书名：Moby Dick  白鲸
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数1230
作者：Herman Melville
出版社名称：Signet Classics
出版时间：2013
语种：英文
ISBN：9780451532282
商品尺寸：10.7 x 2.5 x 17.2 cm
包装：简装
页数：624 （以实物为准）

Moby Dick《白鲸》是19世纪美国重要的小说家赫尔曼·梅尔维尔于1851年发表的一篇海洋题材的小说，小说描写了亚哈船长为了追逐并杀死白鲸（实为白色抹香鲸）莫比·迪克，最终与白鲸同归于尽的故事。故事营造了一种让人置身海上航行、随时遭遇各种危险甚至是死亡的氛围，是作者的代表作。适合英语专业学生及对经典英语文学作品感兴趣的读者。
推荐理由：
1.这部小说以充实的思想内容、史诗船的规模和成熟、深思性质的文笔，成为传世佳作；
2.史诗般文学巨著，世界文坛公认的伟大杰作，被誉为“时代的镜子”和“美国想象力颇为辉煌的表达”；
3.美国作家海明威和法国作家、诺贝尔文学奖获得者加缪都十分推崇此书；
4.《白鲸》采用哥特式自然书写，表现出作者对自然生态和人类社会文明的忧患意识；
5.英文原版无删减，小巧轻便，阅读方便。
Moby-Dickis a novel by American writer Herman Melville, published in 1851 during the period of the American Renaissance. The novel was a commercial failure and out of print at the time of the author’s death in 1891, but during the 20th century, its reputation as a Great American Novel was established. William Faulkner confessed he wished he had written it himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it “one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world”, and “the greatest book of the sea ever written”.“Call me Ishmael” is among world literature’s most famous opening sentences.
With an Introduction by Elizabeth Renker and an Afterword by Christopher Buckley

Herman Melville’s thrilling nautical adventure—a timeless allegory and an epic saga of heroic determination and conflict.
At the heart ofMoby-Dickis the powerful, unknowable sea—and Captain Ahab, a brooding, one-legged fanatic who has sworn vengeance on the mammoth white whale that crippled him. Narrated by Ishmael, a wayfarer who joins the crew of Ahab’s whaling ship, this is the story of that hair-raising voyage, and of the men who embraced hardship and nameless horrors as they dared to challenge God’s most dreaded creation and death itself for a chance at immortality.

A novel that delves with astonishing vigor into the complex souls of men,Moby-Dickis an impassioned drama of the ultimate human struggle that theAtlantic Monthlycalled “the greatest of American novels.”

Herman Melville’s (1819-91) father’s bankruptcy and death in 1832 deprived him of higher-educational oppotunities and alienated him forever from a conventional view of life. He taught school, sailed to Liverpool and back, then shipped before the mast on a Pacific whaling voyage. He deserted at the Marquesas Islands, living for a month among the cannibal Typee natives. An Australian whaleship then took him to Tahiti, where he was jailed for mutiny, but he escaped and spent some months as a beachcomber. A third whaleship took him to Hawaii, where he lived for some months before sailing home with the crew of the frigateUnited States. From these adventures came his popular and increasingly imaginative travel romances:Typee(1846),Omoo(1847), the allegoricalMardi(1849),Redburn(1849),White-Jacket(1850), and his masterpiece,Moby-Dick(1851). Melville married in 1847. His later works of fiction were not sea romances and sold poorly. He gave up professional writing and for twenty years served as a customs inspector in New York, where he died.Billy Budd, written in his last years, was published for the first time in 1924, on the crest of a Melville revival that began about 1920 and continues to the present day—a revival that has established him among the greatest American writers.

Elizabeth Renkerteaches English at Ohio State University. She is the author ofStrike through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing.

Christopher Buckleyis a widely published essayist and the author of fifteen books, includingThank Your for SmokingandLosing Mum and Pup. At eighteen, he worked his way around the world as a deckboy aboard a Norwegian merchant ship. His first book wasSteaming to Bamboola: The World of a Tramp Freighter, and he has crossed the Atlantic twice aboard a sailboat and the Pacific once.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—havinglittle or no money in my purse, and nothing particular tointerest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the waterypart of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulatingthe circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about themouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever Ifind myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringingup the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hyposget such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principleto prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodicallyknocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get tosea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With aphilosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietlytake to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it,almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearlythe same feelings towards the ocean with me.
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round bywharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with hersurf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtownis the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, andcooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land.Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from CorlearsHook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward.What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town,stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; somelooking over the bulwarks glasses! of ships from China; some high aloftin the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But theseare all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster— tied tocounters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are thegreen fields gone? What do they here?