John Seelye Books

Edgar Allan Poe’s gift for the macabre–his genius in finding the strangeness lurking at the heart of things–was so extraordinary that he exerted a major influence on Baudelaire and French symbolism, on Freudian analysis, and also on the detective novel and the Hollywood movie. His psychologically profound stories of encounters with the marvelous, the uncanny, and the dreadful represent–in contrast to the optimism of writers like Emerson and Whitman–the other, darker side of the nineteenth-century American sensibility. (Jacket Status: Jacketed)

" The Call of the Wild tells the story of Buck, a domestic dog who is kidnapped from his home in California and forced to pull sleds in the Arctic wasteland. White Fang , by contrast, is the tale of a crossbreed who is three-quarters wolf and a quarter dog, and who must endure considerable suffering in the wilderness before being tamed by an American and taken to live in California. Extraordinary both for the vividness of their descriptions and the success with which they imagine life from a non-human perspective, Jack London's classics of children’s literature are two of the greatest and most popular animal stories ever written. This beautiful Macmillan Collector’s Library edition of The Call of the Wild & White Fang features an afterword by Sam Gilpin. Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much-loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure."

The literature of the "Old" West is very old indeed, but stories from the region began to appear only after the Civil War, as the short story emerged as a major literary form and the West emerged as a seperate, distinctly American culture. This collection brings together fifty of the best stories of the Old West by some of America's finest writers. From comic tales about California charlatans and prostitutes with hearts of gold to portrayals of tough, taciturn, and honorable cowboys and heroic cavalrymen; from razor-sharp stories of settlers struggling to survive in a savage land to the rare, sympathetic vision of American Indian culture, this is an indispensable collection of stories from an Old West always partly geographical, partly imagined.

Jody Tiflin is a ten-year-old boy, living on his father's ranch. One day his father brings home a small pony. He's Jody's, if the boy will learn to feed, clean, stable and care for him. But Jody learns, through the colt, and through his other adventures on the ranch, that with responsibility can come sacrifice and pain. Joy may swiftly turn to tragedy. And he also discover that the simplicities of childhood must eventually turn into the complications of adulthood. "The Red Pony" is Steinbeck's brilliant, and sometimes brutal, celebration of adolescence