Edited by Diana Secker Tesdell

Favorite quote: “Under him, six or seven feet down, was a floor of perfectly clean, shining white sand, rippled firm and hard by the tides. Two greyish shapes steered there, like long, rounded pieces of wood or slate. They were fish. He saw them nose towards each other, poise motionless, make a dart forward, swerve off, and come around again. It was like a water dance. A few inches above them the water sparkled as if sequins were dropping through it. Fish again — myriads of minute fish, the length of his fingernail — were drifting through the water, and in a moment he could feel the innumerable tiny touches of them against his limbs. It was like swimming in flaked silver. — Through the Tunnel by Doris Lessing

From the publisher: “A gathering of the best maritime fiction from the last two hundred years: tales of shipwrecks and storms at sea, of creatures from the deep, of voyages that test human limits on the wild and limitless waters.

Classic adventures stories by Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Crane, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London mix with marvelously imaginative tales by Isak Dinesen, Patricia Highsmith, and J. G. Ballard. Robert Olen Butler explores the memories of a Titanic victim who has become part of the sea that swallowed him; Ray Bradbury’s “The Fog Horn” summons something primeval and lonely from the ocean depths; John Updike’s vacationing lovers retrace the route of Homer’s Odyssey on a cruise ship. From Edgar Allan Poe’s dramatic “A Descent into the Maelstrom” to Ernest Hemingway’s chilling “After the Storm” to Mark Helprin’s heartbreaking “Sail Shining in White,” the stories here are as wide-ranging and entrancing as the sea itself.”

Dimensions: 7 1/2” x 5”

Hardcover