New fall books from Chicago

International Edition

From white whales to whale intelligence, giant squids, barnacles, albatross, and sharks, Richard J. King examines what Melville knew from his own experiences and the sources available to a reader in the mid-1800s, exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what was known to serve his fiction.

“SEPTEMBER 6. . . . It was one Sunday evening early in September of the year 1903 that I received one of Holmes’s laconic messages Come at once if convenient—if inconvenient come all the same.” —from The Adventure of the Creeping Man

“APRIL 18. . . . I am sorry to tell you that I am getting very extravagant & spending all my Money; & what is worse for you, I have been spending yours too.” —Letter from Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, 18–20 April 1811

“This is a forceful and weighty book . . . written in a quiet, personal voice, and with humor. It is a documentary book, but it is written like literature in the full sense of the word. It produces in the reader—at least it did in this reader—empathy and emotion, and it reads like a powerful, consciousness-changing novel.” —David Grossman, author of To the End of the Land