Charles Dickens

In common to all is the mastery on display. This centuries-spanning collection, edited by C. Alphonso Smith, brings together the finest gems of the storyteller's art. Classics of New England are here, from Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" and Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Great Stone Face." The taut realism of Bret Harte's California, in "The Outcasts of Poker Flat, the mystifications of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold Bug," and the perennially heart-warming "A Christmas Carol," by Charles Dickens, are set here alongside the finest from Rudyard Kipling, O. Henry, de Maupassant, and Robert Louis Stevenson -- and even ancient tales from the Old Testament and The Arabian Nights. Included in this volume: ESTHER, From the Old Testament, THE HISTORY OF ALI BABA AND THE FORTY ROBBERS, From "The Arabian Nights," RIP VAN WINKLE, By Washington Irving, THE GOLD-BUG, By Edgar Allan Poe, A CHRISTMAS CAROL, By Charles Dickens, THE GREAT STONE FACE, By Nathaniel Hawthorne, RAB AND HIS FRIENDS, By Dr. John Brown, THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT, By Bret Harte, MARKHEIM, By Robert Louis Stevenson, THE NECKLACE, By Guy de Maupassant, THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, By Rudyard Kipling and THE GIFT OF THE MAGI, By O. Henry.

Dickens s scathing portrait of Victorian industrial society. Coketown, the depressed mill town that is the setting for one of Charles Dickens s most powerful and unforgettable novels, is all brick, machinery, and smoke-darkened chimneys. Its emblematic citizen, the schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind, lives to impose his version of education: facts and statistics that feed the mind while starving the soul and spirit. Inflexible and unyielding, he places conformity above curiosity and logic over sentiment, only to see his philosophy warp and destroy the lives of his own family. Filled with memorable characters and scenes, "Hard Times" is a daring novel of ideas and, ultimately, a celebration of love, hope, and imagination. With an Introduction by Frederick Buschand an Afterword by Jane Smiley"