Written in 1896, The Island of Dr. Moreau is one of the earliest scientific romances. An instant sensation, it was meant as a commentary on Darwin's theory of evolution, which H. G. Wells stoutly believed. The story centers on the depraved Dr. Moreau, who conducts unspeakable animal experiments on a remote tropical island, with hideous, humanlike results. Edward Prendick, an English-man whose misfortunes bring him to the island, is witness to the Beast Folk's strange civilization and their eventual terrifying regression. While gene-splicing and bioengineering are common practices...

Set in sixteenth-century England, Mark Twain's classic "tale for young people of all ages" features two identical-looking boys--a prince and a pauper--who trade clothes and step into each other's lives. While the urchin, Tom Canty, discovers luxury and power, Prince Edward, dressed in rags, roams his kingdom and experiences the cruelties inflicted on the poor by the Tudor monarchy. As Christopher Paul Curtis observes in his Introduction, The Prince and the Pauper is "funny, adventurous, and exciting, yet also chock-full of . . . exquisitely reasoned harangues against society's ills."...

In 1910, the mystery novelist Gaston Leroux, working from scraps of history, theatrical lore, and his own fertile imagination, created a masterpiece in Le fantome de l'opera, the story of a disfigured composer who lives in the labyrinthine depths of the Paris Opera. After the breathtaking debut of Christine Daae, the whispers of an Opera ghost seem to become reality as the young singer vanishes. As the Phantom strikes again and again, targeting foes from a jealous diva to a romantic rival, Leroux spins a thriller of obsession and violence with, at its center, a tormented murderer who...

Edited and with Notes by Shelly Eversley
Introduction by Robert Reid-Pharr
In this truly astonishing eighteenth-century memoir, Olaudah Equiano recounts his remarkable life story, which begins when he is kidnapped in Africa as a boy and sold into slavery and culminates when he has achieved renown as a British antislavery advocate. The narrative "is a strikingly beautiful monument to the startling combination of skill, cunning, and plain good luck that allowed him to win his freedom, write his story, and gain international prominence," writes Robert Reid-Pharr in his...

Introduction and Notes by Robert Folkenflik

Rich in playful double entendres, digressions, formal oddities, and typographical experiments, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman provoked a literary sensation when it first appeared in England in a series of volumes from 1759 to 1767. An ingeniously structured novel (about writing a novel) that fascinates like a verbal game of chess, Tristram Shandy is the most protean and playful English novel of the eighteenth century and a celebration of the art of fiction; its inventiveness anticipates the work of Joyce,...

Washington Square follows the coming-of-age of its plain-faced, kindhearted heroine, Catherine Sloper. Much to her father's vexation, a handsome opportunist named Morris Townsend woos the long-suffering heiress, intent on claiming her fortune. When Catherine stubbornly refuses to call off her engagement, Dr. Sloper forces Catherine to choose between her inheritance and the only man she will ever truly love. Cynthia Ozick, in her Introduction to what she calls Henry James's "most American fiction," writes that "every line, every paragraph, every chapter of Washington Square] is...

One of America's most celebrated poets--and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1923--Edna St. Vincent Millay defined a generation with her passionate lyrics and intoxicating voice of liberation. Edited by Millay biographer Nancy Milford, this Modern Library Paperback Classics collection captures the poet's unique spirit in works like Renascence and Other Poems, A Few Figs from This-tles, and Second April, as well as in "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver" and eight sonnets from the early twenties. As Milford writes in her Introduction, "These are the poems that made Edna St....

Anew translation by Scot James Hogarth for the first unabridged English edition of the novel, which tells the story of an illiterate fisherman from the Channel Islands who must free a ship that has run aground in order to win the hand of the woman he loves, a shipowner's daughter."

Both an official chronicle and the highly personal memoir of the emperor Babur (1483-1530), The Baburnama presents a vivid and extraordinarily detailed picture of life in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India during the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. Babur's honest and intimate chronicle is the first autobiography in Islamic literature, written at a time when there was no historical precedent for a personal narrative--now in a sparkling new translation by Islamic scholar Wheeler Thackston.

This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition includes notes, indices, maps, and...

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time
'I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams, ' said Gore Vidal. 'He was remarkably prescient about the coming horrors.'
His political ideals shaped by two presidential ancestors great-grandfather John Adams and grandfather John Quincy Adams Henry Adams was one of the most powerful and original minds to confront the American scene from the Civil War to the First World War.
Printed privately in 1907 and published to wide acclaim shortly after the author&'s death in 1918, The...