Modern Library

'Heart of Darkness,' which appeared at the very beginning of our century, 'was a Cassandra cry announcing the end of Victorian Europe, on the verge of transforming itself into the Europe of violence,' wrote the critic Czeslaw Milosz.Originally published in 1902, Heart of Darkness remains one of this century's most enduring--and harrowing--works of...

Featuring the brilliantly drawn Roxanna, a mulatto slave who suffers dire consequences after switching her infant son with her masters baby, and the clever Puddnhead Wilson, an ostracized small-town lawyer, Twains darkly comic masterpiece is a provocative exploration of slavery and miscegenation. Leslie A. Fiedler described the novel as half...

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all timeRudyard Kipling's Kim is the tale of an Irish orphan raised as an Indian vagabond on the rough streets of colonial Lahore. Young Kimball O'Hara's coming of age takes place in a world of high adventure, mystic quests, and secret games of espionage played out...

Crime and Punishment has upon most readers an impact as immediate and obvious and full as the news of murder next door, wrote critic R. P. Blackmur. One almost participates in the crime.., it is the murder that only by some saving accident we did not ourselves commit. In the whole literature of the ambivalent relationship between man and the crimes...

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....

A Story of an Eastern RiverAlmayers Folly, Joseph Conrads first novel, is a tale of personal tragedy as well as a broader meditation on the evils of colonialism. Set in the lush jungle of Borneo in the late 1800s, it tells of the Dutch merchant Kaspar Almayer, whose dreams of riches for his beloved daughter, Nina, collapse under the weight of his...