Billy Budd and The Piazza Tales
Herman Melville
Language: English
Pages: 376
ISBN: B01GT6H61E
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Billy Budd and the Piazza Tales, by Herman Melville, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
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Largely neglected in his own lifetime, Herman Melville mastered not only the great American novel but also the short story and novella forms. In Billy Budd and The Piazza Tales, Melville reveals an uncanny awareness of the inscrutable nature of reality.
Published posthumously in 1924, Billy Budd is a masterpiece second only to Melville's Moby-Dick. This complex short novel tells the story of “the handsome sailor" Billy who, provoked by a false charge, accidentally kills the satanic master-at-arms. Unable to defend himself due to a stammer, he is hanged, going willingly to his fate. Although typically ambiguous, Billy Budd is seen by many as a testament to Melville's ultimate reconciliation with the incongruities and injustices of life.
The Piazza Tales (1856) comprises six short stories, including the perpetually popular "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby," a tale of a scrivener who repeatedly distills his mordant criticism of the workplace into the deceptively simple phrase "I would prefer not to."
Robert G. O'Meally is Zora Neale Hurston Professor of Literature at Columbia University, where he has served on the faculty for seventeen years; since 1999 he has been the director of Columbia's Center for Jazz Studies. He is the author of The Craft of Ralph Ellison and Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, and the principal writer of Seeing Jazz, the catalog for the Smithsonian Institution's exhibit on jazz painting and literature.
Spanish seaman, whose countenance evinced his due share in the general hopefulness and confidence at the coming of the breeze. He proved the same man who had behaved with so shamefaced an air on the windlass.li “Ah—it is you, my man,” exclaimed Captain Delano—”well, no more sheep’s-eyes now; look straight forward and keep the ship so. Good hand, I trust? And want to get into the harbor, don’t you?” The man assented with an inward chuckle, grasping the tillerhead firmly. Upon this, unperceived
guns were in readiness, though, owing to the San Dominick having glided somewhat astern of the sealer, only the aftermost one could be brought to bear. With this, they fired six times, thinking to cripple the fugitive ship by bringing down her spars, but only a few inconsiderable ropes were shot away. Soon the ship was beyond the gun’s range, steering broad out of the bay, the blacks thickly clustering round the bowsprit,lp one moment with taunting cries towards the whites, the next with upthrown
recent events, raved of some things which could never have happened. But subsequent depositions of the surviving sailors, bearing out the revelations of their captain in several of the strangest particulars, gave credence to the rest. So that the tribunal, in its final decision, rested its capital sentences upon statements which, had they lacked confirmation, it would have deemed it but duty to reject. I, DON ]OSÉ DE ABOS AND PADILLA, His Majesty’s Notary for the Royal Revenue, and Register of
lying down before it, beneath a rude shed lately added, slept out the night, blunderbuss in hand. It is supposed that not content with daily parading over a cindery solitude at the head of his fine army, Oberlus now meditated the most active mischief, his probable object being to surprise some passing ship touching at his dominions, massacre the crew, and run away with her to parts unknown. While these plans were simmering in his head, two ships touch in company at the isle, on the opposite side
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