“The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals,” writes James Thurber in the introduction to this classic collection honoring the dogs, real and imaginary, that populated his life and work. These two dozen stories and essays...

After graduating from college in 1825, Nathaniel Hawthorne returned home to Salem, Massachusetts, where he lived with his mother and sisters for most of the next two decades, honing his craft in his third-story bedroom. During that time, he kept a series of journals, now called the American Notebooks, that became a vital taproot for his stories and novels. They...

In the far-flung archipelago of Earthsea, dragons fly on the winds of the western isles and a grove of trees is the magical center of the world. A project that spanned her celebrated career, Ursula K. Le Guin’s beloved Earthsea saga has thrilled generations of readers, becoming one of the foundational classics of the fantasy genre. The definitive Library of...

In 1990, more than twenty years after she imagined it into existence, Ursula K. Le Guin returned to the archipelago of Earthsea. “I needed to look at heroics from outside and underneath, from the point of view of the people who are not included,” she wrote. “The ones who can’t do magic. ... Women, kids, the poor, the old, the...

In the far-flung archipelago of Earthsea, dragons fly on the winds of the western isles and a grove of trees is the magical center of the world. A project that spanned her celebrated career, Ursula K. Le Guin’s beloved Earthsea saga has thrilled generations of readers, becoming one of the foundational classics of the fantasy genre. The definitive Library of...

Haunting tales of worldly crime and otherworldly retribution, the three novels gathered here mark the emergence of a modern master of the American gothic. “Peter Straub’s work restored the literature of horror and the uncanny to its rightful place at the heart of the American canon,” observes Michael Chabon, “simply by going about the business—with dispassionate, elegant prose and an...

The hundred writers in this dazzling new collection show that less can indeed be more. American Flash Fiction celebrates the beguiling art of the very short story across a century and a half of American literary history, from Mark Twain and Bret Harte to Rabih Alameddine, Venita Blackburn, and Diane Williams. These flash fictions, as they began to be called...

Upon its publication in 1926, The Sun Also Rises confirmed Ernest Hemingway as a foundational figure of literary modernism and the voice of the “Lost Generation.” As F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby captured the glitter and underlying disillusionment of Jazz Age New York, Hemingway’s masterpiece dramatized the excesses and fractured psyches of British and American expatriates in Paris and...

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. These words from the Declaration of Independence are at once familiar and startling. Where did they come from, and what do they mean to us...

The end of World War I transformed the struggle for racial equality in the United States as the “New Negro” began to challenge the oppressive regime of disenfranchisement, segregation, racial terror, and cultural calumny that had emerged from the ruins of Reconstruction. Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle captures firsthand how courageous Americans, Black and white, fought against...

W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified the problem of the color-line as the defining issue in American life in the twentieth century. The powerful writings gathered here reveal the many ways Americans, Black and white, fought against white supremacist efforts to police the color line, envisioning a better America in the face of disenfranchisement, segregation, and widespread lynching, mob violence, and...

This volume gathers the essential prose writings of our “poet laureate of Deep Ecology,” spanning the entire arc of his seventy-year career and sounding his deepest themes: How can we learn to tread lightly on the land we inhabit? What can ancient faiths and traditions teach us about living creatively and in community in the here and now? A companion...

In 1951, a monumental book by a relatively unknown German-Jewish émigré cast a spotlight on the terrifying new mode of political organization underlying the simultaneous emergence of Nazism and Stalinism. Herself a refugee from Nazi persecution, Hannah Arendt sought from her exile in New York City to answer the fundamental questions raised by the unprecedented atrocities in the Soviet Union...

One of our leading interpreters of ancient literature, acclaimed translator Sarah Ruden (the Aeneid) has long had a passion for Sylvia Plath’s poetry. In I Am the Arrow: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath in Six Poems, she offers a profound reconsideration of Plath’s genius. Ruden argues that Plath is more than a consummate mythmaker; the poet herself takes...

For more than fifty years, in writings of remarkable breadth and insight, John Quincy Adams shaped the politics of a young America, becoming its greatest champion and most penetrating critic. Despite a persistent interest in Adams’s extraordinary life and career, there has never been a volume of his essential political writings. Here, for the first time in an anno­tated edition,...