Product Description: ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST BOOKS The Wall Street Journal • Slate • Kansas City Star • Flavorwire • Policy Mic • Buzzfeed“Necessary Errors is a very good novel, an enviably good one, and to read it is to relive all the anxieties and illusions and grand projects of one’s own youth...read more

A predecessor of both the nativist humor of Mark Twain and the exotic adventure stories of Washington Irving, Herman Melville, and Richard Dana, Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive is an entertaining romp through eighteenth-century society, a satiric look at a variety of American types, from the backwoods schoolmaster to the southern gentleman, and a serious exposé of the horrors of the slave trade. “In stylistic purity and the clarity with which Tyler investigates and dramatizes American manners,” the critic Jack B. Moore has noted, The Algerine Captive “stands alone in our earliest fiction.” It is also one of the first attempts by an American novelist to depict the Islamic world, and lays bare a culture clash and diplomatic quagmire not unlike the one that obtains between the United States and Muslim nations today.

The Gothic novel of the demonic possession of a farm boy is accompanied by a six other tales.

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Ten interconnecting tales include 'Truths,' in which some things are better left unsaid; 'A Case for Political Inspectors,' in which fear and hypocrisy shake the highest class levels; and 'Krpata's Blues,' where true love and an apartment are at stake

Ten interconnecting tales include 'Truths,' in which some things are better left unsaid; 'A Case for Political Inspectors,' in which fear and hypocrisy shakes the highest class levels; and 'Krpata's Blues,' where true love and an apartment are at stake. (view table of contents)