An invaluable resource for students of nineteenth-century writing and of Hardy in particular, this edition presents a text which closely reflects Hardy's original intentions. All his revisions are clearly shown, enabling readers to trace his creative process. An introductory essay outlines the stories' composition, publishing history and reception.

On the Western Circuit is a novella by Thomas Hardy. Edith is a rural girl who falls in love with an older man, in this romance where the mistakes of love life are tragically explored and bared naked.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres comes “an uproariously funny and at the same time hauntingly melancholy portrait of a college community in the Midwest" (The New York Times). In this darkly satirical send-up of academia and the Midwest, we are introduced to Moo University, a distinguished institution devoted to the study of agriculture. Amid cow pastures and waving fields of grain, Moo’s campus churns with devious plots, mischievous intrigue, lusty liaisons, and academic one-upmanship, Chairman X of the Horticulture Department harbors a secret fantasy to kill the dean; Mrs. Walker, the provost's right hand and campus information queen, knows where all the bodies are buried; Timothy Monahan, associate professor of English, advocates eavesdropping for his creative writing assignments; and Bob Carlson, a sophomore, feeds and maintains his only friend: a hog named Earl Butz. Wonderfully written and masterfully plotted, Moo gives us a wickedly funny slice of life.

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was an English novelist and poet. The phrase `life’s little ironies’ is now proverbial, was coined by Hardy as the title for his third volume of short stories. The tales and sketches refl ect many of the strengths and themes of the great novels of Hardy. The collection displays the whole range of Hardy’s art as a writer of fi ction, from fantasy to uncompromising realism, and from the loving re-creation of a vanished rural world to the repressions of fi n de siecle bourgeois life.