Melville’s ‘Bartleby’ is a classic American short story, a strange tale of an assiduous copyist whose catch-phrase is ‘I would prefer not to.’ It is joined here by two other stories from The Piazza...
Written some 40 years after Moby Dick, Herman Meville’s Billy Budd is a moving tale of good versus evil. Set aboard a British navy ship at the end of the eighteenth century, a...
If Melville had never written Moby Dick, his place in world literature would be assured by his short tales. "Billy Budd, Sailor," his last work, is the masterpiece before his death in 1891 in...
Stories of Shipwreck, Sunken Treasure and Survival
Patrick O'Brian
For those who dare, things often go wrong under the sea. Such tragedies, spurred by the booming interest in the Titanic and the Andrea Doria, have been the focus of tremendous literature form the...
Billy Budd, Sailor and Bartleby, the Scrivener are two of the most revered shorter works of fiction in history. Here, they are collected along with 19 other stories in a beautifully redesigned...
In New Bedford, Connecticut in the 1800s, a group of seamen board the Pequod, captained by Ahab. They know they're out to harpoon whales; what they don't realize is that Ahab once lost a leg to the...
One of the great works of American literature, Moby Dick is the epic tale of one man's fight against a force of nature. The outcast youth Ishmael, succumbing to wanderlust during a dreary New...
In a letter to a friend, in 1849, Herman Melville wrote, “I love all men who dive…any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs 5 miles or more.” He...
The stories in "Survive" are full of suffering: From the savagery of the Donner Party snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains during the winter of 1846, to the extreme hunger and brutal cold endured...
