A remarkable piece of fiction first published in 1833. It is the story of two men's struggle for the love of the same woman, a widow. It blends the Gothic with the comic in a manner which will engross the reader till the very end. The story is especially appealing for its realistic depiction of New England and the Yankee character. Alluring!

A remarkable piece of fiction first published in 1833. It is the story of two men's struggle for the love of the same woman, a widow. It blends the Gothic with the comic in a manner which will engross the reader till the very end. The story is especially appealing for its realistic depiction of New England and the Yankee character. Alluring!

A remarkable piece of fiction first published in 1833. It is the story of two men's struggle for the love of the same woman, a widow. It blends the Gothic with the comic in a manner which will engross the reader till the very end. The story is especially appealing for its realistic depiction of New England and the Yankee character. Alluring!

A remarkable piece of fiction first published in 1833. It is the story of two men's struggle for the love of the same woman, a widow. It blends the Gothic with the comic in a manner which will engross the reader till the very end. The story is especially appealing for its realistic depiction of New England and the Yankee character. Alluring!

THE EPIC THRILLER BEGINS. The creator of the number one bestselling SKULDUGGERY PLEASANT series returns with the story of a girl on the run from everything she loves... and the monsters that await her.

The essay, as a notably hard form of writing to pin down, has inspired some unflattering descriptions: It is a “greased pig,” for example, or a “pair of baggy pants into which nearly anything and everything can fit.” In Tracing the Essay, G. Douglas Atkins embraces the very qualities that have moved others to accord the essay second-class citizenship in the world of letters. Drawing from the work of Montaigne and Bacon and recent practitioners such as E. B. White and Cynthia Ozick, Atkins shows what the essay means--and how it comes to mean. The essay, related to assaying (attempting), mines experience for meaning, which it then carefully weighs. It is a via media creature, says Atkins, born of and embracing tension. It exists in places between experience and meaning, literature and philosophy, self and other, process and product, form and formlessness. Moreover, as a literary form the essay is inseparable from a way of life requiring wisdom, modesty, and honesty. “The essay was, historically,” notes Atkins, “the first form to take the experience of the individual and make it the stuff of literature.” Atkins also considers the essay’s basis in Renaissance (and Reformation) thinking and its participation in voyages of exploration and discovery of that age. Its concern is “home-cosmography,” to use a term from seventeenth-century writer William Habington. Responding to influential critiques of the essay’s supposed self-indulgence, lack of irony, and absence of form, Atkins argues that the essay exhibits a certain “sneakiness” as it proceeds in, through, and by means of the small and the mundane toward the spiritual and the revelatory.

In 1922, just out of college and at loose ends, E.B. White set off across America in a Model T. He left his map at home, but packed his typewriter— his true destination, he tells us, was the world of letters. White wrote the richly humorous "Farewell to Model T" for The New Yorker in 1936; it was the first of his essays to bring him fame. In "From Sea to Shining Sea," White conjures the unspoiled America that remained his most enduring subject. The first essay of E. B. White's to become famous, "Farewell to Model T" originally appeared in 1936 in The New Yorker as "Farewell My Lovely." It is rich in comic descriptions of the eccentricities of the car, the demands it put on its devoted owners, and the hardware and decorative accessories—from 98-cent anti-rattlers to the "de-luxe flower vase of the cut-glass anti-splash type"—that kept them pouring over the Sears Roebuck catalog. If there was an owner's manual for the flivver, it didn't begin to divulge what the owner needed to know. That's where theory, speculation, superstition, and metaphysics came in: "I remember once spitting into a timer," White recalls, "not in anger, but in a spirit of research." It is published for the first time with "Sea to Shining Sea," in which White conjures the America that he had discovered as a 22-year old during a cross country trip in his Model T. (The year was 1922, the same the year that Fitzgerald and Hemingway went to Paris to find themselves.) In it he would write: "My own vision of the land—my own discovery of it—was shaped, more than by any other instrument, by a Model T Ford...a slow-motion roadster of miraculous design—strong, tremulous, and tireless, from sea to shining sea."