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Written in seclusion following the intense negative public reaction to the publication of his novel Pierre, The Piazza Tales is Herman Melville's accessible and entertaining collection of short stories and novellas concerning love, labor, and loss. The collection includes his three most important achievements in the genre of short fiction: the short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and the novellas Benito Cereno and The Encantadas.

The Piazza Tales is a collection of six short stories by American writer Herman Melville, published by Dix & Edwards in the United States in May 1856 and in Britain in June. Except for the newly written title story, "The Piazza," all of the stories had appeared in Putnam's Monthly between 1853 and 1855. The collection includes what has long been regarded as three of Melville's most important achievements in the genre of short fiction, "Bartleby, the Scrivener", "Benito Cereno", and "The Encantadas", his sketches of the Galápagos Islands.

With disparate settings such as a Massachusetts farmhouse and the strange volcanic clime of the Enchanted Isles, this six-story anthology features some of Herman Melville’s most exceptional works. Included here is “Bartleby,” the dark tale of a Wall Street clerk who possesses a confounding and disarmingly passive insubordination; and “Benito Cereno,” in which the captain of a whaler boards a tattered Spanish slave ship in South America only to be drawn into an intricately plotted mutiny.

Herman Melville is now seen as one of the great figures in American literature, a man who expanded the role of the novel and gave new and complex depths to the meaning of a story. His best work uses the form of the novel or the story as a means of carrying and discussing concerns about the nature of humanity, the role of God, and a sometimes satiric, sometimes bitter, examination of colonialism and capitalism.

In this entertaining anthology of seven new ghost stories, written especially for Naxos AudioBooks, we meet all kinds of phantoms in different situations: a kind-hearted but accident-prone spectre unwittingly upsetting a family home, as well as ghosts in ancient Egypt, on board a pirate ship, and in a Newcastle swimming pool. Engaging and slightly sinister, The Clumsy Ghost and Other Spooky Tales is a delightful shiver for all the family.