I Would Prefer Not To: Essential Stories

Description

A lawyer hires a new copyist, only to be met with stubborn, confounding resistance. A cynical lightning rod salesman plies his trade by exploiting fears in stormy weather. After boarding a beleaguered Spanish slave ship, an American trader's cheerful outlook is repeatedly shadowed by paralyzing unease.

Herman Melville was born to a merchant family in New York City in 1819. His father died suddenly in 1832, and Melville took jobs as a bank clerk, a farmhand and a teacher to make ends meet. In 1839, he embarked on the first in a series of sea voyages that would provide him with inspiration for his novels Typee (1846), Omoo (1847) and his great masterpiece, Moby-Dick (1851). Following poor sales and hostile reviews, Melville abandoned fiction writing in 1857, turning to poetry and a career as a customs inspector on the New York docks. He died in relative obscurity in 1891.

'Melville instinctively aspired to the grandest scale, and even in his shorter works offers vast inklings and the resonance of cosmic concerns' - John Updike 'Melville seems to promise the very stuff of existence: time, space, air. We don't so much read him as inhale him' - Geoffrey O'Brien 'There are very few stories that, on re-reading after re-reading, seem to become impossibly more perfect, but Herman Melville's eerie, aching story Bartleby, the Scrivener is one such' - Stuart Kelly 'Some of the most brilliant stories of his or any other century. From proto-existentialist Bartleby-whose dry, ironic voice of resistance chimes with our own times-to the dark ocean gothic of Benito Cereno, he surpasses any expectation' - Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan or, the Whale