Books in Literary Classics series

One of the great and ever popular masters of the English novel is represented here by every one of her novels. Includes Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, and the lesser-known Lady Susan. This Library of Literary Classics edition is bound in padded leather with luxurious gold-stamping on the front and spine, satin ribbon marker and gilded edges. Other titles in this series include: Charlotte & Emily Bronte: The Complete Novels; Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Works; Mark Twain: Selected Works; Charles Dickens: Four Complete Novels; Lewis Carroll: The Complete, Fully Illustrated Works; and William Shakespeare: The Complete Works.

The author who today is probably best known for her novel The Awakening initially established her literary reputation with short stories about life in rural Louisiana during the late nineteenth century.The stories collected in Bayou Folk present remarkably vivid snapshots of daily life in a now vanished world. Many of them highlight the relations between blacks and whites in a society where the rules of engagement still reflected the entrenched patterns of slavery some two decades after the Civil War.As she was ahead of her time regarding women's rights, Chopin was also farsighted about race relations. Perhaps the story "Desiree's Baby" about the birth of a mixed-race baby to two "white" parents best expresses the uneasy relationship between blacks and whites in the old South, and its strict codes against miscegenation.Chopin's gifts for capturing the dialects of the region and for telling a compelling story in memorable vignettes provide the reader with a richly rewarding experience.

Novelist and short story writer Jack London (1876-1916) contemplated the strange theory of astral travel, penning The Star Rover in 1914. The last of London's fifty books, which include White Fang and The Call of the Wild, The Star Rover centers on San Quentin prison inmate Darrell Standing, a former university professor who is serving a life sentence for murdering a colleague. To escape the tortures of his confinement, he withdraws into dreams of past lives in which he experiences what he calls his "eternal recurrence on earth." Thus the fantastic becomes a vehicle for exposing the social injustices of the U.S. prison system.One of America's great turn-of-the-century writers, London lived as a sailor, waterfront loafer, and hobo, embarking on a successful literary career based on his travels, observations of nature, and his outspoken position in the Socialist Party. Internationally recognized literary critic and essayist Leslie Fiedler, the former Samuel Clemens Professor at SUNY Buffalo, provides an insightful introduction to this lost classic.

This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Edition includes a glossary and reader's notes to help the modern reader fully appreciate London's masterful weaving of science, philosophy, and the storyteller's art. This gripping story follows the adventures of the loyal dog Buck, who is stolen from his comfortable family home and forced into the harsh life of an Alaskan sled dog. Passed from master to master, Buck embarks on an extraordinary journey that ends with his becoming the legendary leader of a wolf pack. Included in this Edition is the short story, To Build a Fire, London’s biting commentary on human folly in the face of indomitable natural forces.

The beloved March girls—beautiful Meg, tomboy Jo, kind and gentle Beth, and spunky Amy—come alive in this manga-style retelling of Little Women. With their country embroiled in war and their father far from home, the four sisters find themselves thrust into new and trying situations, and with little money and a hard winter ahead, they must learn to adapt. In the year that follows, the girls learn about compassion, sacrifice, love, and more about themselves and each other than they ever imagined. About the Manga Literary Classics series:Combining the exciting graphics of manga style with classic stories, these beloved works by literary icons are accessible and entertaining to today's children, as well as educational—each story is accompanied by a time line that puts the story's events in historical perspective. Visually stunning, this series is a beautifully updated version of yesterday's literary comics, sure to hook young readers on these perennial classics and the written word. Manga, one of the fastest growing segments of children's literature, is incredibly popular amongst school-age children and lends itself exceptionally well to the vivid stories in this series.

Although it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, this stirring novel about World War I remains far less known than Cather's established classics such as My Ántonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop. In the lucid, unadorned prose that was her hallmark, Cather brings to life the simple Nebraska farm folk and their tranquil rural lifestyle, showing how the Great War, seemingly so far away on the Old Continent, eventually touches them all.More than half of the novel is devoted to the slow rhythms of the prairie farmland centering on the Wheeler homestead. The novel's protagonist, Claude Wheeler, a strong, healthy, red-headed farm boy, is physically a typical representative of his sturdy sodbuster family and hard-working neighbors. But mentally the boy has little in common with their narrow outlooks, and the limited horizons of his parochial community make him restless and filled with a barely suppressed discontent. Through a series of striking vignettes, Cather brilliantly reveals Claude's search for some greater purpose to his life beyond the routines of farm life.Gradually, the widening war in Europe sneaks up on the rural Nebraska region, as newspaper reports of refugees and German atrocities begin to stir the emotions of the local young men. When the United States finally enters the conflict, Claude is one of the first to enlist, seeing purpose, adventure, and commitment to some larger ideal in the call to arms.Claude's longings for radically new experiences are more than amply realized overseas in sobering encounters with suffering French women and children, the battle-scarred English "Tommies," and the tenacious German enemy.One of Ours is a memorable testament to the shattering effects of war on youth and ideals, a powerful depiction of mechanized battle, and its life-changing effects on one Nebraska farm boy and the people he left behind.

The first of his major novels of the 1920s, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street satirizes the manners of the American Midwest. Here is the story of Carol Kennicott, who, to be accepted, must adapt to the ways of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. This ground-breaking novel attacks conformism, commercialism, moneygrubbing, and the decline in what Lewis saw as the American ideals of freedom and respect for individuality.