The Red Tent meets The Scarlett Letter in this haunting historical novel set in a colonial New England whaling village.

"When was it that the sense of trouble grew to fear, the fear to certainty? When she sat down to another solitary supper of bread and beer and picked cucumber? When she heard the second sounding of the geese? Or had she known that morning when she stepped outside and felt the wind? Might as well say she

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The Volunteer, a nineteenth-century Yorkshire whaling ship, becomes the stage for a confrontation between brutal harpooner Henry Drax and ex-army surgeon Patrick Sumner, the ship's medic, during a violent, ill-fated voyage to the Arctic.

Based on Melville's real-life experiences after having jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, his first novel was extremely popular, provoking public skepticism until the events within were corroborated by a fellow castaway. Typee is properly considered a work of fiction, as the three week stay on which the author based his story is here extended to four months, and the book is supplemented with imaginative reconstruction and adaptation of material...

The only full-length novel by Edgar Allan Poe, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" was first published in 1838. It is the story of a boy from Nantucket, Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaling ship, the "Grampus", with the help of his friend Augustus, the ship captain's son. Pym and Augustus experience many unexpected adventures and misfortunes at sea, including mutiny, violent storms, cannibalism, and the destruction of the ship. Eventually,...

Redburn is the story that relates a young man's initiation into the sailors life; White-Jacket is the story that is a semi-autobiographical account of experiences in the U.S. Navy; Moby-Dick, or the whale is the most famous of Melville's works, and tells the story of Ahab, a ship captain that has become obsessed with the hunt for the whale he has named Moby-Dick.

After a tragic accident maims her laboratory assistant, Dr. Sara Pollard's career as a primate behaviorist lies in ruins. With nothing left to lose, Pollard, descendant of a Nantucket captain whose ship was sunk by a rogue whale, accepts an offer to join anti-whaling activists on a round-the-world racing yacht as the resident scientist, to sail from Argentina to the stormy Antarctic Sea. There they'll shadow, harass, and expose the Japanese fleet,...

Philosophers have said that we travel through our lives, past and present, surrounded by the same souls, that we spend each new life trying to mend the hurts we've done to one another in the past. In The Boundless Deep, Kate Brallier explores this idea in a combination of strong storytelling and gifted characterization. Grad student Liza has long been plagued by vivid dreams of whaling. Offered the chance to trade her land-locked existence for a...

The first edition of Melville's tales and poems in fifty years and the only one currently in print, this edition presents Melville's full array of short works as they appeared in magazines, private printings and manuscript, along with a generous sampling of his most significant poetry (an unjustly neglected facet of his ouvre). Senior Melvillean John Bryant brings extensive scholarly experience to the task; along with such classics as Bartleby the...