Rappaccini's Daughter

Part fairy tale, part Gothic horror story, "Rappaccini's Daughter" is an inspired tale of creation and control. It is published here with two additional short stories by Hawthorne: "Young Goodman Brown" and "A Select Party. "Giovanni Guasconti, a student at the University of Padua, is enchanted to discover a nearby garden of the most exquisite beauty. In it abides a young woman, perhaps the most beautiful Giovanni has ever seen. Yet as he looks out from an upstairs window, he soon learns that the garden--and the matchless Beatrice--are not the work of Mother Nature, but rather the result of a monstrous abomination of creativity. An ingenious biblical parody, the tale's fantastical quality is brilliantly echoed in the two accompanying short stories. Read together, they display all Hawthorne's gifts as a storyteller. Novelist, essayist, and moralist, Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of America's greatest writers, best known for his remarkable novel "The Scarlet Letter."