Warbler Classics

A Daughter of the Samurai offers an elegant account of a world that had all but vanished by the time Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto put pen to paper. In her beguiling memoir, Sugimoto chronicles her childhood in the frozen Nagaoka region of Japan, where she grows up in a high-ranking samurai family in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration that stripped the samurai class of many of its privileges. Although originally destined to be a Buddhist priestess, at the age of twelve she becomes engaged by family arrangement to a Japanese merchant in Cincinnati, Ohio. To prepare for her new life in the United States Etsu attends a Methodist school in Tokyo where she studies English. In 1898, she boards a ship and leaves the only land she has ever known. An emissary of her native culture even while she is fascinated by American customs, Sugimoto keenly observes the two worlds she inhabits. Sugimoto's profound, poignant, and sometimes wry perceptions continue to resonate with authenticity and insight to this day.

Oscar Wilde's first major success on the stage, Lady Windermere's Fan premiered in London in 1892 to sold-out fashionable crowds. The social comedy centers on a woman who has been cast out of and hopes to re-enter society but ultimately sacrifices herself to save her grown daughter's dignity and social standing. Filled with some of Wilde's best-known and wittiest epigrammatic sayings, the play's exposure of upper-class hypocrisy is far deeper and more poignant than such funny writing ought to allow.

The Prince is widely thought to be one of the first works of modern political philosophy. Machiavelli was the first to decisively divorce politics from ethics. His political realism influenced many important figures in the developing field of materialist philosophy, including Francis Bacon, John Milton, Spinoza, Rousseau, Hume, Edward Gibbon, and Adam Smith. His treatise had a profound impact on political leaders throughout the modern west, including the founding fathers of the United States who, like Machiavelli, favored a republican form of government. Machiavelli emphasized the need for looking at the "effective truth" based on experience and historical fact, rather than theorizing about ideal republics or imaginary utopias. Controversial for advancing an amoral view of the world where any means are justified if they serve the ambitions of power, The Prince also ironically seems to undermine its own doctrine by predicting in some ways the doom of a strictly realist approach.

In 813, Maurice Leblanc's epic tale, Arsène Lupin, master of disguise and celebrity thief, is framed in the murder of millionaire Rudolf Kesselbach, nicknamed alternatively the King of Diamonds and the Lord of the Cape. Lupin assumes the identity of the chief detective on the case in order to find the real murderer and, in the interest of France, find a secret parcel of documents that have the power to redraw the map of Europe. Lupin must use every ounce of his genius to escape ensnarement by both obvious and stealthy means. Lupin has been depicted in countless film and stage adaptions, most recently as the inspiration of the Netflix series, Lupin, starring Omar Sy. This Warbler Classics edition includes a detailed chronology of Leblanc's life and work.

Oscar Wilde's social comedy, An Ideal Husband, has charmed and challenged audiences since its glamorous London opening in 1895, which the Prince of Wales attended. When a prominent politician is, blackmailed over a youthful indiscretion, society is forced to examine whether idealized notions of goodness and morality serve to uphold society or become tools of destruction. In the context of contemporary quests to grapple with the past honestly, Wilde's sparkling and profound play is unparalleled in beckoning us to love the world "in all its tainted glory." This Warbler Classics edition includes an afterword by Ulrich Baer and George Bernard Shaw's review of the original stage production.

Mary Austin's love of the desert is everywhere evident in The Land of Little Rain, a collection of fourteen vignettes about the land and people of the region that today includes Death Valley National Park and the Mojave National Preserve. Part nature essay, personal essay, folk legend, and local history of the California Sierras, this enduring American classic resists classification. Her lyrical observations are infused with a deep understanding of the flora and fauna of the area and an appreciation of the people she encountered and befriended there-Shoshones and Paiutes, Mexican and Chinese immigrants, shepherds, stagecoach drivers, and miners among them. Austin's writings have been compared to the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, and Aldo Leopard, but her poetic sensibility is purely original, winsome, and entirely her own. This Warbler Classics paperback includes the illustrations that appeared in the original edition and a detailed biographical note.

Kate Chopin's absorbing 1899 novel The Awakening tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a married woman in New Orleans who, during a summer holiday, begins to question her conventional life. In this path-breaking novel, Chopin speculates more daringly than any before her about the consequences for middle-class women of late-nineteenth-century society's unleashing of female desire. Celebrated today as a key text in American literature, it scandalized early critics and, precisely because of its boldness, jeopardized Chopin's career. In this annotated, modernized edition-specially tailored for twenty-first-century readers-Rafael Walker highlights Chopin's awareness of the privileged class's exploitation of the the less-privileged, and includes a number of neglected stories that foreground Chopin's feminist proclivities.

While at Hyde Park Corner tube station, Anne Beddingfeld sees a man electrocuted after apparently losing his balance and falling onto the rails. A man in a brown suit examines the lifeless body and makes a hasty exit, inadvertently leaving behind a cryptic note. What is the significance of "17.122 Kilmorden Castle" and who is the man in the brown suit? Ruled an accidental death by Scotland Yard, Anne is not convinced. Her spirited quest to unravel the mystery leads her aboard a South Africa-bound ocean liner and into the murky world of nefarious diamond thieves and other dubious characters. Part murder mystery and part international crime thriller, this clever, labyrinthine tale entertains at every turn. This Warbler Classics edition includes a detailed biographical note.

First published in 1923, Cane is a significant work of Modernist fiction and a literary Goliath of the Harlem Renaissance. In this wholly original novel, Jean Toomer highlights issues of class and caste in a three-part pastiche of poems, vignettes, and play-like stories. The audacious, non-traditional structure of the book reflects the prismatic nature of the material itself. Toomer's close observations during a stint as school principal in Sparta, Georgia, primarily informed what Houston A. Baker, Jr. calls a "mysterious brand of Southern psychological realism that has been matched only in the best work of William Faulkner." This edition includes Jean Toomer's essay, The Crock of Problems, in which the author discusses race in America and his own diverse ethnic heritage, and an extensive biographical note.

First published in 1688, Oroonoko follows the tragic love story of a charismatic African prince and his beloved Imoinda. The eponymous hero is tricked into slavery and sold to European colonists in Surinam. Behn's moving and deeply empathetic tale is structured, as a first-person account of Oroonoko's life, love, rebellion, and execution. This Warbler Classics edition includes an historically illuminating article by George Jay Smith from 1925 and an essay that provides context for Oroonoko, Behn's most famous story, by Janet Todd, whose biography Aphra Behn: A Secret Life was published in 2017.

John Dos Passos's second novel, Three Soldiers, was published in 1921 after many rejections from publishers and censorship squabbles. The novel, which was hailed as a masterpiece on its original publication, stands as one of the most grimly honest portraits of World War I. This anti-war novel focuses on three soldiers, Fuselli, an Italian American store clerk from San Francisco; Chrisfield, a farm boy from Indiana; and Andrews, a musically gifted Harvard graduate from New York-who endure long waits in the trenches punctuated by terrifying firefights filled with poison gas. The military strategy of the direct frontal assault combined with the use of airplanes, grenades, and mustard gas as military weapons assures mutual destruction. Three Soldiers explores fear and ambition, conformity and rebellion, desertion and violence in the context of impossible circumstances. The book remains a towering testament to the brutal and dehumanizing effects of a regimented war machine on ordinary soldiers. This Warbler Classics edition includes a detailed biographical timeline.

Edwin Lefèvre's Reminiscences of a Stock Operator is a fictionalized autobiography based on the life of Jesse Livermore (1877-1940) who was a pioneer of day trading and one of the greatest investors of all time. At his peak in 1929, Livermore was worth $100 million, which in today's dollars roughly equates to $1.5 billion, making him one of the richest people in the world at that time. The book, which began as a series of articles published during 1922 and 1923 in The Saturday Evening Post, tells the story of Livermore's progression from day trading in the then so-called "bucket shops" to market speculator, market maker, and market manipulator to Wall Street "Boy Plunger" where he won and lost tens of millions of dollars. This classic of American business writing continues to offer sharp insights into the art and psychology of trading and speculation. It is one of the most widely read, highly recommended investment books of all time.

In West with the Night Beryl Markham chronicles her unconventional, free-spirited girlhood in Kenya and her adventures as a rescue pilot, mail carrier, and bush pilot, scouting game for safaris all over Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. The book earned high praise upon its publication in 1942, but fell out of print and into obscurity. When it was, republished in 1983, the book became an international bestseller and is now, considered both a classic of its genre and a significant literary achievement. National Geographic Adventure ranks it number 8 in a list of 100 best adventure books.

The Island of Doctor Moreau is a classic work of early science fiction and one of H. G. Wells' most visionary novels. It recounts the harrowing ordeal of Edward Prendick, an Englishman who survives a shipwreck in the southern Pacific Ocean. Rescued by a man named Montgomery, Prendick finds himself on an island belonging to Dr. Moreau, formerly an eminent physiologist in London who was expelled from his homeland for his cruel vivisection experiments. Prendick discovers that Moreau has been creating hideous hybrids of beasts and man in the name of science with an unnerving, sinister disregard for the anguish of his test subjects. Fearing for his life, Prendick flees into the jungle where he joins a colony of half-human/half-animal creatures while he undertakes efforts to escape. Meantime, the true consequences of Moreau's experiments emerge and Prendick is imperiled by forces he can barely comprehend, let alone control. This gruesome tale, as haunting as it is enduring, brilliantly anticipates questions that persist today-what limits, if any, should be imposed in the pursue of science and at what price? This Warbler Classics edition includes an image gallery of animal species that feature in the story and a detailed biographical timeline.

John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer follows the overlapping lives of four principal characters in a sweeping multi-faceted tale set to the soundtrack of the booming, rhythmic pulse of New York City in the 1920s. Peopled with wealthy professionals, struggling immigrants, actors, cab drivers, chefs, and shopkeepers, a portrait of New York City bursts into view with all the force of the city itself. Through a narrative collage of descriptions, snatches of conversations, music, flashbacks, streams of consciousness, and shifting perspectives, Dos Passos vividly portrays the profits and perils of the American dream. Considered by many to be his greatest novel, Manhattan Transfer is a landmark work of modernist fiction and a masterpiece of American literature.

Set in early 1900s Italy and England, A Room with a View offers a humorous critique of Edwardian-era society. The novel begins in Florence, Italy, where Miss Lucy Honeychurch, who is chaperoned by her spinster cousin Miss Charlotte Bartlett, arrive at the Pensione Bertolini to find that instead of rooms with a view of the Arno, as promised, theirs face a drab courtyard. Another guest spontaneously offers to swap the rooms that he and his son have to remedy their distress. Thus ensues an unlikely acquaintance and a series of unforeseen, if not fateful, events that upend the lives of the eccentric cast of characters who vividly animate this enduring and delightful tale. Widely recognized as one of the finest novels of the twentieth century, A Room with a View is one of Forster's most celebrated works. This Warbler Classics edition includes a thought-provoking and historically interesting essay about E. M. Forster's work by legendary contemporary critic and American public intellectual Lionel Trilling along with a detailed biographical timeline.

The Enormous Room is a fictionalized autobiographical account of the three months that E. E. Cummings spent in a French prison under suspicion of espionage-a circumstance he could have easily avoided had he professed a hatred of Germans. Instead, when questioned, Cummings answered French authorities in a way that insured that he would accompany his friend "B." (William Slater Brown), who was indeed guilty of writing letters critical of the French government. The psychologically tense narrative shocking and provocative in its day-juxtaposes the barbarity and inhumanity of war against the comradery and collective spirit of the oppressed. As a piece of writing, it foreshadows the whimsy, humor, pessimism, and jubilance that would come to characterize Cummings's poetry while, on its own, it stands as a major work of World War I literature. This Warbler Classics edition includes Paul Headrick's essay "Brilliant Obscurity:" The Reception of The Enormous Room, as well as a detailed biographical timeline.

In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway's first collection of short stories, heralded the arrival of an original and distinct literary voice. The stories' richly complicated themes of alienation, loss, grief, and separation contrast with Hemingway's spare but deeply evocative prose. This Warbler Classics edition includes the essay Hemingway at Midnight by eminent literary critic Malcolm Cowley, who was a contemporary of Hemingway, as well as a detailed biographical timeline.

The first anti-utopian novel ever written, We is a satire on life in a dystopian future society called One State. People are ruled by the Benefactor and policed by the Guardians. They conform to supremely rational, precise rules that govern every aspect of their personal lives-from having numbers rather than names to living in glass buildings that enable mass surveillance. D-503, a mathematician, finds himself deviating from prescribed norms after meeting I-330, a woman involved in a secret plan to destroy the One State. After We was banned by the Soviets in 1921, it was published for the first time in English in 1924. The forerunner of such canonical works as 1984 and Brave New World, We is as urgent and relevant today as it was a hundred years ago. E. M. Forster's short story "The Machine Stops" takes place in a future, where humans have lost the ability to live on the surface of the earth. Individuals live underground and rely entirely on an omnipotent, global Machine for all bodily and spiritual needs. A heretic, who is punished for his deviant behavior nonetheless insists that the Machine, which humans have come to worship, shows ominous signs of breaking down.