I don't know what was his issue, but the man took things that could be explosive, and instead turned them into dust. And, to my frustrated and wry surprise, I got exactly that. I felt like I was getting nowhere, anywhere, and fast. What a dense read! For a book just barely making it over the 100-page mark, it took me forever to will myself through it! Look at the difference between the start date and the finish for this one! Every time I picked it up I felt like I was being forced to swallow lead, or to walk a mile in a pool of TAR.

This book, with its two stories, Bartleby and Benito Cereno, is not what I expected. Reprinted here from standard texts in a finely made, yet inexpensive new edition, these stories offer the general reader and students of Melville and American literature sterling examples of a literary giant at his story-telling best. A splendid parable of man's struggle against the forces of evil, the carefully developed and mysteriously guarded plot builds to a dramatic climax while revealing the horror and depravity of which man is capable. 'Benito Cereno,' considered one of Melville's best short stories, deals with a bloody slave revolt on a Spanish vessel. A strange, enigmatic man employed as a clerk in a legal office, Bartleby forces his employer to come to grips with the most basic questions of human responsibility, and haunts the latter's conscience, even after Bartleby's dismissal. 'Bartleby' (also known as 'Bartleby the Scrivener') is an intriguing moral allegory set in the business world of mid-19th-century New York. Two of the most admired of these - 'Bartleby' and 'Benito Cereno' - first appeared as magazine pieces and were then published in 1856 as part of a collection of short stories entitled The Piazza Tales.

Herman Melville towers among American writers not only for his powerful novels, but also for the stirring novellas and short stories that flowed from his pen.

Bartleby and benito cereno