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Captain Ahab is obsessed with hunting down Moby Dick, the white whale who bit off one of his legs. His paranoia is not only the epitome of human desire for conquest, but also a crazy allegory of industrial civilization's declaration of war on nature. From the ports of New England to the vast Pacific Ocean, the whaling ship "Pecod" has become a floating laboratory of civilization: the crew members with different skin colors, beliefs, and traumas collided in the closed cabin with the undercurrent of colonization, belief, and class. Whale oil, as the "black gold" of the industrial age, quietly connected human greed with ecological catastrophe. With a prophetic touch, Melville shaped the white whale into multiple metaphors - it is the divine incarnation of nature, the abyss projection of unknown destiny, and the ultimate mirror image of human arrogance. When Ahab and the white whale died together, this tragedy was not only the decline of individual destiny, but also foreshadowed the eternal dilemma of the relationship between modern civilization and nature.

The Piazza Tales is the only collection of short stories and short stories compiled and published by the American literary master Melville during his lifetime. The story is gorgeous, strange, profound, humorous, and the language is moving and fluent. The Chinese translation of the book is published for the first time to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Melville's birth.