Great short works of Herman Melville / edited with an introduction by Warner Berthoff. [print]

The town-ho's story -- Bartleby, the scrivener : a story of Wall-Street -- Cock-a-doodle-doo! or, The crowing of the noble cock Beneventano -- The encantadas or Enchanted Isles -- The two temples -- Poor man's pudding and rich man's crumbs --The happy failure : a story of the river Hudson -- The lightning-rod man -- The fiddler -- The paradise of bachelors and the tartarus of maids -- The bell-tower -- Benito Cereno -- Jimmy Rose -- I and my chimney -- The 'Gees -- The apple-tree table, or Original spiritual manifestations -- The piazza -- The Marquis de Grandvin -- Three "Jack Gentian sketches" -- John Marr -- Daniel Orme -- Billy Budd, sailor.

Billy Budd, Sailor and Bartleby, the Scrivener are two of the most revered shorter works of fiction in history. Here, they are collected along with 19 other stories in a beautifully redesigned collection that represents the best short work of an American master. As Warner Berthoff writes in his introduction to this volume, "It is hard to think of a major novelist or storyteller who is not also a first-rate entertainer ... a master, according to choice, of high comedy, of one or another robust species of expressive humor, or of some special variety of the preposterous, the grotesque, the absurd. And Melville, certainly, is no exception. A kind of vigorous supervisory humor is his natural idiom as a writer, and one particular attraction of his shorter work is the fresh further display it offers of this prime element in his literary character.--