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The complete shorter fiction / Herman Melville ; with an introduction by John Updike.

by Melville, Herman, 1819-1891.

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Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction.

Everyman's library (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.) ; 232.

xli, 478 p. ; 21 cm.

The Piazza -- Bartleby, the scrivener -- Benito Cereno -- The lightning-rod man -- The encantadas, or enchanted isles -- The bell-tower -- Fragments from a writing desk -- Authentic anecdotes of "Old Zack" -- Hawthorne and his mosses -- The happy failure -- The fiddler -- Cock-a-doodle-doo! -- Poor man's pudding and rich man's crumbs -- The two temples -- The paradise of bachelors and the Tartarus of maids -- Jimmy Rose -- The 'gees -- I and my chimney -- The apple-tree table -- John Marr -- Billy Budd, sailor.

Herman Melville (1819-91) brought as much genius to the smaller-scale literary forms as he did to the full-blown novel: his poems and the short stories and novellas collected in this volume reveal a deftness and a delicacy of touch that is in some ways even more impressive than the massive, tectonic passions of Moby-Dick. In a story like "Bartleby, the Scrivener" -- one of the very few perfect representatives of the form in the English language -- he displayed an unflinching precision and insight and empathy in his depiction of the drastically alienated inner life of the title character. In "Benito Cereno," he addressed the great racial dilemmas of the nineteenth century with a profound, almost surreal imaginative clarity. And in Billy, Budd, Sailor, the masterpiece of his last years, he fused the knowledge and craft gained from a lifetime's magnificent work into a pure, stark, flawlessly composed tale of innocence betrayed and destroyed. Melville is justly honored for the epic sweep of his mind, but his lyricism, his skill in rendering the minute, the particular, the local, was equally sublime.

Adventure fiction.

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