Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Literary History & Criticism

Ardis Cameron mines extensive interviews, fan letters, and archival materials including contemporary cartoons and cover images from film posters and foreign editions to tell how the story of a patricide in a small New England village circulated over time and became a cultural phenomenon.

Designed to be compatible with virtually every standard textbook in its subject field, Barron's EZ-101 Study Keys gives you a valuable overview of your college-level course. From Middle English through the modern writers, English Literature covers the key themes, quotations, and literary terms.

Master wit Mark Twain selected these 27 stories himself by 15 of his favorite 19th-century authors. The order follows that which Twain placed them in in the original anthology, published in 1888. He indulged his comic fancy rather than making a textbook in which all themes or authors are placed together, saying that "This way you will have to peruse the whole thing before discovering that one of your favorites is not included." Among others, you'll find: Artemus Ward, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Francis Lee Pratt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Frederick W. Cozzens, and Twain himself.

Robert Browning's intensely romantic love affair with Elizabeth Barrett inspired some of literature's most celebrated verse. His view that love is the key to the meaning of life and life's animating force is evident in these collected poems.

Torn by a quirk of fate from his life as a dilettante and intellectual, Humphrey van Weydon finds himself at the whim of the ruthless Wolf Larsen. The 2 men - the one youthful, idealistic, and upper-class, the other ruthless, dangerous, self-taught, and self-determined - inevitably become adversaries. As he does in Call of the Wild and White Fang, Jack London dramatizes in this story the violent encounter between safe, genteel comfort and a brutal set of circumstances.

Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in a provincial town with a bizarre but seductive proposition for local landowners. He proposes to buy the names of their serfs who have died but who are still registered on the census, saving their owners from paying tax on them. But what collateral will Chichikov receive for these "souls"?

As he was composing what was to become his most enduring and popular book, E. B. White was obeying that oft-repeated maxim: "Write what you know." Helpless pigs, silly geese, clever spiders, greedy rats - White knew all of these characters in the barns and stables where he spent his favorite hours. In The Story of Charlotte's Web, Michael Sims shows how White solved what critic Clifton Fadiman once called "the standing problem of the juvenile-fantasy writer: how to find, not another Alice, but another rabbit hole."

This collection contains poems Elizabeth Browning wrote in her early days as well as the last poems she wrote before her death at 55: ballads, religious, social-reforming, and political verse. Included are: "The Dream," "The Image of God," and "The Tempest."

Lessons at the Halfway Point is a deeply thought-provoking look at one man’s courageous journey to understand life from the perspective of having just turned 40. It is both a wry reflection on the past as well as an optimistic look to a challenging future. Nothing escapes Michael Levine’s critical eye, insightful mind, and often humorous spin on our world and ourselves.

This chilling tale of greed, lust, and deception opens on a midwinter night when Felix Canaris, a despairing writer about to take his own life, is saved by a knock at the door. The mysterious visitor, a Jasper Helwyze, promises Felix fame and fortune in return for his complete devotion.

Mark Twain's complete, uncensored Autobiography was an instant best seller when the first volume was published in 2010, on the centennial of the author's death, as he requested. Published to rave reviews, the Autobiography was hailed as the capstone of Twain's career. It captures his authentic and unsuppressed voice, speaking clearly from the grave and brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions. The eagerly awaited second volume delves deeper into Twain's life, uncovering the many roles he played in his private and public worlds.

First published in 1915, The Voyage Out marked the literary debut of one of the great pioneers of the modern novel. Virginia Woolf's extraordinary narrative follows a group of lively, eccentric British tourists embarking on a sea voyage from London to South America. Among them is Rachel Vinrace, a shy, motherless young woman who has been taken along under the wing of her Aunt Helen, so that she may learn "how to live".

Trilby opens in the Latin Quarter of Paris, where Trilby O'Ferrall is working as an artist's model. Her grace and ingenuous charm make a poignant contrast to the cruel magnetism of Svengali, under whose spell she falls. Using hypnotic powers, Svengali shapes her into a virtuoso singer, Europe's most captivating soprano. But her golden voice, and even her life, become fatally tied to him.