself is treated more leniently than the adulteress in Mansfield Park, who is severely punished.

Henry James (1843-1916), born in New York City, was the son of noted religious philosopher Henry James, Sr., and brother of eminent psychologist and philosopher William James. He spent his early life in America and studied in Geneva, London and Paris during his adolescence to gain the worldly experience so prized by his father. He lived in Newport, went briefly to Harvard Law School, and in 1864 began to contribute both criticism and tales to magazines.

George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, explores a fictional nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of modern changes. The proposed Reform Bill promises political change; the building of railroads alters both the physical and cultural landscape; new scientific approaches to medicine incite public division; and scandal lurks behind respectability. The quiet drama of ordinary lives and flawed choices are played out in the complexly portrayed central characters of the novel—the idealistic Dorothea Brooke; the ambitious Dr. Lydgate; the spendthrift Fred Vincy; and the steadfast Mary Garth. The appearance of two outsiders further disrupts the town’s equilibrium—Will Ladislaw, the spirited nephew of Dorothea’s husband, the Rev. Edward Casaubon, and the sinister John Raffles, who threatens to expose the hidden past of one of the town’s elite. Middlemarch displays George Eliot’s clear-eyed yet humane understanding of characters caught up in the mysterious unfolding of self-knowledge.

Edgar Allan Poe was an American poet, short story writer, playwright, editor, critic, essayist and one of the leaders of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of the macabre and mystery, Poe was one of the early American practitioners of the short story and a progenitor of detective fiction and crime fiction. He is also credited with contributing to the emergent science fiction genre. Poe died at the age of 40. The cause of his death is undetermined and has been attributed to alcohol, drugs, cholera, rabies, suicide (although likely to be mistaken with his suicide attempt in the previous year), tuberculosis, heart disease, brain congestion and other agents.