Gulliver's Travels has been called many things: Menippean satire, children's story, proto-Science Fiction and even the forerunner of the modern novel. Published seven years after Daniel Defoe's wildly successful Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels may be read as a rebuttal of Defoes optimistic account of human capability. In The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man Warren Montag argues that Swift was concerned to refute the notion that the individual precedes society, as Defoe's novel seems to suggest. Swift regarded such thought as a dangerous endorsement of Thomas Hobbes' radical political philosophy and for this reason Gulliver repeatedly encounters established societies rather than desolate islands. The captain who invites Gulliver to serve as a surgeon aboard his ship on the disastrous third voyage is named Robinson. Possibly one of the reasons for the book's classic status is that it can be seen as many things to many different people. Wilder Publications is a green publisher. All of our books are printed to order. This reduces waste and helps us keep prices low while greatly reducing our impact on the environment.

Now a major motion picture from Lion's Gate Films starring Christian Bale (Metroland), Chloe Sevigny (The Last Days of Disco), Jared Leto (My So Called Life), and Reese Witherspoon (Cruel Intentions), and directed by Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol). In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront. From the Trade Paperback edition.

A satire on human nature and a parody of the "travellers\' tales" literary genre, this is widely considered Swift\'s greatest work as well as one of the indisputable classics of English literature.

Bret Easton Ellis’s debut, Less Than Zero, is one of the signal novels of the last thirty years, and he now follows those infamous teenagers into an even more desperate middle age. Clay, a successful screenwriter, has returned from New York to Los Angeles to help cast his new movie, and he’s soon drifting through a long-familiar circle. Blair, his former girlfriend, is married to Trent, an influential manager who’s still a bisexual philanderer, and their Beverly Hills parties attract various levels of fame, fortune and power. Then there’s Clay’s childhood friend Julian, a recovering addict, and their old dealer, Rip, face-lifted beyond recognition and seemingly even more sinister than in his notorious past. But Clay’s own demons emerge once he meets a gorgeous young actress determined to win a role in his movie. And when his life careens completely out of control, he has no choice but to plumb the darkest recesses of his character and come to terms with his proclivity for betrayal. A genuine literary event. From the Hardcover edition.

Nightmarish villains with superhuman enhancements. An all-seeing social network that tracks your every move. Mysterious, smooth-talking power players who lurk behind the scenes. A young woman from the trailer park. And her very smelly cat. Together, they will decide the future of mankind. Get ready for a world in which anyone can have the powers of a god or the fame of a pop star, in which human achievement soars to new heights while its depravity plunges to the blackest depths. A world in which at least one cat smells like a seafood shop's dumpster on a hot summer day. This is the world in which Zoey Ashe finds herself, navigating a futuristic city in which one can find elements of the fantastic, nightmarish and ridiculous on any street corner. Her only trusted advisor is the aforementioned cat, but even in the future, cats cannot give advice. At least not any that you'd want to follow. Will Zoey figure it all out in time? Or maybe the better question is, will you? After all, the future is coming sooner than you think.

When Pushkin first read some of the stories in this collection, he declared himself "amazed."  "Here is real gaiety," he wrote, "honest, unconstrained, without mincing, without primness. And in places what poetry! . . . I still haven't recovered." More than a century and a half later, Nikolai Gogol's stories continue to delight readers the world over. Now a stunning new translation--from an award-winning team of translators--presents these stories in all their inventive, exuberant glory to English-speaking readers. For the first time, the best of Gogol's short fiction is brought together in a single volume: from the colorful Ukrainian tales that led some critics to call him "the Russian Dickens" to the Petersburg stories, with their black humor and wonderfully demented attitude toward the powers that be. All of Gogol's most memorable creations are here: the minor official who misplaces his nose, the downtrodden clerk whose life is changed by the acquisition of a splendid new overcoat, the wily madman who becomes convinced that a dog can tell him everything he needs to know. These fantastic, comic, utterly Russian characters have dazzled generations of readers and had a profound influence on writers such as Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Now they are brilliantly rendered in the first new translation in twenty-five years--one that is destined to become the definitive edition of Gogol's most important stories.

Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, this coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money a place devoid of feeling or hope. Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark.

A satire portraying a literal battle between books in the St. James library, together with fifteen other pieces

"How dared you, in disregard of all decency, call me a goose?" This lesser-known work is perhaps the perfect distillation of Nikolai Gogol’s genius: a tale simultaneously animated by a joyful, nearly slapstick sense of humor alongside a resigned cynicism about the human condition. In a sharp-edged translation from John Cournos, an under-appreciated early translator of Russian literature into English, How The Two Ivans Quarreled is the story of two long-time friends who have a falling out when one of them calls the other a “goose.” From there, the argument intensifies and the escalation becomes more and more ludicrous. Never losing its generous antic spirit, the story nonetheless transitions from whither a friendship, to whither humanity, as it progresses relentlessly to its moving conclusion. **The Art of The Novella Series **Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol's wily antihero, Chichikov, combs the back country wheeling and dealing for "dead souls"--deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them--we are introduced to a Dickensian cast of peasants, landowners, and conniving petty officials, few of whom can resist the seductive illogic of Chichikov's proposition. This lively, idiomatic English version by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky makes accessible the full extent of the novel's lyricism, sulphurous humor, and delight in human oddity and error.

This is the story of Joao, an uninspiring country boy who moves to a slum in the city with his drunken father and falls for amiable prostitute named Charity.This is the story of Joao, an uninspiring country boy who moves to a slum in the city with his drunken father and falls for amiable prostitute named Charity.All João ever wanted was to be of some use. All he ever wanted was to belong. And far away from the molesting lick of the sun, where his brothers and sisters toil upon the arid earth, in a dank café in the very worst part of town, and working as a barrista, João will himself, inside the sediment of a city, at the bottom of a ceramic cup.And a minister, a chef, and a whore, they will all taste him on their lips, long after he is gone.

Gogol's classic, uproarious folktale, presented in a beautiful hardcover edition perfect for giving as a gift. Written in 1831, this dark tale relates the adventures of Vakula, the blacksmith, in his fight against the devil, who has stolen the moon above the village of Dikanka and is wreaking havoc on its inhabitants, all to win the love of the most beautiful girl in town. The basis for many film and opera adaptations, and still a story traditionally read aloud to children on Christmas Eve in Ukraine and Russia, The Night Before Christmas is the best holiday tale by the man whom Vladimir Nabokov called 'the greatest writer Russia has yet produced'. Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) was the son of a Ukrainian gentleman farmer. He attended a variety of boarding schools, where he proved an indifferent student but was admired for his theatrical abilities. In 1828 he moved to St. Petersburg and began to publish stories, and by the mid-1830s he had established himself in the literary world and been warmly praised by Pushkin. In 1836, his play The Inspector-General was attacked as immoral, and he left Russia, remaining abroad for most of the next dozen years. During that time he wrote two of his best-known stories, 'The Nose' and 'The Overcoat,' and in 1842 he published the first section of his masterpiece Dead Souls. Gogol became increasingly religious as the years passed, and in 1847 he became the disciple of an Orthodox priest who influenced him to burn the second part of Dead Souls and then abandon writing altogether. After undertaking an extreme fast, he died at the age of forty-two.

Sid Sharp is a lonely guy whose life is changed forever one froggy morning in this quirky frog prince retelling for all ages.Sid Sharp is a lonely guy. If only the beautiful Miss Emma Lavender from the post office with whom Sid has secretly been in love with for months, would notice him, he would be a happy man. One busy morning at the post office, a funny kind of fate intervenes for Sid and Emma in this quirky, Roald Dahl inspired frog prince retelling.

This is the tale of a polite and well-mannered boy named Alex who; after being abducted, develops an incredible bond with an angry and foul mouthed doll called The Gruff who teaches young Alex how to find his voice.This is the tale of a polite and well-mannered boy named Alex who; after being abducted, develops an incredible bond with an angry and foul mouthed doll called The Gruff who teaches young Alex how to find his voice.When Alex wakes bound in a wooden coffin to manic cursing and abusing, he finds something he’d never imagined having, a true friend. In the days that follow, a small oddly tempered doll called The Gruff will teach Alex how to say no, how to sharpen his claws and how to kill a man. And a triangle of deception will leave Alex wondering who the real victim is.Based on real events, Alex and The Gruff explores the philosophical theme of the effect of the domestication of children through mannerly learning and poses the premise that 'politeness is the discipline of abuse' and is a horror story that will appeal to readers of Stephen King’s trepid subtlety, and to those who thirst for Clive Barker styled blood curdling crescendos.

Set in Los Angeles, in the recent past. The birthplace and graveyard of American myths and dreams, the city harbours a group of people trapped between the beauty of their surroundings and their own moral impoverishment. This novel is a chronicle of their voices.