Books in the Thrift Editions series

Major work on ethics, by one of the most influential thinkers of the last 2 centuries, deals with master/slave morality and modern man's current moral practices; the evolution of man's feelings of guilt and bad conscience; and how ascetic ideals help maintain human life under certain conditions.

Unique features include an extensive overview of Shakespeare's life, world, and theater by the general editor of Signet Classic Shakespeare series, plus a special introduction to the play by the editor Sylvan Barnet, Tufts University. This book contains information on the source from which Shakespeare derived "Othello"--selections from Giraldi Cinthio's "Hecatommithi". Special introduction by Alvin Kernan, Princeton University.

Stimulating, thought-provoking utopian fantasy about a young man who's put into a hypnotic trance in the late 19th century and awakens in the year 2000 to find crime, war, and want nonexistent.

Rich in detail, shrewdly observed, and vividly narrated, these 6 tales include "Three Deaths," "The Three Hermits," "The Devil," "Father Sergius," "Master and Man," and the title story.

Nature was a form of religion for naturalist, essayist, and early environmentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817 62). In communing with the natural world, he wished to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and learn what it had to teach." Toward that end Thoreau built a cabin in the spring of 1845 on the shores of Walden Pond on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson outside Concord, Massachusetts. There he observed nature, farmed, built fences, surveyed, and wrote in his journal.One product of his two-year sojourn was this book a great classic of American letters. Interwoven with accounts of Thoreau's daily life (he received visitors and almost daily walked into Concord) are mediations on human existence, society, government, and other topics, expressed with wisdom and beauty of style.Walden offers abundant evidence of Thoreau's ability to begin with observations on a mundane incident or the minutiae of nature and then develop these observations into profound ruminations on the most fundamental human concerns. Credited with influencing Tolstoy, Gandhi, and other thinkers, the volume remains a masterpiece of philosophical reflection."

This unique collection spans over 400 years (1488-1902) of haiku history by the greatest masters, in translations by top-flight scholars of the field. Haiku (distilled poems featuring 17 syllables) command enormous respect in Japan. Now readers of poetry in the West can savor these expressive masterpieces in this treasury.

Classic of economic and social theory offers satiric examination of the hollowness and falsity suggested by the term "conspicuous consumption," exposing the emptiness of many standards of taste, education, dress, and culture.

Romeo and Juliet was the first drama in English to confer full tragic dignity on the agonies of youthful love. The lyricism that enshrines their death-marked devotion has made the lovers legendary in every language that possesses a literature.

In the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, two French Jesuit priests travel to the American Southwest to establish a new Roman Catholic diocese. Upon arrival, Father Jean Marie Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant encounter a diverse population in an unforgiving landscape, the entrenched customs and beliefs of the inhabitants, and corrupt Spanish priests. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Willa Cather and published in 1927, the novel follows the two priests' adventures, friendship, and spiritual journey as they struggle to fulfill their mission.

In eighteenth-century Peru, a historic bridge collapses, plunging five people to their deaths. A Franciscan monk witnesses the disaster and embarks on a spiritual quest to reconcile free will versus fate and the existence of God in the victims' lives: "Why did this happen to those five?" This thought-provoking, Pulitzer Prize-winning second novel by American writer Thornton Wilder was called "a masterpiece" by The New York Times when it was published in 1927. McCall's praised it as "the philosophical novel brought to perfection." New generations have applied its messages to tragic events, including the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, and the September 11 terrorist attacks. The Bridge of San Luis Rey remains a compelling literary classic exploring destiny, love, religion, and the meaning of life.

Laugh out loud with this captivating collection of more than 350 limericks. This volume features selections by legendary poets Robert Frost, Edward Lear, and Carolyn Wells; renowned writers Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, William Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Mark Twain; and world leaders Prime Minister Clement Attlee, Queen Elizabeth I, and President Woodrow Wilson. A limerick is a five-line rhyming poem with a bouncy rhythm. Enjoy common varieties, including geographical and bawdy limericks, as well as tongue twisters and creative misspellings. Travel the world with a man from Nantucket and a young lady of Niger. Explore the animal kingdom with a fly and a flea in a flue and a pelican with food stuffed in his beak. Experience the mundane, such as a tooting tutor tutoring two tooters, and the peculiar, including walking around a room that has no floor. With classics from the golden age and contemporary verse, this irresistible, rib-tickling anthology has something for everyone, from humor buffs to poetry lovers.

British economist, ethical theorist, and civil servant John Stuart Mill (1806-73) was one of the most influential English-language philosophers during the Victorian era. Autobiography, published posthumously in 1873, recounts the prolific thinker and writer's rigorous tutelage under a domineering father and his mental health crisis at age twenty. The book explores his struggle to regain joy amid self-reflection as well as a reassessment of theories he once believed to be true. Mill's insights have remained relevant in the century and a half since he published his most important works, including On Liberty, Principles of Political Economy, The Subjection of Women, and Utilitarianism.

In these masterful stories, steeped in realism, Joyce creates an exacting portrait of his native city, showing how it reflects the general decline of Irish culture and civilization. Joyce compels attention by the power of its unique vision of the world, its controlling sense of the truths of human experience.

William Faulkner is one of the most significant American writers of the twentieth century, but success was elusive with his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, in 1926. The promising young author had not yet achieved the reputation that would lead to the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature and two Pulitzer Prizes. Soldiers' Pay reflects Faulkner's gift for keen observations, embracing his Southern experience, as well as his experimental narrative techniques blended with literary modernism. He captures the post-World War I atmosphere of the Lost Generation on American soil and explores the war's emotional impact on three weary veterans and their hometown in Georgia.

One of the most innovative authors and distinguished literary critics of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf examines family dynamics and the tensions between men and women in her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse. She explores multiple perspectives of the members of the Ramsay family as they navigate experiences of disappointment and loss. Divided into three parts, the story takes place pre- and post-World War I during visits to the Ramsays' summer residence on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. Virginia Woolf strove to write a new fiction that emphasized the passage of time as both a series of sequential moments and a longer flow of years and centuries, as well as exploring the essential indefinability of character. To the Lighthouse is among her most successful experiments in her pioneering use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device in addition to such groundbreaking novels as Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Voyage Out.

Besides a selection of letters by the abolitionist himself, the original collection includes an excerpt from W. E. B. Du Bois's biography, John Brown, addresses by Frederick Douglass and Ralph Waldo Emerson, poetry by Louisa May Alcott, and more.