Underpress Books: 28 books

Michel de Montaigne was one of the most influential figures of the Renaissance, singlehandedly responsible for popularising the essay as a literary form. This Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Essays is translated from the French and edited with an introduction and notes by M.A. Screech. In...

Louis Joseph Vance was an early 20th century American novelist. "Michael Lanyard," also known as "The Lone Wolf" was featured in eight books and 24 films between 1917 and 1949, and also appeared in radio and television series. Michael Lanyard was a jewel thief who became a private...

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. His first two books gained much attention, though they were not bestsellers, and his popularity declined precipitously only a few years later. By the time of his death he had been almost completely forgotten, but his...

Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) was an English author and intellectual, best known for his book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822). In 1821, he went to London to dispose of some translations from German authors, but was persuaded first to write and publish an account of his opium experiences,...

When honest young Caleb Williams comes to work as a secretary for Squire Falkland, he soon begins to suspect that his new master is hiding a terrible secret. But as he digs deeper into Falkland's past and finally unearths the guilty truth, the results of his curiosity prove calamitous when - even...

The Sayings of Confucius (Lunyu) assembles Confucius' Pity sayings and notions over a lifetime, which enjoy lasting value. 100 sections are arranged under twelve topics such as "Benevolence", "The Rites", "Piety and Fraternity", "Administration", "Knowledge...

Written when he was just twenty-three years old and stationed at a remote army outpost in the Caucasus Mountains, Childhood won Leo Tolstoy immediate fame and critical praise years before works like War and Peace and Anna Karenina would bring him to the forefront of Russian literature. It is...

A prequel of sorts, this story follows a young Conan (still called the Cimmerian during this era) as he pursues a beautiful nymph across a frozen land, making all kinds of enemies along the way. Robert Ervin Howard was an American pulp writer of fantasy, horror, historical adventure, boxing,...

A line of houses fronting this--old familiar faces--still look blank and regretfully forth, through their glassy eyes, upon the changed scene. How different the company they kept some ninety or a hundred years ago!Where is the mill, too, standing fast by the bridge, the manorial appendage of the town,...

Written during the winter of 1916-17 when Kafka was living in one of the tiny houses on Golden Lane (formerly Alchimistengasse) at Prague Castle, and published in spring 1920 by Kurt Wolff Verlag, the 14 short fictions comprising this volume are interconnected by a persistent exploration of identity,...

Ourland is the sequel to Gilman's acclaimed feminist utopian novel Herland; both were published in her journal, The Forerunner, in 1915 and 1916. Ourland resumes the adventures of Herland's protagonists, Ellador and Van, but turns from utopian fantasy to a challenging analysis of contemporary social...

Scholar Lafcadio Hearn made it his life's work to study the world's supernatural superstitions, with a particular focus on Asian cultures. This volume brings together a series of traditional Japanese ghost stories, as well as several first-hand accounts of unusual occurrences in the country. A must-read...

A Stable for Nightmares By Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu AND OTHERS;[1][2] 28 August 1814 - 7 February 1873) was an Irish writer of Gothic tales, mystery novels, and horror fiction. He was a leading ghost story writer of the nineteenth century and was central to the development of the genre in the...

From that night my nature seemed to have become halved -- and there were two men within me, neither of whom knew the other. At one moment I believed myself a priest who dreamed nightly that he was a gentleman -- at another, that I was a gentleman who dreamed he was a priest. I could no longer distinguish...