A clever detective infiltrates the Council of Days, a secret organization of anarchists with seven members, each disguised and named for a day of the week.

Jack London cut a mythic figure across the American landscape of the early twentieth century. But throughout his colorful life-from his teenage years as an oyster pirate to his various incarnations as a well-traveled seaman, Yukon gold prospector, waterfront brawler, unemployed vagrant, impassioned socialist, and celebrated writer-he retained a predilection for drinking on a prodigious scale. London's classic -alcoholic memoirs--the closest thing to an autobiography he ever wrote-are a startlingly honest and vivid account of his life not only as a drinker, but also as a storied adventurer....

A personal narrative of life aboard an American merchant ship in the 1830s.

Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy's passionate tale of the beautiful, headstrong farmer Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors, firmly established the thirty-four-year-old writer as a popular novelist. According to Virginia Woolf, "The subject was right; the method was right; the poet and the countryman, the sensual man, the sombre reflective man, the man of learning, all enlisted to produce a book which . . . must hold its place among the great English novels." Introducing the fictional name of "Wessex" to describe Hardy's legendary countryside, this early masterpiece draws a vivid...

The Rise of David Levinsky, written by the legendary founder and editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, is an early Jewish-American classic. According to the scholar Sam B. Girgus, "The novel is more than an important literary work and cultural document. It forms part of the traditional ritual of renewal of the American Way."

First published in 1917, Abraham Cahan's realistic novel tells the story of a young talmudic scholar who emigrates from a small town in Russia to the melting pot of turn-of-the-century New York City. As the Jewish "greenhorn" rises from the depths of...

Preserved by Arabic mathematicians and canonized by Christian scholars, Aristotle's works have shaped Western thought, science, and religion for nearly two thousand years. Richard McKeon's The Basic Works of Aristotle-constituted out of the definitive Oxford translation and in print as a Random House hardcover for sixty years-has long been considered the best available one-volume Aristotle. Appearing in paperback at long last, this edition includes selections from the Organon, On the Heavens, The Short Physical Treatises, Rhetoric, among others, and On the Soul, On Generation and...

Highly acclaimed at its publication in 1913, The Custom of the Country is a cutting commentary on America's nouveaux riches, their upward-yearning aspirations and their eventual downfalls. Through her heroine, the beautiful and ruthless Undine Spragg, a spoiled heiress who looks to her next materialistic triumph as her latest conquest throws himself at her feet, Edith Wharton presents a startling, satiric vision of social behavior in all its greedy glory. As Undine moves from America's heartland to Manhattan, and then to Paris, Wharton's critical eye leaves no social class unscathed.

Fanny Hill, shrouded in controversy for most of its more than 250-year life, and banned from publication in the United States until 1966, was once considered immoral and without literary merit, even earning its author a jail sentence for obscenity.
The tale of a naive young prostitute in bawdy eighteenth-century London who slowly rises to respectability, the novel-and its popularity-endured many bannings and critics, and today Fanny Hill is considered an important piece of political parody and sexual philosophy on par with French libertine novels.
This uncensored version...

First published to critical acclaim in 1929, Passing firmly established Nella Larsen's prominence among women writers of the Harlem Renaissance. The Modern Library is proud to present Passing--an electrifying story of two women who cross the color line in 1920s New York--together with a new Introduction by the Obie Award- winning playwright and novelist Ntozake Shange.

Irene Redfield, the novel's protagonist, is a woman with an enviable life. She and her husband, Brian, a prominent physician, share a comfortable Harlem town house with their sons. Her work arranging charity balls...

Poet, celebrity, and revolutionary, Lord (George Gordon) Byron was one of the most influential and controversial figures of the first half of the nineteenth century, his distinctive, deeply felt work comprising one of the enduring high points of Romantic literature. From Manfred, with its evocation of the figure that came to be called the Byronic hero, to the melancholy Childe Harold, to the satirical masterpiece Don Juan (presented here in judiciously selected form), this Modern Library Paperback Classic includes all of the essential Byron."