Viking portable library

A collection of the best work from the great American writer includes three full-length novels, nineteen short stories and sketches, and selections from his essays, letters, and poems.

Contents: Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County from A Tramp Abroad from Old Times on the Mississippi Private History of a Campaign that Failed from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]( Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses from Pudd'nhead Wilson from Following the Equator from Mark Twain in Eruption from Europe and Elsewhere from Mark Twain's Autobiography Mysterious Stranger Letters

For most of the twentieth century Russia existed under some form of dictatorship--with the paradoxical effect that in Russia literature continued to matter as it did in few other countries. The writers of modern Russia have possessed the power to enrage tyrants, to inspire allegiance and devotion in their readers, and to speak for the suffocating conscience of their motherland, even when they are addressing the least political of issues. At their best, their writing is informed by the exhilarated awareness of that potential--and the responsibility that goes with it.

Selections from the books, notes, and letters of this 19th century philosopher.

The Portable Blake contains the hermetic genius's most important works: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience in their entirety; selections from his "prophetic books"—including The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Abion, America, The Book of Urizen, and The Four Zoas—and from other works of poetry and prose, as well as the complete drawings for The Book of Job.

"The Portable Voltaire" is an excellent compendium of the major works of the man who became the most famous iconoclast of the French Enlightenment. One of the attractions of this particular volume is the introduction by Ben Ray Redman, who delivers with witty, flowing prose an extremely interesting short biography and a summary of the man's philosophy. Normally I don't bother to mention a book's introduction in a review, but Redman's is so good I make a notable exception. Voltaire was a man of contrasts. He was sickly and feeble but miraculously managed to extend his lifespan to eighty-four years, travel abroad, and survive in prison; he was made wealthy by various benefactors and seemed generally happy but could be very cynical and antagonistic in his writing; and most notoriously, he was a deist whose hatred of Christianity could make him appear to be an atheist. Most of what he hated about Christianity was the clergy--their hypocrisy, their adherence to practices he found absurd, their conceit that everything in the universe is made exclusively for man's consumption and amusement--and the superstition and fanaticism exhibited by the more extreme practitioners of the faith. -- from (June 16, 2014).

The best literature that emerged from a flowering of African American culture centered in Harlem between the world wars.

Alfred Kazin has aptly remarked that "the greatest story Jack London ever wrote was the story he lived." Newsboy, factory "work beast," gang member, hobo, sailor, Klondike argonaut, socialist crusader, war correspondent, utopian farmer, and world-famous adventurer: London is the closest thing America has had to a literary folk hero. His writing itself is concerned with nothing less than the largest questions and the grandest themes: What does it mean to be a human being in the natural world? What debts do human beings owe each other - and to all their fellow creatures? This collection places London, at last, securely within the American literary pantheon. It includes the complete novel The Call of the Wild; such famous stories as "Love of Life," "To Build a Fire," and "All Gold Canyon"; journalism, political writings, literary criticism, and selected letters.