Modern Library

or, Memoirs of a Woman of PleasureFanny 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 nave young prostitute in bawdy eighteenth-century...

When Matthew Lewiss The Monk was published in 1796, readers were shocked by this gripping and horrific novel. Lewiss story, which drove the House of Commonsof which he was a memberto deem him licentious and perverse, follows the abbot Ambrosio as he is tempted into a world of incest, murder, and torture by a young girl who has concealed herself in...

A Major New TranslationFor more than two centuries the very title of this book has evoked the sensitivity of youth, the suffering of the artist, the idea of a hero too full of love to live. When it was first published in Germany, in 1774, The Sorrows of Young Werther created a sensation. Banned and condemned but embracedespecially by the youngit...

In 1910, the mystery novelist Gaston Leroux, working from scraps of history, theatrical lore, and his own fertile imagination, created a masterpiece in Le fantme de lopra, the story of a disfigured composer who lives in the labyrinthine depths of the Paris Opera. After the breathtaking debut of Christine Daa, the whispers of an Opera ghost seem to...

(A Modern Library E-Book)Called a 'perfect novel' by Harold Bloom, Persuasion was written while Jane Austen was in failing health. She died soon after its completion, and it was published in an edition with Northanger Abbey in 1818. In the novel, Anne Elliot, the heroine Austen called 'almost too good for me,' has let herself be persuaded not to...

A Novel of the Mexican RevolutionHailed as the greatest novel of the Mexican Revolution, The Underdogs recounts the story of an illiterate but charismatic Indian peasant farmers part in the rebellion against Porfirio Daz, and his subsequent loss of belief in the cause when the revolutionary alliance becomes factionalized. Azuelas masterpiece is a...