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In Manhattan, an elderly lawyer's business is growing. Having two scriveners in his employ, the lawyer advertises for a third to meet demand. Enter Bartleby, a glum albeit quality scrivener. However, the lawyer quickly discovers that something is off with his new employee. When asked to perform any duties outside of copying, Bartleby responds with a canned I would prefer not to. Soon Bartleby is living at the office and performing less and less at...
2) The Piazza
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Don Benito faltered; then, like some somnambulist suddenly interfered with, vacantly stared at his visitor, and ended by looking down on the deck. He maintained this posture so long, that Captain Delano, almost equally disconcerted, and involuntarily almost as rude, turned suddenly from him, walking forward to accost one of the Spanish seamen for the desired information. But he had hardly gone five paces, when with a sort of eagerness Don Benito invited...
3) The Fiddler
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A short story from the Classic Shorts collection: The Happy Failure by Herman Melville.
5) Daniel Orme
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A short story from the Classic Shorts collection: The Happy Failure by Herman Melville.
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The ten "sketches" comprising The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles are based largely on author Herman Melville's experience in the Galápagos Islands, combined with the recorded history of the islands, local folklore, and sailors' stories.
The earlier sketches present a daunting description of the islands and their fauna. Belying their tropical location, there is nothing of paradise in these volcanic remnants-home to large numbers of lizards, snakes,...
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"Billy Budd" is the final work of American author Herman Melville which was discovered amongst his papers three decades after his death and first published in Raymond Weaver's 1924 edition of "The Collected Works of Melville." The emergence of that collection as well as Weaver's 1921 biography, "Herman Melville: Man, Mariner and Mystic", sparked a revival of interest in the forgotten writer. Despite the complex and incomplete nature of the manuscript...
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Here are ten stories that represent some of the best short work of American master Herman Melville, including "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street," "The Happy Failure," and "The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids." Alongside THE HAPPY FAILURE, Harper Perennial will publish the short fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, and Oscar Wilde to be packaged in a beautifully designed, boldly colorful...
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Early American writer Herman Melville is best known for his great American novel "Moby Dick." However, Melville was also a prolific and honest short story writer. His stories play with irony, twisting the fates of his protagonists and making sure that the reader is left with a deep sense of wonder and enlightenment. Many of his works are set from an "outsider's" perspective of immigrants in early America, which is interesting considering that Melville...
Author
Description
Here are ten stories that represent some of the best short work of American master Herman Melville, including "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street," "The Happy Failure," and "The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids." Alongside THE HAPPY FAILURE, Harper Perennial will publish the short fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, and Oscar Wilde to be packaged in a beautifully designed, boldly colorful...
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When the narrator decides to build a piazza at his new country home, his neighbours are amused when he decides to construct it on the north-facing side of his property. But the narrator is content, and when his view provides a glimpse of silver gleaming in the distance, he is convinced that his piazza provides a view of fairyland, and he decides to discover what lies in the distant mountains. "The Piazza" was written as an introduction to Herman Melville's...
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Chosen for inclusion in William Evans Burton's Cyclopediae of Wit and Humor of 1857, with an illustration by Henry Louis Stephens, "The Lightning-Rod Man" was the one Melville tale to be available throughout his lifetime, thanks to reissues of this volume. More a parable than a character-driven story, The Lightning-rod man is a charlatan who tries to profit by selling fearful people lightning rods during thunderstorms. The narrator has a difficult...
14) The Bell-Tower
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Considered to be the least characteristic of Melville's stories, somewhat resembling the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, "The Bell-Tower" is a dark literary work that explores, though never fully reveals, its central mystery. An eccentric artist and architect dreams up plans for a magnificent bell tower. After receiving approval from the city, he happily begins construction. When city residents begin to notice strange occurrences...
15) Benito Cereno
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A fictionalized account about the revolt on a 19th-century Spanish slavery ship, Benito Cereno was first published in three installments in 1855. Melville scholar Merton M. Sealts, Jr. called the story "an oblique comment on those prevailing attitudes toward blacks and slavery in the United States that would ultimately precipitate civil war between North and South." The famous question of what had cast such a shadow upon Cereno was used by American...
16) The Encantadas
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"The Encantadas" (or Enchanted Isles), is a series of ten descriptive sketches, and a reminiscence from Melville's sailor days revealing the ecologically pristine Galápagos Islands as both enchanting and horrifying. Containing some of Melville's "most memorable prose", The Encantadas were a critical success at a time when Melville's fortunes were down. After publication, the New York Dispatch cited the chapters as universally considered among the...
17) The Piazza Tales
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The Piazza Tales (1856) is a collection of short stories by American writer Herman Melville. Before publication, five of its six stories appeared in Putnam's Monthly during a period of productivity with which Melville sought to achieve popular success as a writer of literary fiction. After the failure of his novels Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852), Melville struggled to find a publisher who would accept his work, and contemporary...
18) I and My Chimney
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The truth is, my wife, like all the rest of the world, cares not a fig for my philosophical jabber. Thus wrote Melville in 1856, in the house where he had penned 'Moby-Dick" some six years earlier (Arrowhead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts). An allegorical tale that reveals a very unsettling home life and professional life for this American genius, who by the time this story was published was nearly forgotten.
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