Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation. After his rescue, Northup published...

In Spoon River Anthology, the American poet Edgar Lee Masters (1869–1950) created a series of compelling free-verse monologues in which former citizens of a mythical Midwestern town speak touchingly from the grave of the thwarted hopes and dream of their lives. First published in book form in 1915, the Anthology was the crowning achievement of Masters' career as a poet, and a work that would become a landmark of 20th-century American literature....

The importance of Edgar Allan Poe to literary history can hardly be exaggerated; his genius and originality, both in terms of language and technique, influenced the French Symbolists of the late 19th century and thus changed the course of modern literature. Although chiefly remembered for his short stories, poetry was his first love, and this magnificently decorated edition presents Poe's complete poems in addition to his most important critical essays...

"From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices--from lichen on a ceiling to...

"Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive....

Part of the Timeless Classics series, The Complete Tales & Poems of Edgar Allan Poe contains every know tale written by the famous gothic American writer. His often macabre and dark works, which span the years from 1827 to his death in 1849, include "The Raven," "The Black Cat," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "Annabelle Lee." For Poe fans worldwide, this elegant collector's edition includes over 70 of Poe's short stories, more than 40 melodious poems,...

The murder of an old man is revealed by the beating of his heart.