With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster, and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emmanuel. Drawing on her own deeply unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels,...

A new illustrated gift edition of a beloved classic. Three hundred years ago, a great deal of the world as we now know it was still undiscovered. A voyage in those days was not a pleasant thing, and a traveller was likely to encounter mysterious islands and strange people. Danger lurked around every corner, and friends and foes are to be found unexpectedly, and in equal measure. When Lemeul Gulliver, a ship's surgeon, sets off on the high seas in...

"Beautiful Country is the real deal. Heartrending, unvarnished, and powerfully courageous, this account of growing up undocumented in America will never leave you."--Gish Jen, author of The Resisters. "Ba Ba told me this and I in turn carried it in my heart: so long as we didn't stake claim to what wasn't ours--the things, our rooms, America, this beautiful country--we would be okay." An incandescent and heartrending memoir about Qian Julie Wang's...

Presents an anthology of the best literary essays published in the past year, selected from American periodicals.