"Willa Cather's A Lost Lady was first published in 1923. It tells the story of Marian Forrester and her husband, Captain Daniel Forrester who live in the Western town of Sweet Water, along the Transcontinental Railroad. The novel is written in the third person, but is mostly written from the perspective of Niel Herbert, a young man who grows up in Sweet Water and witnesses the decline of Mrs. Forrester, for whom he feels very deeply, and also of the...

Mark Ablett's stately mansion, the Red House, is filled with very proper guests when his most improper brother returns from Australia. The prodigal brother enters Mark's study, the parlor maid hears arguing and the brother dies...rather suddenly, with a bullet between his eyes. The study is locked from the inside and Mark is missing! Investigating the crime is wealthy Antony Gillingham, who rivals Sherlock Holmes in his remarkable powers of observation....

First published in 1925, "The Professor's House" is the profound study of a middle-aged man's unhappiness by critically acclaimed American author Willa Cather. The novel tells the story of its central character, Professor Godfrey St. Peter, in three parts. In the first part, the Professor feels that he is losing control over his life and resists the direction it is taking. He is displeased with his family's move to a new house, with his daughters...

"This story traces the early course of a young marriage in a luminous style. Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert are incandescent young lovers and they pursue their respective destinies furiously, leading ultimately to oblivion." --

A new translation of Maupassant's second novel tells the story of the very ambitious Georges Duroy and his rise to the top in fin de siècle Paris.

Presents newly translated verions of seventeen of Leskov's short stories, inspired by oral storytelling traditions, that range from the fantastical to the satirical to the tragic.

As Ivan Ilyich lies dying he begins to re-evaluate his life, searching for meaning that will make sense of his sufferings. In "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" and the other works in this volume, Tolstoy conjures characters who, tested to the limit, reveal glorious and unexpected reserves of courage, or baseness of a near inhuman kind. Two vivid parables and "The Forged Coupon", a tale of criminality, explore class relations after the emancipation of the...

There is something epic-and almost mythic-about this sparsely beautiful novel by Willa Cather, although the story it tells is that of a single human life, lived simply in the silence of the desert. In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour...

"A portrait of American manners and morals at the turn of the century offers the saga of Lily Bart, a beautiful heroine who lacks one requirement for marrying well in New York society--her own money." --

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

 

Aanton Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels–here brought together in one volume for the first time, in a masterly new translation by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

 

The Steppe–the most lyrical of the five–is an account of a nine-year-old

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