This beautiful new edition features unpublished notes for the novel and other illuminating documentary mate- rial, all of which is included in a new Afterword by Tappan Wilder. "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714,the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel...

A young man uses the opinions of his butler Jeeves to make major life decisions.

"Winn Van Meter is heading for his family's retreat on the pristine New England island of Waskeke. Normally a haven of calm, for the next three days this sanctuary will be overrun by tipsy revelers as Winn prepares for the marriage of his daughter Daphne to the affable young scion Greyson Duff. Winn's wife, Biddy, has planned the wedding with military precision, but arrangements are sideswept by a storm of salacious misbehavior and intractable lust:...

Emma dreams of sophistication, wealth, and romance, but what she gets is a marriage to Charles Bovary, a provincial, middle-class doctor who is a devoted but boring husband. She tries her hardest to be a loyal and loving wife, even as she grows to resent him more and more for his insufferable dullness. Soon, though, she is seduced by the dashing Rodolphe and gives into her desires. In their affair, Emma believes she has finally found true, passionate...

This prize-winning debut collection of 15 stories by the acclaimed Irish author are “among the finest contemporary stories written recently in English” (The Observer).
 
The compassionate, witty, and unsettling short stories collected here announced Claire Keegan as one of Ireland’s most exciting and versatile new talents and earned comparison to the works of Joyce Carol Oates, Alison Lurie,...

This work of art reflects life in Ireland at the turn of the last century, and by rejecting euphemism, reveals to the Irish their unromantic reality. Each of the 15 stories offers glimpses into the lives of ordinary Dubliners, and collectively they paint a portrait of a nation. Map.

Set in the early nineteenth-century English countryside, an English squire yields to the temptations of an innocent country girl and crime, remorse, and suffering are the consequences.

"Jude Fawley, an impoverished stonemason, aspires to the ministry and fails to fulfill the opposite expectations of the two women he loves in Victorian society." *** "Marriage, the Church of England, and the British university system all come under criticism in a story about two cousins who love each other and want to improve their lot in life." *** "In this haunting love story, a couple who have each fled a previous marriage find love and fulfillment...

The death of Sir Edward Crick has unleashed a torrent of gossip through the seedy taverns and elegant ballrooms of Oxfordshire. Few mourn the dissolute young man -- except his sister, the beautiful Lady Lydia Farrell. When her husband comes under suspicion of murder, she seeks expert help from Dr. Thomas Silkstone, a young anatomist from Philadelphia.

Middlemarch is a recognized masterpiece that explores the complex social world of 19th century England. It is concerned with the lives of several ordinary people, albeit ones with high social standing. The novel explores the very fabric of Victorian society in the 1800s, showing how various human passions--heroism, egotism, love, and lust--interrelate within this society.