BiblioVault - Books about Classics

Early Stories by Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams

University of Iowa Press, 2025

Early Stories by Tennessee Williams is an edited collection of thirty-one previously unpublished short stories written in the 1930s, when Tennessee Williams was living in the Midwest during a tumultuous period for the nation and himself. The stories highlight aspects of the writer’s biography relative to his young adult years in St. Louis, Columbia, and the Missouri Ozarks, offering insight into the relationships between the author, his family, and close friends. The influence of proletarian fiction and leftist ideas are evident in Williams’s stories of the Great Depression, as are themes of sexual turmoil and inner passions inspired by authors like D. H. Lawrence.
In notes for each story, additional context is provided regarding locations, occupations, and individuals. All of this enriches a critical understanding of Tennessee Williams’s major works such as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Night of the Iguana, and Suddenly Last Summer.

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Emma

An Annotated Edition

Jane Austen

Harvard University Press, 2012

“Jane Austen lovers worldwide will cherish these books...Prepare yourself for a major treat.”
—Christian Science Monitor

Handsome, clever, and rich—just like Emma.
Emma is one of Jane Austen’s most beloved novels, and perhaps her most technically accomplished. It’s a timeless tale of friendship, self-discovery, and love. Inspiring countless adaptations for stage and screen, Emma is the story of a smart but superficial girl who finds her ultimate happiness through humility. If we loved this extraordinary edition less, we might be able to talk about it more.

For beginners and experts alike—immerse yourself in Jane Austen’s world: For the modern reader, our annotations provide clear explanations and illuminating context for period language and references. For the enthusiast, they offer fresh, exciting analysis—a passionate friend in the margins.

A work of art—the ideal gift: Perfect for gifting, collecting, and cherishing, this grand hardcover (9” x 9.5”) brims with hundreds of full-color illustrations that vividly recreate Austen’s world—its fashions, carriages, libraries, and estates.

The story: Emma Woodhouse is in no rush to find a husband. She’s “handsome, clever, and rich,” with “very little to distress or vex her,” and more than a little spoiled. Fancying herself a matchmaker, Emma insinuates herself into others’ lives, mostly ignorant of the risks. When her headstrong nature causes hurt to others, she is corrected by the older, down-to-earth Mr. Knightley. After weaving herself unwittingly into a number of love triangles, Emma is forced to confront her feelings for her only critic.

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Emma McChesney and Co.

Edna Ferber

University of Illinois Press, 2002

Edna Ferber, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Show Boat and Giant, achieved her first great success with a series of stories featuring Emma McChesney: a smart, stylish, divorced mother who in a mere twelve years rose from stenographer to traveling sales representative to business manager and partner of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company.

In this final of three volumes chronicling the travels and trials of Emma McChesney, first published in 1915, Emma's son, Jock, has moved to Chicago with his new wife. Struggling with a newly emptied nest, Emma dives into a whirlwind South American sales tour to prove she hasn't lost her touch.

Back in New York, Emma and her business partner, T. A. Buck Jr., try to disguise their budding romance from colleagues. After months of acting like a "captain of finance when he feels like a Romeo," T. A. convinces Emma they should marry. Emma tries to "be what the yellow novels call a doll-wife" but trades in her fancy dressing gowns for more sensible business suits and heads back to the office.

With one hand writing advertising copy and the other wrapped around a pair of shears, Emma saves the company from financial peril amid the arrival of some flustering, if exciting, news from Jock. By turns sales pro, newlywed, fashion maven, and anxious grandmother, Emma symbolizes the ideal woman at the dawn of the twentieth century: sharp, capable, charming, and progressive. Emma McChesney and Co. is enhanced by the illustrations of James Montgomery Flagg, one of the most highly regarded book illustrators of the period.

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The Essential Fictions

Isaac Babel; Edited and translated from the Russian by Val Vinokur; Illustrations by Yefim Ladyzhensky

Northwestern University Press, 2018

The Essential Fictions offers contemporary readers seventy-two short stories by one of twentieth-century Russia’s premier storytellers, Isaac Babel. This unique volume, which includes Babel’s famous Red Cavalry series and his Odessa Stories, is translated, edited, introduced, and annotated by Val Vinokur, a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow in Translation, and features illustrations by Yefim Ladyzhensky, a painter known for his depictions of everyday life under Soviet rule in Babel’s native Odessa.

Babel was born in 1894 into multicultural Odessa’s thriving Jewish community. Working as a journalist, he witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War, and accompanied the Cossack horsemen of the Red Cavalry during the 1920 Polish-Soviet War, distilling these experiences into his fiction. Vinokur highlights Babel’s “horrified hopefulness” and “doleful and bespectacled Jewish comedy” in the face of the bloody conflicts that plagued his generation.

On the centenary of the revolution that toppled the Romanov tsars, Babel’s fictions continue to absorb and fascinate contemporary readers interested in eastern European and Jewish literature as well as the history and politics of the twentieth century.

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Essential Turgenev

Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

Northwestern University Press, 1994

The Essential Turgenev will provide American readers with the first comprehensive, portable edition of this great Russian author's works. It offers an extensive introduction to the writings that established Turgenev as one of the preeminent literary figures of his time, and reveals the breadth of insight into changing social conditions that made Turgenev a portal to Russian intellectual life.

Readers will find complete, exemplary translations of Turgenev's finest novels, Rudin, A Nest of Gentry, and Fathers and Sons, along with the lapidary novella First Love. The volume also includes selections from Sportsman's Sketches, seven of Turgenev's most compelling short stories, and fifteen prose poems. It also contains samples of the author's nonfiction drawn from autobiographical sketches, memoirs, public speeches, plus the influential essay "Hamlet and Don Quixote" and correspondence with Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and others.

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