Pines and Plains Libraries

A collection of sixty-eight tales of mystery and horror by the nineteenth-century American author, including such stories as "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Purloined Letter." Also features a brief biography and a chronology of significant events in the writer's life.

From the publisher. When we first met him in Rabbit, Run (1960), the book that established John Updike as a major novelist, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom is playing basketball with some boys in an alley in Pennsylvania during the tail end of the Eisenhower era, reliving for a moment his past as a star high school athlete. Athleticism of a different sort is on display throughout these four magnificent novels -- the athleticism of an imagination possessed...

"The only one-volume hardcover edition of the two uncommonly powerful novels written by the youngest of the famous Brontë sisters. Anne Brontë wrote these two fantastically successful novels just before her tragically early death, both of them in a much more grittily realistic mode than the more romantic ones favored by her sisters. Agnes Grey, the story of a governess working for disdainful and cruel employers, is a wrenching account of the desperate...

In Conrad's haunting tale, Marlow, a seaman and wanderer, recounts his physical and psychological journey in search of the enigmatic Kurtz. Travelling to the heart of the African continent, he discovers how Kurtz has gained his position of power and influence over the local people. Marlow's struggle to fathom his experience involves him in a radical questioning of not only his own nature and values but the nature and values of his society.