I WOULD PREFER NOT TO: Essential Stories

The author of Moby Dick (1851), following hostile reviews and poor sales, Melville abandoned fiction in 1857 and became an inspector on the New York Docks. Yet he produced some of the most singular, enigmatic stories in American literature, from surreally funny tales of office life to claustrophobic accounts of obscure tensions at sea. His darkly modern sensibility produced works of unparalleled narrative inventiveness. A lawyer hires a new copyist who begins to exhibit a strange, confounding resistance to work. A cynical lightning-rod salesman plies his trade by exploiting fears in stormy weather. After boarding a beleaguered Spanish slave ship, a cheerful American trader is repeatedly struck by paralyzing unease as figures move in the shadows. A beautifully produced Pushkin Press softback, 256pp, 12.12 x 16.5cm.