The seventeen narratives of The Common Lot and Other Stories, published in popular magazines across the United States between 1908 and 1921 and collected here for the first time, are driven by Emma Bell Miles’s singular vision of the mountain people of her home in southeastern Tennessee. That vision is shaped by her strong sense of social justice, her naturalist’s sensibility, and her insider’s perspective. Women are at the center of these stories, and Miles deftly works a feminist sensibility beneath the plot of the title tale about a girl caught between present drudgery in her father’s house and prospective drudgery as a young wife in her own. Wry, fiery, and suffused with details of both natural and social worlds, the pieces collected here provide a particularly acute portrayal of Appalachia in the early twentieth century. Miles’s fiction brings us a world a century in the past, but one that will easily engage twenty-first-century readers. The introduction by editor and noted Miles expert Grace Toney Edwards places Miles in the literary context of her time. Edwards highlights Miles’s quest for women’s liberation from patriarchal domination and oppressive poverty, forces against which Miles herself struggled in making a name for herself as a writer and artist. Illustrations by the author and Miles family photographs complement the stories.

Suggestions for further reading and research

A Deal in Wheat and Other Stories of the New and Old West is a collection of short stories written by the American author Frank Norris. It was published posthumously in 1903 and composed primarily of recently published works. I. The first of the five sections of the story, entitled ""The Bear- Wheat at Sixty-Two"", takes place in rural Kansas. Sam Lewiston leaves his wife, Emma, home on the ranch while he goes into town one last time to try to sell his wheat to Bridges & Co., Grain Dealers before being forced out of the market. At sixty-two cents a bushel, Lewiston can no longer afford to raise wheat and must take a job with his wife's brother in Chicago. II. The next section, ""The Bull- Wheat at a Dollar-Ten"", introduces the two main players of the Chicago-run wheat business, the bear and the bull: Treslow and Hornung. When Treslow had let the price fall to sixty-two cents, Hornung had almost run him out of business...

The Monster and Other Stories (1899) is a collection of short fiction by American writer Stephen Crane. “The Monster,” a novella, was originally published in 1898 in Harper’s Magazine and has since been recognized as one of Crane’s most important works, a story which critiques the racism prevalent in American society. In 1899, it was published alongside “The Blue Hotel” and “His New Mittens” in The Monster and Other Stories, which was the last work by Crane to be published during his lifetime. In “The Monster,” set in the fictional town of Whilomville, an African American coachmen employed by the wealthy Trescott family is horribly disfigured while attempting to save their young son Jimmie from a house fire. Despite his gruesome injuries, Henry Johnson survives, and Dr. Trescott gratefully nurses him back to health and offers him a place to stay on the family property. Meanwhile, the white townspeople, who view Johnson as a monster, vilify the Trescotts for transgressing the unspoken rules of racial segregation. As Johnson attempts to return to some sense of normalcy, he is rejected both by the African American and white communities, and retreats into a lonely, quiet life. “The Blue Hotel” is a story of violence, fate, and hatred, of a place where loneliness reigns among strangers, and where fear is a troublesome friend. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Stephen Crane’s The Monster and Other Stories is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.