Modern Library

Macbeth

by William Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate & Eric Rasmussen

No dramatist has ever seen with more frightening clarity into the heart and mind of a murderer than has Shakespeare in this compelling tragedy of evil. Taunted into asserting his “masculinity” by his ambitious...

Romeo and Juliet

by William Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate & Eric Rasmussen

"The permanent popularity, now of mythic intensity, of Romeo and Juliet is more than justified," writes eminent scholar Harold Bloom, "since the play is the largest and most persuasive celebration of romantic...

We

by Yevgeny Zamyatin & Natasha Randall

Translated by Natasha Randall

Foreword by Bruce Sterling

Written in 1921, We is set in the One State, where all live for the collective good and individual freedom does not exist. The novel takes the form...

Les Miserables

by Victor Hugo & Charles E. Wilbour

Les Miserables is the great epic masterpiece of the mid-nineteenth century. Begun in 1845, the year Louis Philippe conferred a peerage and a lifetime seat in the Senate upon Victor Hugo, it was completed when...

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography 1980

by Edmund Morris

Thirty years ago, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Although Theodore Rex fully recounts TR’s years in the White House (1901–1909), The Rise of Theodore...

Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth

by William Wordsworth, Mark Van Doren & David Bromwich

Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth represents Wordsworth’s prolific output, from the poems first published in Lyrical Ballads in 1798 that changed the face of English poetry to the late “Yarrow Revisited.”...

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories: Or, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

by Washington Irving & Alice Hoffman

With his beloved Gothic tales, Washington Irving is said to have created the genre of the short story in America. Though Irving crafted many of the most memorable characters in fiction, from Rip Van Winkle to...

My Antonia

by Willa Cather

'The best thing I've done is My Antonia,' recalled Willa Cather. 'I feel I've made a contribution to American letters with that book.' Set against the vast Nebraska prairie, Cather's elegiac novel features one...

Persuasion: (A Modern Library E-Book)

by Jane Austen

Called a 'perfect novel' by Harold Bloom, Persuasion was written while Jane Austen was in failing health. She died soon after its completion, and it was published in an edition with Northanger Abbey in 1818....

Crossing to Safety

by Wallace Stegner, Terry Tempest Williams & T.H. Watkins

Introduction by Terry Tempest Williams

Afterword by T. H. Watkins

Called a “magnificently crafted story . . . brimming with wisdom” by Howard Frank Mosher in The Washington Post Book World, Crossing...

A Christmas Carol and Other Stories

by Charles Dickens & John Irving

An immediate bestseller when it was first published in December 1843, A Christmas Carol has endured ever since as a perennial Yuletide favorite. Charles Dickens's beloved tale about the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge--who...

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

by Edgar Allan Poe & Jeffrey Meyers

After reading an 1836 newspaper account of a shipwreck and its two survivors, Edgar Allan Poe penned his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the story of a stowaway on a Nantucket whaleship...

The Wealth of Nations: (A Modern Library E-Book)

by Adam Smith

Adam Smith's masterpiece, first published in 1776, is the foundation of modern economic thought and remains the single most important account of the rise of, and the principles behind, modern capitalism. Written...

Basic Writings of Nietzsche

by Friedrich Nietzsche & Walter Kaufmann

Introduction by Peter Gay

Translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann

Commentary by Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, and Gilles Deleuze

One hundred years after his death, Friedrich Nietzsche remains the most influential...

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

by Charles Dickens & Matthew Pearl

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Charles Dickens’s final, unfinished novel is in many ways his most intriguing. A highly atmospheric tale of murder, The Mystery of Edwin Drood foreshadows both the detective stories...

Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden

by Eleanor Perenyi, Michael Pollan & Allen Lacy

This collection of essays covers an enormous range of gardening subjects and it will charm and instruct gardeners everywhere.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Varieties of Religious Experience: (A Modern Library E-Book)

by William James

The Varieties of Religious Experience is certainly the most notable of all books in the field of the psychology of religion and probably destined to be the most influential [one] written on religion in the twentieth...

The Rough Riders: (A Modern Library E-Book)

by Theodore Roosevelt

In 1898, as the Spanish-American War was escalating, Theodore Roosevelt assembled an improbable regiment of Ivy Leaguers, cowboys, Native Americans, African-Americans, and Western Territory land speculators....

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

by Lewis Carroll

Introduction by A. S. Byatt

Illustrations by John Tenniel

Includes commissioned endnotes

Conceived by a shy British don on a golden afternoon to entertain ten-year-old Alice Liddell and her sisters, Alice’s...

Pride and Prejudice

by Jane Austen

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

So begins Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's perfect comedy of manners--one of the most popular...