Includes nine masterful portraits of black and white inhabitants of Louisiana's bayou and urban areas. Written with grace, delicate humor, and a keen understanding of the female psyche.

'At night, among the reeds on the bayou, Chicot could still hear the woman's wail, mingled now with the croaking of the frogs...' From one of the most daring writers of fin-de-siècle America, five stories of awakening that range from Louisiana's plantations and poverty-stricken bayous to its gilded cities. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Kate Chopin (1850-1904). The Awakening and Selected Stories and At Fault are available in Penguin Classics.

The extraordinary biographical novel about a Chinese-American woman who fought for independence and dignity in the American West—“an important contribution to the history of pioneer women” (Ms. Magazine) Lalu Nathoy’s father called his thirteen-year-old daughter his treasure, his “thousand pieces of gold”—yet when famine strikes northern China in 1871, he is forced to sell her. Polly, as Lalu is later called, is sold to a brothel, sold again to a slave merchant bound for America, auctioned to a saloonkeeper, and offered as a prize in a poker game. With over a quarter of a million copies sold, Thousand Pieces of Gold is a classic of biographical historical fiction that stars an unforgettable Chinese-American heroine whose struggles put a human face on the anti-immigration policies of the past and present.

A pretty book of tales drawn from life among the Creoles and Acadians of Louisiana. They represent with fidelity and spirit characters and customs unfamiliar to most readers ; they are admirably told, with just enough dialect for local color; and they can hardly fail to be very popular. Some of these stories are little more than croquis — just a brief incident of idea sketched in with a few rapid strokes and left to the imagination of the reader to be materialized, if we may so speak. Others are longer and more finished, but all are full of that subtle, alien quality which holds the Creole apart from the Anglo-Saxon — a quality we do not quite understand and can never reproduce, but which is full of fascination to us from the very fact that it is so unlike ourselves.

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