Library of essential writers

In a career spanning five decades, Eudora Welty has chronicled her own Mississippi with a depth and intensity matched only by William Faulkner. One of the most influential writers of the century, her novels and stories blend the storytelling tradition of the South with a modernist sensibility attuned to the mysteries and ambiguities of experience. Welty explores the complex abundance of southern, and particularly southern women's, lives with an artistry that Salman Rushdie has called "impossible to overpraise.". Complete Novels gathers all of Welty's longer fiction in one volume for the first time. In The Robber Bridegroom (1942), based on a Grimm fairy tale, legendary figures from Mississippi's past, such as the keel-boat captain Mike Fink and the savage outlaws the Harp Brothers, mingle with Welty's own imaginings in a free-ranging and boisterous fantasy set along the Natchez Trace. The richly textured Delta Wedding (1946), set against a backdrop of rural Mississippi in the 1920s, vividly portrays the intricacies of family relationships in its account of the sprawling Fairchild clan. Edna Earle Ponder's unrestrained and delightfully absurd monologue, superb in its capturing of the rhythms of country speech, shows Welty's humor at its idiomatic best in The Ponder Heart (1954), a flight of invention culminating in a murder trial that becomes an occasion for exuberant comedy. The monumental Losing Battles (1970), composed over fifteen years, brings Welty's imaginative gifts to the largest canvas of her career, rendering a Depression-era family reunion with mythic scope and ebullient comic vigor. The volume concludes with The Optimist's Daughter (1972), a taut and moving story of a woman rediscovering the world of her childhood as she comes to terms with her father's death. Often considered her masterpiece, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1972.

In his mesmerizing fictional debut, psychiatrist Roderick Anscombe takes readers into the fevered mind of Count Dracula the man - aristocrat, doctor, and helpless killer of young women. There are no vampires in this stunningly erotic reinvention of the classic myth, only tormented human beings. Tortured by his own perverse desires, the distinguished Dr. Dracula is drawn to posses and destroy young women, first in Paris where he is studying with the renowned pioneer of hypnosis, Charcot, and then in the Hungarian countryside, as the Count takes over the deteriorating family estate. Even as he maintains the facade of the aristocratic life, Dracula is drawn inexorably into a world of violent emotion, blood lust, and self-loathing. Swirling between the scientific fact and superstition of the day - and propelled into the medical epidemics and politics of the Austro-Hungarian empire - Dracula becomes a public saint and a private savage, and all the while a plausible and pitiable human being. Here is a novel not of the supernatural but the all-too-human, not of a monster but a man. The Secret Life of Laszlo, Count Dracula is a bravura performance from a marvelous new writer.