I Would Prefer Not To

A new selection of Melville's most electrifying stories, in a beautiful Pushkin Collection edition 'Some of the most brilliant stories of his or any other century' Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan Herman Melville 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. These are stories of unsettling ironies and absurd humour, where nothing is as it first appears.

Herman Melville was born to a merchant family in New York City in 1819. His father died suddenly in 1832, and Melville took jobs as a bank clerk, a farmhand and a teacher to make ends meet. In 1839, he embarked on the first in a series of sea voyages that would provide him with inspiration for his novels Typee (1846), Omoo (1847) and his great masterpiece, Moby-Dick (1851). Following poor sales and hostile reviews, Melville abandoned fiction writing in 1857, turning to poetry and a career as a customs inspector on the New York docks. He died in relative obscurity in 1891.