Includes Beren and Luthien, Turin and the Dragon, and full narratives of the Necklace of the Dwarves and the Fall of Gondolin. Also includes commentary and poems associated with each tale.

Poetry can inspire, evoke, provoke and transport the reader. But this collection of 39 poems did even more - it broke barriers. This collection was written by Phillis Wheatley, the first African-American woman whose poetry writings were published. Seized from West Africa as a young girl, Phillis lived in Boston as a slave to the prominent Wheatley family where she learned to read and write, as well as undertaking lessons in the Bible, astronomy, geography,...

'How we interact with animals has preoccupied philosophers, poets, and naturalists for ages,' writes Susan Orlean. Since the age of six, when Orlean wrote and illustrated a book called Herbert the Near-Sighted Pigeon, she's been drawn to stories about how we live with animals, and how they abide by us. Now, in On Animals, she examines animal-human relationships through the compelling tales she has written over the course of her celebrated career....

From Publishers Weekly: The rich and sometimes discordant strains of American self-scrutiny fill this wide-ranging anthology. Kennedy (The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) arranges the more than 200 selections according to themes like "The Flag," "Freedom of Speech," "Work, Opportunity and Invention" and "The Individual," and devotes equal space to the official, the devotional and the oppositional. The Declaration of Independence...

With these words, Elena Ferrante bid farewell to her year-long collaboration with the Guardian newspaper. For a full year, she wrote an article each week, the subjects of which had been suggested by Guardian editors, making the writing process a form of prolonged interlocution.

Don Juan is a satiric poem by Lord Byron, based on the legend of Don Juan, which Byron reverses, portraying Juan not as a womanizer but as someone easily seduced by women. It is a variation on the epic form. Byron himself called it an "Epic Satire". Modern critics generally consider it Byron's masterpiece. The poem is in eight line iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme ab ab ab cc – often the last rhyming couplet is used for a humor comic...

Presents the legends, songs, and sayings of Uncle Remus, following the text of the first edition of Joel Chandler Harris' attempt to record traditional black stories of his time.

The great American novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937) here gives us her colorful and textured travel memoir "In Morroco" (1920). Still a deeply energized work, Wharton imbues the reader with a sense of wonder that served as the impetus for her travels into this exotic Northern African land. Edith Wharton made her name as a novelist closely associated with the prolific Henry James. Their personal and literary kinship may be seen in much of her long...