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In the Cities of Coin and Spice and In the Night Garden introduced readers to the unique and intoxicating imagination of Catherynne M. Valente. Now she weaves a lyrically erotic spell of a place where the grotesque and the beautiful reside and the passport to our most secret fantasies begins with a stranger's kiss....Between life and death, dreaming and waking, at the train stop beyond the end of the world is the city of Palimpsest. To get there is a miracle, a mystery, a gift, and a curse—a voyage permitted only to those who've always believed there's another world than the one that meets the eye. Those fated to make the passage are marked forever by a map of that wondrous city tattooed on their flesh after a single orgasmic night. To this kingdom of ghost trains, lion-priests, living kanji, and cream-filled canals come four travelers: Oleg, a New York locksmith; the beekeeper November; Ludovico, a binder of rare books; and a young Japanese woman named Sei. They've each lost something important—a wife, a lover, a sister, a direction in life—and what they will find in Palimpsest is more than they could ever imagine.

In Basic Teachings of the Buddha, Glenn Wallis selects sixteen essential dialogues drawn from more than five thousand Pali-dialect suttas of the Buddhist canon. The result is a vibrant introductory guide to studying Buddhist thought, applying its principles to everyday life, and gaining a deeper understanding of Buddhist themes in modern literature. Focusing on the most crucial topics for today's readers, Wallis presents writings that address modern psychological, religious, ethical, and philosophical concerns. This practical, inspiring, and engaging volume provides an overview of the history of Buddhism and an illuminating analysis of the core writings that personalizes the suttas for each reader. "Glenn Wallis brings wisdom and compassion to this work of scholarship. Everyone should read this book.”-Christopher Queen, Harvard University"A valuable sourcebook with a good selection of the fundamental suttas enhanced by an eloquent introduction and comprehensive notes-altogether a very useful text.” -Peter Matthiessen (Roshi), author of The Snow Leopard and Nine-Headed Dragon River"Glenn Wallis's new and accessible translations of some of the Buddha's lectures to his original students, along with Wallis's elegant guide to the texts, gives twenty-first-century readers in the modern West a fresh chance to learn from this teacher.”-Charles Hallisey, University of Wisconsin-Madison

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 Maguire takes readers on a guided tour of Oz, gathering and introducing us to three of Baum's beloved stories:The Marvelous Land of Oz, the sequel to The Wizard of Oz, is the adventure-packed tale of a Gillikin boy named Tip who flees Old Mombi the witch in search of the Emerald City.Ozma of Oz, set mainly in the strange land of Ev, features the clever and beautiful new ruler of the Emerald City, as well as Dorothy of Kansas, the mechanical marvel Tik-Tok, and the dreaded Nome King. The Emerald City of Oz recounts Dorothy's trip to Oz with her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, and the Nome King's terrible plot against the kingdom.

"The boastful, unstable Toad, the hospitable Water Rat, the shy, wise, childlike Badger, and the Mole with his pleasant habit of brave boyish impulse,” noted Vanity Fair nearly a century ago, "are types of that deeper humanity which sways us all.” Written by Kenneth Grahame as bedtime stories for his son, The Wind in the Willows continues to delight readers today. Basing his fanciful animal characters on human archetypes, Grahame imparts a gentle, playful wisdom in his timeless tales. Few readers will be able to resist an invitation to join the Wild Wooders at Toad Hall, enjoy a quick splash in the river with Rat and Badger, or take a swerving ride with Toad in a "borrowed” motor-car. This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the first illustrated American edition of 1913.

When Marshal of the Nobility Pozdnyshev suspects his wife of having an affair with her music partner, his jealousy consumes him and drives him to murder. Controversial upon publication in 1890, The Kreutzer Sonata illuminates Tolstoy's then-feverish Christian ideals, his conflicts with lust and the hypocrisies of nineteenth-century marriage, and his thinking on the role of art and music in society.In her Introduction, Doris Lessing shows how relevant The Kreutzer Sonata is to our understanding of Tolstoy the artist, as well as to feminism and literature. This Modern Library Paperback Classic also contains Tolstoy's Sequel to the Kruetzer Sonata.

Charles Dickens's satirical masterpiece, The Pickwick Papers, catapulted the young writer into literary fame when it was first serialized in 1836-37. It recounts the rollicking adventures of the members of the Pickwick Club as they travel about England getting into all sorts of mischief. Laugh-out-loud funny and endlessly entertaining, the book also reveals Dickens's burgeoning interest in the parliamentary system, lawyers, the Poor Laws, and the ills of debtors' prisons. As G. K. Chesterton noted, "Before [Dickens] wrote a single real story, he had a kind of vision . . . a map full of fantastic towns, thundering coaches, clamorous market-places, uproarious inns, strange and swaggering figures. That vision was Pickwick.”

Here is a true publishing event-the first modern translation of a lost masterpiece by one of fiction's giants. Censored upon publication in 1871, out of print since the 1950s, and untranslated for a century, Zola's The Kill (La Curée) emerges as an unheralded classic of naturalism. Second in the author's twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart saga, it is a riveting story of family transgression, heedless desire, and societal greed.The incestuous affair of Renée Saccard and her stepson, Maxime, is set against the frenzied speculation of Renée's financier husband, Aristide, in a Paris becoming a modern metropolis and "the capital of the nineteenth century.” In the end, setting and story merge in actions that leave a woman's spirit and a city's soul ravaged beyond repair. As vividly rendered by Arthur Goldhammer, one of the world's premier translators from the French, The Kill contains all the qualities of the school of fiction marked, as Henry James wrote, by "infernal intelligence.”In this new incarnation, The Kill joins Nana and Germinal on the shelf of Zola classics, works by an immortal author who-explicit, pitiless, wise, and unrelenting-always goes in for the kill.

One of the greatest works of American literature, The Red Badge of Courage gazes fearlessly into the bright hell of war through the eyes of one young soldier, the reluctant Henry Fleming. Written by Stephen Crane at the age of twenty-one, the novel imagines the Civil War's terror and loss with an unblinking vision so modern and revolutionary that, upon publication, critics hailed it as a work of literary genius. Ernest Hemingway declared, "There was no real literature of our Civil War . . . until Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage." This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition includes the short story "The Veteran," Crane's tale of an aged Civil War soldier looking back at his past.

George Eliot's Romola, writes Robert Kiely in his Introduction, embodies the author's "wrestling with her own best theories of history and human nature as a creative experiment of the highest order.” Set in Florence in 1492, a time of great political and religious turmoil, Eliot's novel blends vivid fictional characters with historical figures such as Savonarola, Machiavelli, and the Medicis. When Romola, the virtuous daughter of a blind scholar, marries Tito Melema, a charismatic young Greek, she is bound to a man whose escalating betrayals threaten to destroy all that she holds dear. Profoundly inspired by Savonarola's teachings, then crushed by the religious leader's ultimate failure, Romola finds her salvation in noble self-sacrifice. This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the 1878 Cabinet Edition.

Martial, the father of the epigram, was one of the brilliant provincial poets who made their literary mark on first-century Rome. His Epigrams can be affectionate or cruel, elegiac or playful; they target every element of Roman society, from slaves to schoolmasters to, above all, the aristocratic elite. With wit and wisdom, Martial evokes not "the grandeur that was Rome,” but rather the timeless themes of urban life and society.

Hailed as the greatest novel of the Mexican Revolution, The Underdogs recounts the story of an illiterate but charismatic Indian peasant farmer's part in the rebellion against Porfirio Díaz, and his subsequent loss of belief in the cause when the revolutionary alliance becomes factionalized. Azuela's masterpiece is a timeless, authentic portrayal of peasant life, revolutionary zeal, and political disillusionment.

When John Muir traveled to California in 1868, he found the pristine mountain ranges that would inspire his life's work. The Mountains of California is the culmination of the ten years Muir spent in the Sierra Nevadas, studying every crag, crook, and valley with great care and contemplation.Bill McKibben writes in his Introduction that Muir "invents, by sheer force of his love, an entirely new vocabulary and grammar of the wild . . . a language of ecstasy and exuberance." The Mountains of California is as vibrant and vital today as when it was written over a century ago. This Modern Library Paperback Classic includes the photographs and line drawings from the original 1898 edition.

Edith Kermit Carow grew up in New York City in the same circles as did Theodore Roosevelt. But only after TR's first wife died at age twenty-two did the childhood friends forge one of the most successful romantic and political partnerships in American history. Sylvia Jukes Morris's access to previously unpublished letters and diaries brings to full life her portrait of the Roosevelts and their times. During her years as First Lady (1901-09), Edith Kermit Roosevelt dazzled social and political Washington as hostess, confidante, and mother of six, leading her husband to remark, "Mrs. Roosevelt comes a good deal nearer my ideal than I do myself."

Set in 1885, The Ox-Bow Incident is a searing and realistic portrait of frontier life and mob violence in the American West. First published in 1940, it focuses on the lynching of three innocent men and the tragedy that ensues when law and order are abandoned. The result is an emotionally powerful, vivid, and unforgettable re-creation of the Western novel, which Clark transmuted into a universal story about good and evil, individual and community, justice and human nature. As Wallace Stegner writes, [Clark's] theme was civilization, and he recorded, indelibly, its first steps in a new country.

Millions of Americans are finding it more and more difficult to apply the traditional demands of organized religion to their lives, and yet a complete absence of spirituality leaves them uneasy. Working on God is a book for and about such intelligent, independent people, who are seeking to reconcile their spiritual yearnings with their skeptical intellects. Winifred Gallagher, a behavioral-science reporter, began her investigation of religion in our postmodern age with research and interviews and soon discovered a vast, quiet revolution under way among ordinary men and women grappling with the sacred. Both Gallagher's brilliant journalistic inquiry and her very personal journey unfold over time spent in a Zen monastery and a cloistered convent, in small-group discussions and healing rituals, in a Conservative synagogue that shares spaces with a Christian church, and in the birthplace of the New Age. Written with humor, empathy, and a rigorous curiosity, Working on God breaks new ground in depicting the broad-based spiritual movement that is transforming many lives.

In 1860, fifteen years after Sir John Franklin's ill-fated expedition disappeared in the Arctic, a Cincinnati businessman named Charles Francis Hall set out to locate and rescue the expedition's survivors. He was an amateur explorer, without any scientific training or experience, but he was driven by a sense of personal destiny and of religious and patriotic mission. Despite the odds against him, he made three forays into the far North, the final--and fatal--one taking him farther north than any westerner had ever gone before. But Hall was suddenly taken ill on that voyage and died under mysterious circumstances.Ninety-seven years later, Chauncey Loomis headed an expedition to Hall's grave in northwestern Greenland. He exhumed Hall's frozen body and performed an autopsy. His findings suggest that the investigators of Hall's death nervously sidestepped the damning evidence. Loomis has written a masterful biography-cum-mystery that brilliantly evokes the lure of the Arctic and the brutal contest between man and nature. With a new Introduction by Andrea Barrett, author of The Voyage of the Narwhal

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all timeWith an Introduction by Joyce Carol Oatesforeword by the authorCommentary by Carl van Doren, Rebecca West,Aldous Huxley, and Henry MillerIt is . . . the world of the poets and the preponderance of the poet in [Lawrence] that is the key to his work. He magnified and deepened experience in the manner of a poet," wrote Anaïs Nin in 1934. Privately printed in 1920 and published commercially in 1921, Women in Love is the novel Lawrence himself considered his masterpiece. Set in the English Midlands, the novel traces the lives of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, and the men with whom they fall in love. All four yearn for fufillment in their romantic lives, yet struggle in a world that is increasingly violent and destructive. Commenting on the novel, which was composed in the midst of the First World War in 1916, Lawrence wrote, "The bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters." Rich in symbolism and lyrical prose, Women in Love is a complex meditation on the meaning of love in the modern world. To the critic Alfred Kazin, "No other writer of [Lawrence's] imaginative standing has in our time written books that are so open to life."D. H. LAWRENCE (1885-1930), the son of a coal miner and a lace worker, completed his formal studies at University College, Nottingham, in 1908 and began teaching at a boys' school. By 1912, he had abandoned teaching to write full-time. His novels include The White Peacock (1911), The Trespasser (1912), Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), The Plumed Serpent (1926), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), which was banned as pornographic in England until 1960.