Modern Library

An inside account of the history-making first year of George W. Bush's presidency by a noted political commentator and author explores the key events of Bush's administration, including the controversial election that swept him into office, the September 11th terrorist attack and its aftermath, and their long-term implications for America. Reprint....

In 1940, as Hitler's troops are marching into Paris, a writer named Serebin finds himself in Istanbul, where he is beginning to realize that, despite his fervent hopes, the world really has become a different place. Hooking up with a Hungarian secret agent, Serebin goes to work for the Allies trying to disrupt German supply lines--an eminently...

Introduction by JEREMY TREGLOWNIn his daily walks through London, notes Jeremy Treglown in his Introduction to this collection, Pritchett watched and listened to people as a naturalist observes wild creatures and birds. He knew that oddity is the norm, not the exception. This finely attuned sense, coupled with an understanding that nothing in life...

A new translation by Adam Thorpe Gustave Flaubert once said of his heroine, ';Emma Bovary, c'est moi.' In this acclaimed new translation, Adam Thorpe brings readers closer than ever before to Flaubert's peerless text and, by extension, the author himself.  Emma, a passionate dreamer raised in the French countryside, is...

Balzac considered it the most important French novel of his time. Andr Gide later deemed it the greatest of all French novels, and Henry James judged it to be a masterpiece. Now, in a major literary event, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and distinguished translator Richard Howard presents a new rendition of Stendhal's epic tale of romance,...

The House Behind the Cedars, which many consider Charles Chesnutts nest novel, tells of John and Lena Walden, mulatto siblings who pass for white in the postbellum American South. The drama that unfolds as they travel between black and white worlds constitutes a riveting portrait of the shifting and intractable nature of race in American life. This...