Curiosity, courage and a touch of recklessness: these are the qualities of a true explorer! And yet Axel, the protagonist of this masterpiece by Jules Verne, does not feel particularly courageous when he decides to take part in the mad plan conceived by his uncle, Professor Otto Lidenbrock, to discover what is in the center of the Earth. Following the indications in an ancient book, they descend into the depths of our planet, where they make incredible...

Emily Dickinson lived as a recluse in Amherst, Massachusetts, dedicating herself to writing a "letter to the world"--The 1,775 poems left unpublished at her death in 1886. Today Dickinson stands in the front rank of American poets. This Modern Library edition presents the more than four hundred poems that were published between Dickinson's death and 1900. They express her concepts of life and death, of love and nature, and of what Henry James called...

The influence of the gothic and its atmosphere of gloom and decay have inspired classics of horror and the supernatural for more than two centuries. The Phantom of the Opera and Other Gothic Tales collects twenty-five classic stories shaped by gothic's mood of menace and the macabre. In addition to the world-famous title novel, about a "ghost" who terrorizes the personnel of the Paris Opera House, the book includes Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto,...