Freya Stark--traveler, explorer, Arabist, and woman of letters--began the extraordinary adventures that would glamorize her--and would catapult her into public life for the next sixty years--in 1927. And with the publication of The Valley of the Assassins in 1934, her legend was launched.
Leaving behind a miserable family life, Freya set out, at the age of thirty-four, to explore remote and dangerous regions of the Middle East. She was captured in 1927 by the French military police after penetrating their cordon around the rebellious Druze. She explored the mountainous territory of the...

In the early 1970s, Hannah Green and her husband came upon a small village called Conques, curled like a conch shell in the mountains of south-central France. Entranced, she returned to this numinous place again and again, drawn to the story of the little saint whose spirit fills the lives of the people there. Housed in the village's yellow stone basilica sits the gold reliquary of Sainte Foy, who was beheaded in the fourth century for refusing to deny her faith before a Roman consul. Little Saint, a book written in ecstasy, is at once a moving and passionate tribute to Sainte Foy, a lyrical...

One of art's purest challenges is to translate a human being into words. The New Yorker has met this challenge more successfully and more originally than any other modern American journal. It has indelibly shaped the genre known as the Profile. Starting with light-fantastic evocations of glamorous and idiosyncratic figures of the twenties and thirties, such as Henry Luce and Isadora Duncan, and continuing to the present, with complex pictures of such contemporaries as Mikhail Baryshnikov and Richard Pryor, this collection of New Yorker Profiles presents readers with a portrait...

New York City is not only The New Yorker's place of origin and its sensibility's lifeblood; it is the heart of American literary culture. Wonderful Town collects superb short fiction by many of the magazine's and this country's most accomplished writers. Like all good fiction, these stories take particular places, particular people, and particular events and turn them into dramas of universal enlightenment and emotional impact. Here New York is every great place and every ordinary place. Each life in it, and each life in Wonderful Town, is the life of us all.

Hailed as a classic upon its first publication in 1934, The Valleys of the Assassins firmly established Freya Stark as one of her generation's most intrepid explorers. The book chronicles her travels into Luristan, the mountainous terrain nestled between Iraq and present-day Iran, often with only a single guide and on a shoestring budget.

Stark writes engagingly of the nomadic peoples who inhabit the region's valleys and brings to life the stories of the ancient kingdoms of the Middle East, including that of the Lords of Alamut, a band of hashish-eating terrorists whose stronghold...

In 1934, famed British traveler Freya Stark sailed down the Red Sea, alighting in Aden, located at the tip of the Arabian peninsula. From this backwater outpost, Stark set forth on what was to be her most unforgettable adventure: Following the ancient frankincense routes of the Hadhramaut Valley, the most fertile in Arabia, she sought to be the first Westerner to locate and document the lost city of Shabwa. Chronicling her journey through the towns and encampments of the Hadhramaut, The Southern Gates of Arabia is a tale alive with sheikhs and sultans, tragedy and triumph. Although the...

Previously unpublished letters and diaries are used to portray the life of Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and to assess the mark that she left as first lady.

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time

The Varieties of Religious Experience was an immediate bestseller upon its publication in June 1902. Reflecting the pluralistic views of psychologist turned philosopher William James, it posits that individual religious experiences, rather than the tenets of organized religions, form the backbone of religious life. James's discussion of conversion, repentance, mysticism, and hope of reward and fears of punishment in the hereafter--as well as his observations on the religious experiences of...

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time
In Up from Slavery, Washington recounts the story of his life--from slave to educator. The early sections deal with his upbringing as a slave and his efforts to get an education. Washington details his transition from student to teacher, and outlines his own development as an educator and founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In the final chapters of Up From Slavery, Washington describes his career as a public speaker and civil rights activist.

Sixteen of the world's great women writers speak about their work, their colleagues, and their lives.

For More Than Forty Years, the acclaimed Paris Review interviews have been collected in the Writers at Work series. The Modern Library relaunches the series with the first of its specialized collections -- interviews with sixteen women novelists, poets, and playwrights, all offering rich commentary on the art of writing and on the opportunities and challenges a woman writer faces in contemporary society.