Cause for Alarm

Written by Eric Ambler

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 5, 2002
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-72674-3 (0-375-72674-8)

“Our greatest thriller writer.”—Graham Greene

Nicky Marlow needs a job. He’s engaged to be married and the employment market is pretty slim in Britain in 1937. So when his fiancé points out the Spartacus Machine Tool notice, he jumps at the chance. After all, he speaks Italian and he figures he’ll be... Read more >

Epitaph for a Spy

Written by Eric Ambler

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 5, 2002
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-71324-8 (0-375-71324-7)

“Ambler successfully combines excitement, entertainment, and social significance.”—The New York Times Book Review

When Josef Vadassy arrives at the H^tel de la Reserve at the end of his Riviera holiday, he is simply looking forward to a few more days of relaxation before returning to Paris. But in St. Gatien, on the... Read more >

The Light of Day

Written by Eric Ambler

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: December 7, 2004
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-72679-8 (0-375-72679-9)

The Light of Day was the basis for Jules Dassin’s classic film, Topkapi.

When Arthur Abdel Simpson first spots Harper in the Athens airport, he recognizes him as a tourist unfamiliar with city and in need of a private driver. In other words, the perfect mark for Simpson’s brand of entrepreneurship. But... Read more >

The Schirmer Inheritance

Written by Eric Ambler

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: December 2, 2003
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-72676-7 (0-375-72676-4)

It wasn’t anyone’s idea of a glamorous first assignment at a white show law firm. George Cary, former WWII bomber pilot and newly minted lawyer, was given the ignoble task of going through the tons of files on the Schneider Johnson case, just to make sure nothing had been overlooked. But... Read more >

State of Siege

Written by Eric Ambler

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: December 2, 2003
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-72677-4 (0-375-72677-2)

All in all Steve Fraser had enjoyed his three-year stint in the former Dutch Southeast Asian colony of Sunda, and he’d been well compensated. But now he was looking forward to a last weekend in the capital before heading home. But Sunda was newly independent, and not entirely stable. An opposition... Read more >

Peter Pan

Written by J.M. Barrie
Illustrated by F.D. Bedford
Introduction by Anne McCaffrey

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: October 12, 2004
Price: $8.95
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7297-9 (0-8129-7297-X)

Peter, Wendy, Captain Hook, the lost boys, and Tinker Bell have filled the hearts of children ever since Barrie's play first opened in London in 1904 and became an immediate sensation. Now this funny, haunting modern myth is presented with Bedford's wonderful illustrations, which first appeared in the author's own day... Read more >

Zuleika Dobson

Written by Max Beerbohm

Format: Trade Paperback, 252 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: September 14, 1998
Price: $19.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-75248-3 (0-375-75248-X)

Originally published in 1911, Max Beerbohm's sparklingly wicked satire concerns the unlikely events that occur when a femme fatale briefly enters the supremely privileged, all-male domain of Judas College, Oxford. Inspired throughout by Beerbohm's ornate imagination, this lyrical evocation of Edwardian undergraduate life at Oxford has, according to E.M. Forster, "a... Read more >

To the North

Written by Elizabeth Bowen

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: April 11, 2006
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-9655-8 (1-4000-9655-3)

A young woman’s secret love affair leads to a violent and tragic act in one of Elizabeth Bowen’s most acclaimed novels. To the North centers on two young women in 1920s London, the recently widowed Cecilia Summers and her late husband's sister, Emmeline. Drawn to each other in the wake of... Read more >

The Arabian Nights
Tales from a Thousand and One Nights
Translated by Richard Burton
Introduction by A.S. Byatt

Format: Paperback, 1104 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: June 1, 2004
Price: $8.95
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7214-6 (0-8129-7214-7)

Full of mischief, valor, ribaldry, and romance, The Arabian Nights has enthralled readers for centuries. These are the tales that saved the life of Shahrazad, whose husband, the king, executed each of his wives after a single night of marriage. Beginning an enchanting story each evening, Shahrazad always withheld the ending... Read more >

Alexander's Bridge

Written by Willa Cather

Format: Trade Paperback, 144 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: December 7, 2010
Price: $12.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-73966-7 (0-307-73966-X)

Alexander’s Bridge, Willa Cather’s first novel, is a taut psychological drama about the fragility of human connections. Published in 1912, just a year before O Pioneers! made Cather’s name, it features high society on an international stage rather than the immigrant prairie characters she later became known for. The successful and... Read more >

The Man Who Was Thursday
A Nightmare
Written by G.K. Chesterton
Introduction by Jonathan Lethem

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: October 9, 2001
Price: $8.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-75791-4 (0-375-75791-0)

G. K. Chesterton's surreal masterpiece is a psychological thriller that centers on seven anarchists in turn-of-the-century London who call themselves by the names of the days of the week. Chesterton explores the meanings of their disguised identities in what is a fascinating mystery and, ultimately, a spellbinding allegory. As Jonathan Lethem... Read more >

The Riddle of the Sands

Written by Erskine Childers
Introduction by Milton Bearden

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: December 10, 2002
Price: $9.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-6614-5 (0-8129-6614-7)

While on a sailing trip in the Baltic Sea, two young adventurers-turned-spies uncover a secret German plot to invade England. Written by Childers—who served in the Royal Navy during World War I—as a wake-up call to the British government to attend to its North Sea defenses, The Riddle of the Sands... Read more >

The Hound of the Baskervilles

Written by Arthur Conan Doyle

Format: Trade Paperback, 213 pages
Publisher: Melville House
On Sale: July 26, 2005
Price: $9.00
ISBN: 978-0-9746078-7-0 (0-9746078-7-8)

“It’s an ugly business, Watson, an ugly dangerous business, and the more I see of it the less I like it.”

Sherlock Holmes had been dead for eight years–killed of in another story–when Arthur Conan Doyle decided to bring the famous detective back for a new story that he told friends was... Read more >

Heart of Darkness

Written by Joseph Conrad
Introduction by Caryl Phillips

Format: Trade Paperback, 176 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: August 10, 1999
Price: $11.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-75377-0 (0-375-75377-X)

With an Introduction by Caryl Phillips Commentary by H.L. Mencken, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Lionel Trilling, Chiua Achebe, and Philip Gourevitch, 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... Read more >

Lord Jim & Nostromo

Written by Joseph Conrad
Introduction by Robert D. Kaplan

Format: Trade Paperback, 816 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: April 18, 2000
Price: $29.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-75489-0 (0-375-75489-X)

Originally published in 1900, Lord Jim is one of Joseph Conrad's most complex literary masterpieces. The story of a young sailor whose moment of cowardice haunts him for the rest of his life, Lord Jim explores Conrad's lifelong obsessions with the nature of guilt and the possibility of redemption.
        Nostromo is considered... Read more >

The Secret Agent
A Simple Tale
Written by Joseph Conrad
Edited by Peter Mallios
Introduction by Robert D. Kaplan

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: December 14, 2004
Price: $10.95
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7305-1 (0-8129-7305-4)

In reexamining The Secret Agent in a post-9/11 world, Robert D. Kaplan praises Joseph Conrad’s “surgical insight into the mechanics of terrorism,” calling the book “a fine example of how a savvy novelist may detect the future long before a social scientist does.”

This intense 1907 thriller–a precursor to works by... Read more >

The Shadow-Line
A Confession
Written by Joseph Conrad

Format: Trade Paperback, 144 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 9, 2007
Price: $10.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-38653-3 (0-307-38653-8)

The masterpiece of Joseph Conrad’s later years, the autobiographical short novel The Shadow-Line depicts a young man at a crossroads in his life, facing a desperate crisis that marks the “shadow-line” between youth and maturity.

This brief but intense story is a dramatically fictionalized account of Conrad’s first command as a young... Read more >

Under Western Eyes

Written by Joseph Conrad
Introduction by Jeffrey Meyers

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: July 10, 2001
Price: $11.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-75735-8 (0-375-75735-X)

Hailed as one of Joseph Conrad's finest literary achievements, this is the story of a young man unwittingly caught in the political turmoil of pre-Revolutionary czarist Russia.

A gripping novel that ultimately questions our capacity for moral strength and the depths of human integrity. This new edition includes commentary and a... Read more >

Victory
An Island Tale
Written by Joseph Conrad
Introduction by Peter Mallios

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: July 8, 2003
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-75908-6 (0-375-75908-5)

Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by Peter Mallios.

“With Victory, Conrad inaugurated a new style and aesthetic,” writes Peter Lancelot Mallios in his Introduction to this Modern Library edition. “The tremendous literary sophistication to be found in Victory does not result in the exclusion of the popular reader.”

Set in the... Read more >

Blithe Spirit, Hay Fever, Private Lives
Three Plays
Written by Noel Coward

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 26, 1999
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-78179-0 (0-679-78179-X)

Filled with languid aristocrats trading witticisms as they wait for martinis, this collection of three Noel Coward plays encapsulates the qualities that made him one of the most popular playwrights of the 1930s and '40s and one of the great personalities of the century.In Blithe Spirit, Charles Condomine receives a visit... Read more >

The Noel Coward Reader

Written by Noel Coward
Edited by Barry Day

Format: Trade Paperback, 624 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 6, 2011
Price: $18.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-47487-2 (0-307-47487-9)

The Noël Coward Reader offers a wonderfully wide-ranging selection—the first of its kind—of the best of the Master’s oeuvre, entertainingly annotated and abundantly illustrated, and including material that has never before been published.

Here are scenes from Coward’s famous plays, from Private Lives to Blithe Spirit, and his screenplays, from Brief Encounter... Read more >

The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp

Written by W.H. Davies
Preface by George Bernard Shaw

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Melville House
On Sale: November 8, 2011
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-1-61219-022-8 (1-61219-022-7)

An untutored Welsh tramp who became a popular poet acclaimed by the conservative Georgians and the vanguard Ezra Pound alike, W. H. Davies surprised his contemporaries with the unlikeliest portrait of the artist as a young man ever written.

After a delinquent childhood, Davies renounced home and apprenticeship and at twenty-two sailed... Read more >

Bleak House

Written by Charles Dickens

Format: Trade Paperback, 880 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 3, 2012
Price: $10.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-94719-2 (0-307-94719-X)

One of Charles Dickens’s most critically admired novels, this story of a monumental and life-consuming court case features one of his most vast and varied casts of colorful characters.

In Bleak House, competing claims of love and inheritance—complicated by murder—have given rise to a costly and decades-long legal battle that one litigant... Read more >

The Hound of the Baskervilles

Written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Introduction by Laurie R. King

Format: Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: October 8, 2002
Price: $9.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-6606-0 (0-8129-6606-6)

The most famous of the Sherlock Holmes stories, The Hound of the Baskervilles features the phantom dog of Dartmoor, which, according to an ancient legend, has haunted the Baskervilles for generations. When Sir Charles Baskerville dies suddenly of a heart attack on the grounds of the family’s estate, the locals are... Read more >

The Lost World

Written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Introduction by Michael Crichton

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: January 14, 2003
Price: $9.95
ISBN: 978-0-8129-6725-8 (0-8129-6725-9)

In The Lost World, the first in a series of books to feature the bold Professor Challenger—a character many critics consider one of the most finely drawn in science fiction—Challenger and his party embark on an expedition to a remote Amazonian plateau where, as the good professor puts it, “the ordinary... Read more >