I Would Prefer Not To: Essential Stories

A new selection of Melville`s darkest and most enthralling stories in a beautiful Pushkin Collection edition Includes "Bartleby, the Scrivener", "Benito Cereno" and "The Lightning-Rod Man" A lawyer hires a new copyist, only to be met with stubborn, confounding resistance. A nameless guide discovers hidden worlds of luxury and bleak exploitation. After boarding a beleaguered Spanish slave ship, an American trader`s cheerful outlook is repeatedly shadowed by paralyzing unease. In these stories of the surreal mundanity of office life and obscure tensions at sea, Melville`s darkly modern sensibility plunges us into a world of irony and mystery, where nothing is as it first appears.