"She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen, and I afterward wondered that my employer had not told me more of her." For the first time since 1898, readers can experience Henry James's eerie The Turn of the Screw the way his original readers did, as a twelve-part weekly serial. The Coffeetown Press edition showcases the novel as it first appeared, complete with provocative illustrations by John La Farge and Eric Pape, in Collier's Weekly. This unique edition, with an analytical introduction by Peter G. Beidler, will of course be valuable to scholars. It will be particularly useful, however, for undergraduate classroom use. It allows readers to experience first-hand the suspense generated by the week-by-week grouping of chapters. It also lets them read the young governess's story of her dangerous encounter with prowling spirits as it first appeared, before James made the 500-odd changes in wording he introduced later. After reading Beidler's detailed appendix analyzing all of James's revisions, readers will see that in many ways this earliest version of The Turn of the Screw was James's best.

This Coffeetown Press edition of Henry James's most famous, most widely read, and most frequently taught story presents the text as it appeared in 1908, with the author's final revisions. The Turn of the Screw, first published in serial format in 1898, is the chilling tale of a young woman who accepts a job as governess-that is, as teacher-of two lovely young children who seem to be haunted by the spirits of a former governess and her lover, both now dead. David Gorman's introduction is designed to help first-time readers of the tale by providing a brief historical backdrop to this tale of a haunted house and by laying out the central critical controversy that surrounds it: whether this ghost story is not about ghosts at all, or rather a probing of the psyche of a narrator who madly imagines that two ghosts threaten her young charges.

Peter G. Beidler’s Reader’s Companion is an indispensable guide for teachers, students, and general readers who want fully to appreciate Salinger’s perennial bestseller. Now nearly six decades old, The Catcher in the Rye contains references to people, places, books, movies, and historical events that will puzzle many twenty-first-century readers. Beidler’s guide provides some 250 explanations to help readers make sense of the culture through which Holden Caulfield stumbles as he comes of age. It provides a map showing the various stops in Holden’s Manhattan odyssey. Of particular interest to readers whose native language is not English is the glossary of more than a hundred terms, phrases, and slang expressions. In his introductory essay, “Catching The Catcher in the Rye,” Beidler discusses such topics as the three-day time line for the novel, the way the novel grew out of two earlier-published short stories, the extent to which the novel is autobiographical, what Holden looks like, and the reasons for the enduring appeal of the novel. The many photographs in the Reader’s Companion give fascinating glimpses into the world that Holden has made famous. Beidler also provides discussion of some of the issues that have engaged scholars down through the years: the meaning of Holden’s red hunting hat, whether Holden writes his novel in an insane asylum, Mr. Antolini’s troubling actions, and Holden’s close relationship with his sister and his two brothers. Readers of A Reader’s Companion to J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye will wonder how they managed without it before.

H. G. Wells’s classic novel The Time Machine, first published in 1895, is one part fairy tale, one part love story, one part science fiction, and one part utopia. Readers can enjoy the story on multiple levels and take away something unique to themselves upon finishing the novel. With every turn of the page, we become as little children being read a good night story; for in effect, we are being read to rather than reading ourselves. The story is told through an unnamed narrator, a young member of an informal group of men who meet occasionally at the Time Traveler’s house for dinner, drinks, cigars, and conversation. It is no accident that the narrator who tells us the story is the least skeptical, indeed the most credulous of the group, in response to the Time Traveler’s claim to have built a Time Machine. We need an optimistic and trusting narrator, for he represents the audacity of hope, the possibility of human endeavor leading to improvement and progress, at a time when the specter of social Darwinism and scientific fatalism had fallen over the western world. The narrator is the one who exclaims, in response to the prospect of traveling into the future, “To discover a society erected on a strictly communistic basis.” As humorous and naïve as such a statement sounds to us today, communism was a synonym for utopia in the late nineteenth century. And so we are supposed to identify with the narrator, to suspend our disbelief in the absurd hypothesis of time as the fourth dimension and the fantastical invention of a time machine. During the time when we submit to the power of the story and allow ourselves to be swept away by the fantasy, time machine does exist and time travel is possible.

<DIV>In Anna Katharine Green's first novel, circumstances surrounding a wealthy New York merchant's murder suggest that a niece who is to inherit his fortune is the killer. But is she?

<DIV>When three late-Victorian gentlemen escape from the claustrophobia of suburban life to go on a cycling tour in the Black Forest of Germany, their trip turns into a comic expedition.

<DIV>A lawyer undertakes to help a young woman whose father has suddenly disappeared under very mysterious circumstances in this classic mystery by Mary Roberts Rinehart.

<br>Emma Bovary, heroine of Gustave Flaubert's timeless and tragic novel Madame Bovary, is not a virtuous woman. Emma is shallow, selfish, vain, frivolous, reckless, deceitful; she mocks marriage and motherhood, thrives on romance and frippery, and lives her life on credit both literally and figuratively. You'll love her.