The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century (two of them in prose, the rest in verse). The tales, some of which are originals and others not, are contained inside a frame tale and told by a collection of pilgrims on a pilgrimage from Southwark to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The Canterbury Tales are written in Middle English. Keywords: Canterbury...

Abraham Lincoln read it with approval, but Emily Dickinson described its bold language and themes as "disgraceful." Ralph Waldo Emerson found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet produced." Published at the author's expense on July 4, 1855, Leaves of Grass inaugurated a new voice and style into American letters and gave expression to an optimistic, bombastic vision that took the nation as its subject. Unlike many...

When Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017--revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that was "fresh, unpretentious and lean" (Madeline Miller, Washington Post)--critics lauded it as "a revelation" (Susan Chira, New York Times) and "a cultural landmark" (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of Homer's other...

After a courtship voyage of a year and a day, Owl and Pussy finally buy a ring from Piggy and are blissfully married.

Story of the fiercely independent Janie Crawford and her evolving selfhood through three marriages and a life marked by poverty, trials, and purpose.

Publisher's description: Of the great poets, Dante is one of the most elusive and therefore one of the most difficult to adequately render into English verse. In the Inferno, Dante not only judges sin but strives to understand it so that the reader can as well. With this major new translation, Anthony Esolen has succeeded brilliantly in marrying sense with sound, poetry with meaning, capturing both the poem's line-by-line vigor and its allegorically...

"The first female translator of the epic into English in over sixty years, Stephanie McCarter addresses accuracy in translation and its representation of women, gendered dynamics of power, and sexual violence in Ovid's classic. Ovid's Metamorphoses is an epic poem, but one that upturns almost every convention. There is no main hero, no central conflict, and no sustained objective. What it is about (power, defiance, art, love, abuse, grief, rape, war,...

"The novel takes place entirely in the environs of Egdon Heath, and, with the exception of the epilogue, covers exactly a year and a day. The narrative begins on the evening of Guy Fawkes Night as Diggory Venn drives slowly across the heath, carrying a hidden passenger in the back of his van. When darkness falls, the country folk light bonfires on the surrounding hills, emphasizing--not for the last time--the pagan spirit of the heath and its denizens."...

The Collins edition of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde has long been recognized as the most comprehensive one-volume collection of Oscar Wilde's work available. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde contains his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, all his stories, plays and poems, and a substantial number of his essays and letters, all in their most authoritative texts. The Importance of Being Earnest, for example, is given in the four-act version,...

First published in 1895, America's greatest novel of the Civil War was written before the twenty-one-year-old Stephan Crane had "smelled even the powder of a sham battle." But this pwerful psychological study of a young soilder's struggle with the horror's, both within and without, that war unleashes strikes the reader with its undeniable realism and it's masterful description of the moment-by-moment riot of emotions felt by men under fire. Esteemed...