Library

The Ambassadors (Everyman's Library (Cloth))

Henry JamesA new Everyman's Library hardcover edition of The Ambassadors—one of the great masterpieces of Henry James’s late period, and the author’s own favorite among his works.

First published in 1903, the novel follows middle-aged Lambert Strether as he is dispatched from Massachusetts to Paris by his wealthy fiancée to rescue her son, Chad Newsome, from the corrupting influences of Europe and its wicked women. Once the mild-mannered and inexperienced Strether arrives in Paris, however, Chad introduces him to a world that he finds refined and sophisticated, rather than debauched and base. Mrs. Newsome, waiting in Massachusetts, grows impatient and sends more ambassadors to retrieve her wayward men. But Strether has become especially enchanted by Chad’s female friends Madame de Vionnet and her daughter, Jeanne, and he begins to wonder if, all his life, he has missed out on what the wider world has to offer. “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to,” he tells a friend in one of the most memorable scenes in this darkly comic, masterfully written story of liberation, self-discovery, and the meaning of living well.

Collected Stories Volume 1

Henry James(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

The Coxon Fund

Henry JamesThe greater the windbag the greater the calamity.

Henry James examines one of his favorite topics—the artist’s place in society—by profiling a “genius” who just can’t seem to support himself. A dazzling intellectual and brilliant speaker, Mr. Saltram has become the most sought-after houseguest in England. But, as his intellectual labors slacken, it beomes harder and harder to get him to leave.

A wry, edgy comedy about the fine line between making art...and freeloading. The Coxon Fund shows off a gift that is rarely appreciated about Henry James: he can be wickedly funny.

The Art of The Novella Series

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

Henry James: Autobiographies: A Small Boy and Others / Notes of a Son and Brother / The Middle Years / Other Writings: Library of America #274

Henry James, Philip HorneThe most extensive collection of Henry James's autobiographical writings ever published offers a revelatory self-portrait from one of America's supreme novelists and his famous family. In 1911, deeply affected by the death of his brother William the year before, Henry James began working on a book about his early life. As was customary for James in his later years, he dictated his recollections to his secretary Theodora Bosanquet, who recalled how “a straight dive into the past brought to the surface treasure after treasure.” A Small Boy and Others (1913) and the two autobiographical books that followed—Notes of a Son and Brother (1914) and the incomplete, posthumously published The Middle Years—stand with his later novels as one of the enduring triumphs of his final years. Not only did James create one of the singular self-portraits in American literature, he also fashioned a richly detailed account of his renowned family, especially his father, the social philosopher Henry James Sr., his brother William, and his dear cousin Minny Temple, inspiration for the heroines of two of his greatest novels, The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove.
Rounding out the volume is a selection of eight other personal reminiscences and, as an appendix, his secretary’s insightful and affectionate memoir, “Henry James at Work.”

Henry James: Collected Stories Volume 2

Henry JamesEncompassing a period of almost fifty years, the stories of Henry James represent the most remarkable feat of sustained literary creation in modern times. For sheer richness, variety and intensity, they have no equal in fiction, enabling us to trace the evolution of a great writer in the finest detail. This collection reprints all the major stories together with many unfamiliar but equally intriguing pieces that illuminate their more celebrated companions.

Volume 2 takes us from “The Private Life” of 1892 to James’s last story, “A Round of Visits,” published in 1910. These are the magnificent works of James’s maturity—“The Death of the Lion,” “The Altar of the Dead,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” “The Turn of the Screw,” “In the Cage,” “The Beast in the Jungle,” and many others—in which the deepening darkness of the author’s life casts a tragic but heroic shadow on the themes of his youth.

Contents of Volume 2

The Private Life
The Real Thing
Owen Wingrave
The Middle Years
The Death of the Lion
The Coxon Fund
The Next Time
The Altar of the Dead
The Figure in the Carpet
The Turn of the Screw
In the Cage
The Real Right Thing
The Great Good Place
Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie
The Abasement of the Northmores
The Special Type
The Tone of Time
The Two Faces
The Beldonald Holbein
The Story in It
Flickerbridge
The Beast in the Jungle
The Papers
Fordham Castle
Julia Bride
The Jolly Corner
Crapy Cornelia
The Bench of Desolation
A Round of Visits

The Lesson of the Master

Henry JamesThis beautifully packaged series of classic novellas includes the works of Anton Chekhov, Colette, Henry James, Herman Melville, and Leo Tolstoy. These collectible editions are the first single-volume publications of these classic tales, offering a closer look at this underappreciated literary form and providing a fresh take on the world's most celebrated authors.

This brilliantly realized, morally ambiguous tale of a young writer and his encounter with "The Master," an accomplished writer whom the young man has long idolized, is a humorous and devastating inquiry into the emotional price that an artist pays for his art.

The Princess Casamassima (Everyman's Library Classics)

Henry JamesWhen a beautiful, spoilt, aristocratic woman with revolutionary ambitions meets an idealistic young proletarian conspirator who dreams of a better life, the stage is set for the story. The author explores the London underworld and the political unrest seething there in the later 19th century.

The Portrait of a Lady (Everyman's Library (Cloth))

Henry James

Washington Square

Henry JamesWashington Square is one of Henry James’s most appealing and popular novels, with the most straightforward plot and style of any of his works.

Set in the genteel New York of James’s early childhood, it is a tale of cruelty laced with comedy. Dr. Austin Sloper is a wealthy and domineering father who is disappointed in the unremarkable daughter he has produced; he dismisses her as both plain and simpleminded. The gentle and dutiful Catherine Sloper has always been in awe of her father, but when she falls in love with Morris Townsend, a penniless charmer whom Dr. Sloper accuses of being a fortune hunter, she dares to defy him and a battle of wills ensues that will leave her forever changed. Readers have long admired the way that the innocent Catherine, misled by her meddling aunt and mistreated by both her father and her lover, grows in strength and wisdom over the course of her ordeal.

The Golden Bowl (Everyman's Library (Cloth))

HENRY JAMESIntroduction by Denis Donoghue