Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories

Though best-known for his epic masterpiece *Moby Dick*, Herman Melville also left a body of short stories arguably unmatched in American fiction. In the sorrowful tragedy of *Billy Budd, Sailor*; the controlled rage of *Benito Cereno*; and the tantalizing enigma of *Bartleby, the Scrivener*; Melville reveals himself as a singular storyteller of tremendous range and compelling power. In these stories, Melville cuts to the heart of race, class, capitalism, and globalism in America, deftly navigating political and social issues that resonate as clearly in our time as they did in Melville's. Also including *The Piazza Tales* in full, this collection demonstrates why Melville stands not only among the greatest writers of the nineteenth century, but also as one of our greatest contemporaries. This Penguin Classics edition features the Reading Text of *Billy Budd, Sailor*, as edited from a genetic study of the manuscript by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., and the authoritative Northwestern-Newberry text of *The Piazza Tales*.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.