This collection features 14 of Melville's short stories reprinted from Harper's and Putnam's magazines, including "The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles," a dramatic story set on the Galapagos Islands, plus "The Bell-Tower," more.

Brilliant short stories and a novella by the author of Moby-Dick "Billy Budd, Sailor," a classic confrontation between good and evil, is the story of an innocent young man unable to defend himself from wrongful accusations. Other selections include "Bartleby," "The Piazza," "The Encantadas," "The Bell-Tower," "Benito Cereno," "The Paradise of Bachelors," and "The Tartarus of Maids." For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. From the Trade Paperback edition.

A new, definitive edition of Herman Melville’s virtuosic short stories—American classics wrought with scorching fury, grim humor, and profound beauty Though best-known for his epic masterpiece Moby-Dick, Herman Melville also left a body of short stories arguably unmatched in American fiction. In the sorrowful tragedy of Billy Budd, Sailor; the controlled rage of Benito Cereno; and the tantalizing enigma of Bartleby, the Scrivener; Melville reveals himself as a singular storyteller of tremendous range and compelling power. In these stories, Melville cuts to the heart of race, class, capitalism, and globalism in America, deftly navigating political and social issues that resonate as clearly in our time as they did in Melville’s. Also including The Piazza Tales in full, this collection demonstrates why Melville stands not only among the greatest writers of the nineteenth century, but also as one of our greatest contemporaries. This Penguin Classics edition features the Reading Text of Billy Budd, Sailor, as edited from a genetic study of the manuscript by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., and the authoritative Northwestern-Newberry text of The Piazza Tales. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A standalone hardcover edition of Herman Melville's novelette in ten sketches, "The Encantadas," with original illustrations by Eric Tonzola and a new introduction by Elizabeth Hennessy, author of On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden.

"With fairest flowers, Whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele-" When I removed into the country, it was to occupy an old-fashioned farm-house, which had no piazza-a deficiency the more regretted, because not only did I like piazzas, as somehow combining the coziness of in-doors with the freedom of out-doors, and it is so pleasant to inspect your thermometer there, but the country round about was such a picture, that in berry time no boy climbs hill or crosses vale without coming upon easels planted in every nook, and sun-burnt painters painting there. A very paradise of painters. The circle of the stars cut by the circle of the mountains. At least, so looks it from the house; though, once upon the mountains, no circle of them can you see. Had the site been chosen five rods off, this charmed ring would not have been. The house is old. Seventy years since, from the heart of the Hearth Stone Hills, they quarried the Kaaba, or Holy Stone, to which, each Thanksgiving, the social pilgrims used to come. So long ago, that, in digging for the foundation, the workmen used both spade and axe, fighting the Troglodytes of those subterranean parts-sturdy roots of a sturdy wood, encamped upon what is now a long land-slide of sleeping meadow, sloping away off from my poppy-bed. Of that knit wood, but one survivor stands-an elm, lonely through steadfastness.

Herman Melville’s The Piazza Tales is the only collection of short fiction that he published in his lifetime, and it includes his two most famous short stories, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” along with the less well-known but deeply engaging sketches of the Galapagos Islands that make up “The Encantadas,” as well as three more short stories: “The Piazza,” “The Bell-Tower,” and “The Lightning-Rod Man.” This new edition places these stories in the context of nineteenth-century debates over slavery, free will and determinism, science and technology, and the nature and value of literary artistry. The stories in The Piazza Tales demonstrate the global range of Melville’s cultural and aesthetic concerns, as Melville set his stories in locales ranging from rural western Massachusetts and Wall Street in the United States to the Pacific coast of South America and southern Europe. This edition is especially concerned with Melville’s engagement with both political questions related to slavery and imperialism and aesthetic questions germane to the short-story tradition as developed by his near-contemporaries Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.