Robert Louis Stevenson is widely known for his novels Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Treasure Island, and Kidnapped. His reputation as a "romantic" writer and children's author, however, reflects only a portion of his literary achievement. This collection of stories features an introduction by Stevenson scholar Barry Menikoff which places Stevenson's writing in a new context. Menikoff argues that Stevenson is misunderstood by academic readers and critics and presents him as a writer whose subjects and methods are clearly modernist.

Included in this volume for the first time are versions of the stories "Markheim" and "The Isle of Voices" as they appear in Stevenson' s holograph manuscripts, plus his classics The Suicide Club, The Rajah's Diamond, "The Bottle Imp," "The Pavilion on the Links," "A Lodging for the Night," "The Merry Men," and "Thrawn Janet."

Trixy is a 1904 novel by the best-selling but largely forgotten American author and women’s rights activist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. The book decries the then common practice of vivisection, or scientific experiments on live animals. In Trixy, contemporary readers can trace the roots of the early animal rights movement in Phelps’s influential campaign to introduce legislation to regulate or end this practice. Phelps not only presents a narrative polemic against the cruelty of vivisection but argues that training young doctors in it makes them bad physicians. Emily E. VanDette’s introduction demonstrates that Phelps’s protest writing, which included fiction, pamphlets, essays, and speeches, was well ahead of its time.

Though not well known today, Phelps’s 1868 spiritualist novel, The Gates Ajar, which offered a comforting view of the afterlife to readers traumatized by the Civil War, was the century’s second best-selling American novel, surpassed only by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Recently scholars and readers have begun to reexamine Phelps’s significance. As contemporary authors, including Peter Singer, Jonathan Safran Foer, Donna J. Haraway, Gary L. Francione, and Carol J. Adams, have extended her vision, they have also created new audiences for her work.

Almost from the time of its publication in 1846, Melville's first book, based on his own travels in the South Seas, has been recognized as a classic in the literature of travel and adventure. Although initially rejected as too fantastic to be true, Typee was immensely popular and regarded in Melville's lifetime as his best work. It established his reputation as the literary discoverer of the South Seas and inspired the likes of Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Two common sailors jump ship and are held in benign captivity by Polynesian natives. Through the narrator's eyes we see a literate (if romanticized) portrait of the people and their culture presented in vivid, even scientific, detail. Melville's racy style and irreverence toward Christian missionaries caused a scandal, and critics denounced the narrator's suggestion that the native life might be superior to that of modern civilization. An adventure story above all, albeit one with a philosophical bent, Typee is a combination of elements that even early in Melville's career hinted at the towering ambition he would fulfill with Moby-Dick.

Almost from the time of its publication early in 1846, Melville's first book, based on his own travels in the South Seas, has been recognized as a classic in the literature of travel and adventure. From the beginning, however, there have been problems with the text. Due to disparities between the American and English editions, and revisions Melville had to make at his publisher's request concerning its racy style and attitude toward missionaries, the book has circulated in two versions.

This scholarly edition is based on collations of all editions published during his lifetime, incorporating many authorial readings that have often been omitted and some that have been misprinted in all previous editions. This edition is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).