Modern Library
The Modern Library was founded in 1917 and features treasured classics, volumes of essential writings, major translations of great works from around the globe, and rediscoveries of keen literary and historical merit.
Today, The Modern Library seeks to honor writers whose work broke new ground and challenged the status quo. We hope to remind readers that today’s classics are often the works of yesterday’s avant-garde; and that what we call the literary canon is an ever-fluid collection of great books—books that gain their significance from readers engaging with their themes across the centuries.
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius, Gregory Hays
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Nearly two thousand years after it was written, Meditations remains profoundly relevant for anyone seeking to lead a meaningful life.
Your ability to control your thoughts—treat it with respect. It’s all that protects your mind from false perceptions—false to your nature, and that of all rational beings.
A series of spiritual exercises filled with wisdom, practical guidance, and profound understanding of human behavior, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations remains one of...
“Meditations offers a glimpse into [Marcus Aurelius’s] mind, his habits, and his approach to life. . . . I think any reader would find something useful to take away from it.”
—James Clear, #1 New York Times bestselling author
Read an Excerpt from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Debts and Lessons
1. My grandfather Verus
Character and self-control.
2. My father (from my own memories and
his reputation)
Integrity and manliness.
3. My mother
Her reverence for the divine, her generosity, her inability not only to do wrong but even to conceive of doing it. And the simple way she lived-not in the least like the rich.
4. My great-grandfather
To avoid the public schools, to hire good private teachers, and to accept the resulting costs as money well-spent.
5. My first teacher
Not to support this side or that in chariot-racing, this fighter or that in the games. To put up with discomfort and not make demands. To do my own work, mind my own business, and have no time for slanderers.
6. Diognetus
Not to waste time on nonsense. Not to be taken in by conjurors and hoodoo artists with their talk about incantations and exorcism and all the rest of it. Not to be obsessed with quail-fighting or other crazes like that. To hear unwelcome truths. To practice philosophy, and to study with Baccheius, and then with Tandasis and Marcianus. To write dialogues...
Celebrating the Truman Capote Centennial 2024
Truman Capote was a literary pioneer whose impact on American literature remains unparalleled, revolutionizing the genre of true crime and elevating the art of the novella.
Breakfast at Tiffany's & Other Voices, Other Rooms
Together in one volume, here are a pair of literary touchstones from Truman Capote’s extraordinary early career: the transcendently popular novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Other Voices, Other Rooms, the debut novel he published as a twenty-three-year-old prodigy.
In Cold Blood
"Cold-blooded, calculated, and utterly captivating, Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood' redefined the true crime genre and set a new standard for literary journalism."
—The New York Times
"A masterpiece ... a spellbinding work." —Life
Answered Prayers
Truman Capote’s unfinished final novel is an unsparing tell-all of New York high society that sent a seismic shock through the public and Capote’s own social circle.
“Prose that makes the heart sing and the narrative fly.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Modern Library Torchbearers
The Modern Library Torchbearers Series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.
The Princess of 72nd Street
NEWLY RELEASED
“When a novelist tells a good story well, it becomes a good novel. When a novelist uses words as if they were sacred love, what is written becomes poetry. Elaine Kraf is a poet.”
—The New York Times Book Review
The Voyage Out
“Absolutely unafraid . . . Here at last is a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights, though by a different path.”
—E. M. Forster
Regiment of Women
Obsessive friendships lead to tragedy in this early-twentieth-century novel about a charismatic schoolmistress, a naïve new teacher, and an impressionable student—with an afterword by Melissa Broder, author of Milk Fed and The Pisces.
Quicksand
“Quicksand . . . open[s] up a whole world of experience and struggle that seemed to me, when I first read [it] years ago, absolutely absorbing, fascinating, and indispensable.”
—Alice Walker
Passing
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING TESSA THOMPSON AND RUTH NEGGA
“The genius of this book is that its protagonists . . . are complex and fully realized. . . . The work of a highly talented and thoughtful writer.”
—Richard Bernstein, The New York Times
Persuasion
Jane Austen’s last completed novel, a brilliantly insightful story of regret, second chances, and the courage to follow our hearts.
The Awakening
A new edition of Kate Chopin’s controversial masterpiece, an essential novel in the canon of early feminism—with an introduction by Carmen Maria Machado, award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties.
The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Writings
Collected fiction and essays by a pillar of the American feminist canon—with an introduction by Halle Butler, a National Book Award Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and a Granta Best Young American Novelist.
Wuthering Heights
The classic tale of tormented love and the inexorable pull of the past, from one of history’s greatest literary talents, with an introduction by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic.
The Goodness of St. Rocque
“A prolific, politically engaged writer . . . In her energy and appetite for life’s pleasures, from the literary to the human to the natural, Alice Dunbar-Nelson celebrated beauty and freedom to the end of her life.”
—The Paris Review
More from Modern Library
The Fire Next Time
Celebrate the Baldwin Centennial this month!
“Basically the finest essay I’ve ever read. It’s technically two essays but it feels like one. [James] Baldwin refused to hold anyone’s hand. He was both direct and beautiful all at once. He did not seem to write to convince you. He wrote beyond you.”
—Ta-Nehisi Coates
Blood Meridian
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
The “masterpiece” (Michael Herr) of the New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road and No Country for Old Men
“McCarthy is a writer to be read, to be admired, and quite honestly—envied.”
—Ralph Ellison
Slaughterhouse-Five
“Poignant and hilarious, threaded with compassion and, behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral statement.”
—The Boston Globe
“Splendid . . . a funny book at which you are not permitted to laugh, a sad book without tears.”
—Life
Austerlitz
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
W. G. Sebald’s celebrated masterpiece, “one of the supreme works of art of our time” (The Guardian), follows a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle.
Siddhartha
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
The classic novel of a quest for knowledge that has delighted, inspired, and influenced generations of readers, writers, and thinkers.
A Raisin in the Sun
"Never before, the entire history of the American theater, has so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage," observed James Baldwin shortly before A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde’s story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author’s most popular work.
The Rising Sun
“[It] is quite possibly the most readable, yet informative account of the Pacific war.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
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