Inventor James Wainwright's greatest desire is to be left alone in his workshop, where he can focus on invention and engineering unsullied by the messiness of London society and the meaningless concerns of its upper classes. His financial patron, gentleman Alton Bartleby, has higher aspirations. To continue to receive funding James will have to venture out into the outside world as a detective, turning his inventive genius to the creation of new forensic technologies. Bartleby and James is a steampunk mystery collection that tells the story of the detectives' foray into private investigation. In "And They Called Her Spider" they hunt an impossible assassin, trying to end her reign of terror before she can disrupt Queen Victoria's Platinum Jubilee. In "Maiden Voyage of the Rio Grande" the detectives fight to clear James' name aboard an airship before sabotage sends them crashing into the city below. "On the Trail of the Scissorman" sends the pair after a monstrous serial killer turning London's children into orphans. Finally, "A Matter of Spirit" delves into the shadow world of séances and spiritualism as they look for a missing medium in the parlors of Knightsbridge... and beyond. Bartleby and James is the first book in the Galavanic Century series of steampunk mysteries and thrillers, taking readers to an alternate 1910s where Queen Victoria yet rules and the psuedo-scientific beliefs of the Victorians work as they believed them to.

Tells the story of a hunchback who is a failed writer that has no luck with women. He is a self-described "Bartleby", named after the Herman Melville character; someone who, when asked to reveal information about themselves, will respond that they "would prefer not to."

In The Silence of Bartleby, Dan McCall proposes a new reading of Herman Melville's classic short tale "Bartleby, The Scrivener." McCall discuss in detail how "Bartleby has been read in the last half-century by practitioners of widely used critical methodologies--including source-study, psychoanalytic interpretation, and Marxist analysis. He argues that in these elaborate readings of the tale, the text itself may be lost, for critics frequently seem to be more interested in their own concerns than in Melville's. Efforts to enrich "Bartleby" may actually impoverish it, preventing us from experiencing the sense of wonder and pain that the story provides. McCall combines close readings of Melville's tale with a lively analysis of over four decades of commentary, and he includes the complete text of story itself as an appendix, encouraging us to read the story on its own terms.

A new selection of Melville's darkest and most enthralling stories in a beautiful Pushkin Collection edition Includes "Bartleby, the Scrivener", "Benito Cereno" and "The Lightning-Rod Man" A lawyer hires a new copyist, only to be met with stubborn, confounding resistance. A nameless guide discovers hidden worlds of luxury and bleak exploitation. After boarding a beleaguered Spanish slave ship, an American trader's cheerful outlook is repeatedly shadowed by paralyzing unease. In these stories of the surreal mundanity of office life and obscure tensions at sea, Melville's darkly modern sensibility plunges us into a world of irony and mystery, where nothing is as it first appears.

London society holds many expectations for gentlewoman Aldora Fiske. Despite her great proficiency at the great game of the social season, Ms. Fiske chafes at the restrictions her social position holds for her. It's only far from the prying eyes and wagging tongues of London parlors that she can truly live the life that she craves. She’ll find adventure with pirates high above the London streets, in the far off jungles of Mexico, and in the heart of the aging Ottoman Empire. It's a delicate tightrope she walks, between dilettante and adventuress, with one wrong step leading to utter ruin in the eyes of her elite peers. Still, when the alternative is an existence more stifling than any corset, the adventurous young woman will risk it all for one more thrill. Obligation and injustice collide in this second of the Galvanic Century steampunk series of Edwardian fiction novels.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1871. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.