Modern Library

Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is his most popular work. Written in Wilde's characteristically dazzling manner, full of stinging epigrams and shrewd observations, the tale of Dorian Gray's moral disintegration caused something of a scandal when it first appeared in 1890....

(A Modern Library E-Book)Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time'[Arnold Bennett's] superb Old Wives' Tale, wandering from person to person and from scene to scene, is by far the finest 'long novel' that has been written in English and in the English fashion, in this generation.'--H. G....

Here is a true publishing eventthe first modern translation of a lost masterpiece by one of fictions giants. Censored upon publication in 1871, out of print since the 1950s, and untranslated for a century, Zolas The Kill (La Cure) emerges as an unheralded classic of naturalism. Second in the authors twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart saga, it is a...

This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition brings together one of literature's most famous ghost stories and one of Henry James's most unusual novellas. In The Turn of the Screw, a governess is haunted by ghosts from her young charges past; Virginia Woolf said of this masterpiece of psychological ambiguity and suggestion, We are afraid of...

A book that deeply influenced the young Freud and was the inspiration for many artists, The Temptation of Saint Anthony was Flauberts lifelong work, thirty years in the making. Based on the story of the third-century saint who lived on an isolated mountaintop in the Egyptian desert, it is a fantastical rendering of one night during which Anthony is...

Etched against the background of a dying rural society, Tess of the d'Urbervilles was Thomas Hardy's 'bestseller,' and Tess Durbeyfield remains his most striking and tragic heroine. Of all the characters he created, she meant the most to him. Hopelessly torn between two menAlec d'Urberville, a wealthy, dissolute young man who seduces her in a...