** Please note: The eBook version of this title is slightly different from the paperback version. While the textual content remains the same, the illustrations/photographs were removed from the eBook version because of permissions issues.The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad* is the first new biography in more than a decade of one of modern literature’s most important writers--whose work remains widely read and acutely relevant eighty years after his death. In this authoritative, insi...

Die Schwarze Spinne is a religious allegory about morals and religious living in the mid-nineteenth century, written by Jeremias Gotthelf. This work is an interlinear translation of Gotthelf's Die Schwarze Spinne with introductions to both the author and the work itself.In a small Swiss community, a baptism is the backdrop for a village elder to tell the story of his family and their life and death struggle with the devil himself. The elder relates the story of a k...

Jean d’Arras’s splendid prose romance of Melusine, written for Jean de Berry, the brother of King Charles V of France, is one of the most significant and complex literary works of the later Middle Ages. The author, promising to tell us “how the noble and powerful fortress of Lusignan in Poitou was founded by a fairy,” writes a ceaselessly astonishing account of the origins of the powerful feudal dynasty of the Lusignans in southwestern France, which flourished in western Europe an...

These early works by Guy de Maupassant were originally published in the 1880's. As a collection of short stories, this represents Maupassant's tales of friendship, and includes 'The Log', 'Alexandre', 'A Family', 'Friend Joseph', 'Two Friends', Two Little Soldiers', and 'Yvette Samoris'. Guy de Maupassant was born in 1850 at the Château de Miromesnil, near Dieppe, France. He came from a prosperous family, but when Maupassant was eleven, his mother risked social disgrace by trying to secure...

These early works by Guy de Maupassant were originally published in the 1880's. As a collection of short stories, this represents Maupassant's tales of marriage, and includes 'Useless Beauty', 'Monsieur Parent', 'A Wedding Gift', 'The Door', 'A Meeting', and many other titles. Guy de Maupassant was born in 1850 at the Château de Miromesnil, near Dieppe, France. He came from a prosperous family, but when Maupassant was eleven, his mother risked social disgrace by trying to secure a legal se...

Everyone knows something of nineteenth-century France - or do they? "Les Miserables", "The Lady of the Camelias" and "The Three Musketeers", "Balzac" and "Jules Verne" live in the popular consciousness as enduring human documents and cultural icons. Yet, the French nineteenth century was even more dynamic than the stereotype suggests. This exciting new introduction takes the literature of the period both as a window on past and present mindsets and as an object of fascination in its own ri...