Literature from The Vespiary Book Restoration & Bindery

Shipwrecked castaway Lemuel Gulliver's encounters with the petty, diminutive Lilliputians, the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the abstracted scientists of Laputa, the philosophical Houyhnhnms, and the brutish Yahoos give him new, bitter insights into human behavior. Swift's fantastic and subversive book remains supremely relevant in our own age of distortion, hypocrisy, and irony.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." So begins Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's witty comedy of manners--one of the most popular novels of all time--that features splendidly civilized sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as they play out their… Read more about this item

With vivid power, Wharton evokes a time of gaslit streets, formal dances held in the ballrooms of stately brownstones, and society people "who dreaded scandal more than disease." This is Newland Archer's world as he prepares to marry the docile May Welland. Then, suddenly, the mysterious, intensely nonconformist Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York after a long absence, turning… Read more about this item

This is a troubling story of crime, sin, guilt, punishment and expiation, set in the rigid moral climate of 17th-century New England. The young mother of an illegitimate child confronts her Puritan judges. However, it is not so much her harsh sentence, but the cruelties of slowly exposed guilt as her lover is revealed, that hold the reader enthralled all the… Read more about this item

The pioneering Book of the City of Ladies begins when, feeling frustrated and miserable after reading a male writer's tirade against women, Christine de Pizan has a dreamlike vision where three virtues--Reason, Rectitude and Justice--appear to correct this view. They instruct her to build an allegorical city in which womankind can be defended against slander, its walls and towers constructed… Read more about this item

This self-contained, free-standing volume gives readers the Second Quarto text. In his illustrated introduction to the plays historical, cultural, and performance contexts, Neil Taylor presents a thorough survey of critical approaches to the play. He addresses the challenges faced in reading, editing, or acting a play with the depth of content and tradition that Hamlet possesses. He also establishes the… Read more about this item

During an eventful season at Bath, young, naive Catherine Morland experiences the joys of fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: flirtatious Isabella, who shares Catherine's love of Gothic romance and horror, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father's mysterious house, Northanger Abbey. There, her imagination influenced by novels… Read more about this item

Readers and audiences have long greeted As You Like It with delight. Its characters are brilliant conversationalists, including the princesses Rosalind and Celia and their Fool, Touchstone. Soon after Rosalind and Orlando meet and fall in love, the princesses and Touchstone go into exile in the Forest of Arden, where they find new conversational partners. Duke Frederick, younger brother to… Read more about this item

The three plays of the Oresteia portray the bloody events that follow the victorious return of King Agamemnon from the Trojan War, at the start of which he had sacrificed his daughter Iphigeneia to secure divine favor. After Iphi-geneia's mother, Clytemnestra, kills her husband in revenge, she in turn is murdered by their son Orestes with his sister Electra's encouragement.… Read more about this item

After a visitation from the dead - through something as concrete as someone singing a particular Irish song - Gabriel Conroy is struck by the profound realization of how superficially he has always loved his wife, Gretta. The image of the falling snow around them, deepening into a cosmic metaphor for life and death as the story progresses, has been… Read more about this item

Concerned that her son Chad may have become involved with a woman of dubious reputation, the formidable Mrs Newsome sends her 'ambassador' Strether from Massachusetts to Paris to extricate him. Strether's mission, however, is gradually undermined as he falls under the spell of the city and finds Chad refined rather than corrupted by its influence and that of his charming… Read more about this item

The book centers on the character of Mr. Harding, a clergyman of great personal integrity, whose charitable income far exceeds the purpose for which it was intended. Young John Bold turns his reforming zeal to exposing what he considers to be an abuse of privilege, despite being in love with Mr. Harding's daughter Eleanor. The novel was highly topical as… Read more about this item

A tale of forbidden sexual passion and thwarted dreams played out against the lush, summer backdrop of the Massachusetts Berkshires, Edith Wharton called Summer her 'hot Ethan.' In their rural settings and their poor, uneducated protagonists, Summer and Ethan Frome represent a sharp departure from Wharton's familiar depictions of the urban upper class. Charity Royall lives unhappily with her hard-drinking… Read more about this item

ostoevsky's final, greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov, paints a complex and richly detailed portrait of a family tormented by its extraordinarily cruel patriarch, Fyodor Pavlovich, whose callous decisions slowly decimate the lives of his sons--the eponymous brothers Karamazov--and lead to his violent murder. In the aftermath of the killing, the brothers contend with dilemmas of honor, faith, and reason as… Read more about this item

Includes the following works: Novels—The Portrait of Dorian Gray; Plays—Salome and The Importance of Being Earnest; Writings—De Profundis, Critic as Artist, and Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Very Young; and selections from Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband, and A Woman of No Importance.

This is the definitive, textually accurate edition of a classic of twentieth-century literature, The Great Gatsby. The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan has been acclaimed by generations of readers. But the first edition contained a number of errors resulting from Fitzgerald's extensive revisions and a rushed production schedule. Subsequent printings… Read more about this item

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each… Read more about this item

Very few people know that Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) wrote a major work on Joan of Arc. Still fewer know that he considered it not only his most important but also his best work. He spent twelve years in research and many months in France doing archival work and then made several attempts until he felt he finally had the… Read more about this item

Pursued by three devoted suitors, Bathsheba Everdine, a beautiful farm owner, allows her passions to run wild. She chooses Seargeant Troy, a dashing and unscrupulous lout, and pays dearly for it. She drives poor Farmer Boldwood to the brink of insanity and beyond. And all along, patient and steady Gabriel Oak tends her sheep and manages her estate, scarcely dreaming… Read more about this item

In the novel, Siddhartha, a young man, leaves his family for a contemplative life, then, restless, discards it for one of the flesh. He conceives a son, but bored and sickened by lust and greed, moves on again. Near despair, Siddhartha comes to a river where he hears a unique sound. This sound signals the true beginning of his life… Read more about this item