Jack London

The Call of the Wild, by Jack London, is one of America's best-known novels. In his Reader's Companion to this new edition, Daniel Dyer provides a wealth of annotations explaining the book's many "sourdough" expressions and geographical references in order to help the modern reader see what London saw. Dyer also identifies characters in the novel - human and canine alike - whom London had known, and he spices his annotations with Northern lore and...

An epic of action-filled excitement. Rescued from drowning, a pampered gentlleman awakes in a special kind of hell. He's aboard the Ghost, a sealing schooner outbound for months of hunting. Wolf Larson, the devilish captain, a feindish crew, the cruel sea, and unlikely love make this tale immortal.

The novel is a classic Künstlerroman -- a coming of age story centered on its titular protagonist, a self-taught would-be writer, struggling to rise above his impoverished proletarian roots in working-class Oakland, California, to achieve a place among the literary elite. The driving force behind Martin Eden's ambition is his love for Ruth Morse and a desire to accumulate enough wealth and prestige to satisfy her bourgeois family.

The year is 2600 AD or 419 B.O.M. (the Brotherhood of Man) when Anthony Meredith, a scholar from the future, comes across an important manuscript of Avis Everhard written around 1912-1932 when "Iron Heel” came to power in USA. "Iron Heel” is an oligarchic regime where the power and money is concentrated in the hands of a few rulers and Avis and her husband Ernest are involved in a conspiracy to overthrow it. Although Meredith knows the fate of...

A series of tales spun around Smoke and his partner during the gold stampede days.

With dramatic and detailed first person narration, Jack London's Before Adam follows the dreams of a young boy who has a genetically imprinted memory and knowledge of an ancestor who lived in prehistoric times. Big Tooth is a pre-human ape and is the protagonist of the young boy's dreams. He lives in a tribe that rests in the middle of two extremes. In the surrounding area, there are tribes of differing levels of development. One is primitive and...

This collection of short stories shows the adventures and misadventures of the "children" alluded in the title: members of several Native-American tribes of the Canadian Arctic, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the XXth Century, on the backdrop of the Klondike Gold Rush amidst a harsh, unforgiving, Darwinian (red in tooth and claw indeed) Nature. The inevitable clash of civilisations brought by the coming of the gold-seeking "Sunlanders"...

"The Cruise of the Dazzler" is a 1902 boy's adventure novel by Jack London. Set in his home town of San Francisco, the story revolves around a boy called Joe Bronson who, unhappy with his mundane life at school, runs away to become a member of the crew of a boat in San Francisco Bay. However, he soon realizes that the captain and its screw are involved in illicit activities. The story is based on London's own experiences as an oyster pirate in San...

In these classic tales of the Yukon, a sled dog and a wolf struggle to suppress their wild instincts to serve their human masters.