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The Confidence-Man - His Masquerade by Herman Melville; Mark Niemeyer; Hershel Parker
Category: Non Fiction | Series: Norton Critical Editions Ser.
In his ninth and final novel, cultural observer, novelist, and poet Herman Melville gives us a picture of everything wrong with America in the decade preceding the Civil War. Evoking Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, this is a story of interlocking tales from a group of steamboat passengers traveling down the ...Show more
The Confidence-Man and Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville
Category: Classic | Series: The\Penguin English Library
'Life is a pic-nic en costume; one must take a part, assume a character, stand ready in a sensible way to play the fool'. In "The Confidence-Man", Melville's unnerving and hallucinatory satire on the American dream, a slippery trickster and master of disguise comes to swindle his fellow passengers - who ...Show more
The Confidence-man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville
Category: Classic Fiction
Onboard the Fidele, a steamboat floating down the Mississippi to New Orleans, a confidence man sets out to defraud his fellow passengers. In quick succession he assumes numerous guises - from a legless beggar and a worldly businessman to a collector for charitable causes and a cosmopolitan' gentleman, w ...Show more
The Happy Failure by Herman Melville
Category: Fiction | Series: Short Story Collections
"Melville at his best invariably wrote from a sort of dream self, so that events which he relates as actual fact have indeed a far deeper reference to his own soul, his own inner life." - D.H. Lawrence. Here are ten stories that represent some of the best short work of American master Herman Melville, ...Show more
The Piazza Tales by Herman Melville
Category: Classic
This volume, first published in 1856, collects three of Melville's most important pieces of prose fiction. In 'Bartleby, the Scrivener', a Wall Street lawyer hires a melancholy young clerk called Bartleby, whose sudden and mysterious refusal to work plunges the firm into disarray. 'Benito Cereno' is a h ...Show more
Three American Poets by Herman Melville
Category: Poetry | Series: Penguin Classics S.
This volume presents work from three great American poets, all of whom preferred the solitary life; yet each responded, in very different ways, to the greatest social event of their times, the challenge of living in a country recovering from a civil war.
Typee - A Peep at Polynesian Life by Herman Melville
Category: Classics | Series: Dover Thrift Editions Ser.
In this classic of travel and adventure literature, Herman Melville drew upon his adventures in the South Pacific Marquesas Islands as a prisoner of the Typee people. Like the novel's narrator, Melville jumped ship from a whaling vessel and was held in benign captivity by an indigenous tribe with a repu ...Show more