The Beach of Falesa [Paperback]

White men die very suddenly in Falesá.

Originally censored by its British publisher,The Beach at Falesáis a scathing critique of colonialism and economic imperialism that bravely takes on many of the 19th Century’ s strongest taboos: miscegenation, imperialism, and economic exploitation. It does so with a story that features a surprising and beguiling romance between an adventurous British trader and a young island girl, against a background of increasing—and mysterious—hostility. Are the native islanders plotting against the couple, or is it the other white traders? The result is a denouement that is astonishing in its violence. Told in the unadorned voice of the trader, it is a story that deftly combines the form of the exotic adventure yarn with the moral and psychological questing of great fiction.

The Art of The Novella Series

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time. I wanted them all, even those I'd already read.
—Ron Rosenbaum,The New York Observer

Small wonders.
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[F]irst-rate…astutely selected and attractively packaged…indisputably great works.
—Adam Begley,The New York Observer

I’ve always been haunted by Bartleby, the proto-slacker. But it’s the handsomely minimalist cover of the Melville House edition that gets me here, one of many in the small publisher’s fine 'Art of the Novella' series.
—The New Yorker

The Art of the Novella series is sort of an lă‰