This masterpiece of love, rejection, and reconciliation is the story of Maggie Tulliver and her resourceful but insensitive brother Tom, as they grow up in the narrowly puritanical atmosphere of rural Victorian society. Too intelligen...

Here are Masters's dramatic monologues written in free verse about a fictional Midwestern town called Spoon River. The dead, 'sleeping on the hill' in their village cemetery, awaken to tell the truth about their lives, toppling the m...

America and Americans is a representative, noteworthy collection of John Steinbeck's journalism, including the title piece, actually his last book. Editors Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson J. Benson, who provide an able, informative intr...

Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures. We have begun publishing his many works for the first time as blackspine Penguin Classics fea...

The essential, classic text of Taoism. These 81 poems comprise an Eastern classic, the mystical and moral teachings of which have profoundly influenced the sacred scriptures of many religions.

A runaway planet hurtles toward Earth. As it draws near, massive tidal waves, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions wrack our planet, devastating continents, drowning cities, and wiping out millions. In central North America, a team of ...

Tolstoy's great novel, one of his last works of fiction, tells the story of a harmless flirtation that gradually develops into a destructive passion: the love affair between Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky. Anna turns to Vronsky, a da...

Vladimir Nabokov’s notorious, hilarious erotic murder mystery takes the form of a monologue by his hero, Humbert Humbert, as he attempts to justify his love for and obsession with the barely adolescent Dolores Haze, known as Lol...

When smalltime insurance salesman Walter Huff meets seductive Phyllis Nirdlinger, the wife of one of his wealthy clients, it takes him only minutes to determine that she wants to get rid of her husband--and not much longer to decide t...

Joe Christmas does not know whether he is black or white. Faulkner makes of Joe's tragedy a powerful indictment of racism; at the same time Joe's life is a study of the divided self and becomes a symbol of 20th century man.

Louisa May Alcott’s little–known novella is an ingenious study of deception, betrayal, and the ruthless power of a woman scorned. Foreword by Doris Lessing. When demure Scottish governess Jean Muir arrives at a wealthy ho...

Second in the trilogy that began with The Good Earth, Buck's classic and starkly real tale of sons rising against their honored fathers tells of the bitter struggle to the death between the old and the new in China. Revolutions sweep ...

Dickens’s second novel was a far cry from THE PICKWICK PAPERS, his first. The story of an orphan who flees the workhouse only to fall in with a gang of thieves and prostitutes in London’s sleazy underworld, it was a trench...

Joyce’s bildungsroman--his first novel--traces the development of Stephen Daedalus, Joyce’s alter ego. In order to pursue his artistic calling, Stephen, like Joyce, must reject his family, religion, and native land. At the...

'Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don't belong no place'. George and his large, simple-minded friend Lennie are drifters, following wherever work leads them. Arriving in...

Louisa May Alcott's semiautobiographical story of a nurse's experiences in the Civil War. Alcott, most famous for her 'Little Women' novel, weaves a light but fulfilling story.

For more than a century, L. Frank Baum’s kingdom of Oz and its delightful denizens have enchanted readers of all ages. In this illustrated Modern Library edition, the bestselling novelist and children’s book writer Gregory...

Listeners can follow the fortunes of the dashing young swordsman D'Artagnan and his daredevil companions, Athos, Aramis and Porthos. The reading is supplemented by music from Raff, Bruch and Nielsen.

Helen Keller at age 12 was like a wild animal. Deaf, blind and utterly unable to communicate, she went through her young life alienated and terrified, struggling against all who tried to help her. Annie Sullivan was half-blind herself...

Sons and Lovers, Lawrences third published novel, was written by the author at the height of his literary powers. The story of class differences (the relationship between a middle-class woman and a miner) in the tough world of coal mi...

For the condemned nobles during the French Revolution, there is a ray of hope: rescue by the Scarlet Pimpernel. His identity remains a mystery to his sworn enemy, the ruthless Chauvelin, and to his devoted admirer, the beautiful Lady ...

Orwell depicts a gray, totalitarian world in which privacy does not exist, news is manufactured according to the authorities' will, and those with unorthodox ideas are brainwashed or put to death. Orwell's 1949 nightmare vision of the...

From a swashbuckling pirate fantasy to a meditation on American morality—two classic Steinbeck novels make their black spine debutsIN AWARDING John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with T...

John Updike takes the Hamlet story as the basis for this absorbing novel about power and lust in 12th-century Denmark. Using both Shakespeare's play and original historical sources, Updike concentrates his narrative on Danish history,...

Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country is a novel of passions--sexual, racial, political, artistic--that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and wo...

With her 1847 novel, 'Jane Eyre', Charlotte Bronte created one of the most unforgettable heroines of all time. Not only is this the classic story of unforgettable love, but it is also the memorable tale of one woman's fight to claim h...

`This time the fiction is founded upon facts' stated Wilkie Collins in his Preface to Man and Wife (1870). Many Victorian writers responded to contemporary debates on the rights and the legal status of women, and here Collins questio...

Two of Conrad's BEST-KNOWN works—in a single volume In this pair of literary voyages into the inner self, Joseph Conrad has written two of the most chilling, disturbing, and noteworthy pieces of fiction of the twentieth century.

The landmark novel that inspired Verdi's opera La Traviata, in a sparkling new translation  "One of the greatest love stories of all time," according to Henry James, and the inspiration for Verdi's opera La Traviata, the ...

Rebellious and affectionate, Maggie Tulliver is always in trouble. Recalling her own experiences as a girl, George Eliot describes Maggie’s turbulent childhood with a sympathetic engagement that makes the early chapters of The M...