The Modern readers series

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1817 work Biographia Literaria is an autobiography in discourse; loosely structured and non-linear, the work is meditative and contains numerous philosophical essays. Initially criticized as the product of Coleridge's opiate-driven descent into illness, more recent critics have given the work far more credit and recognition. The book is the origin of the well-known critical idea of "willing suspension of disbelief."

A beautiful American girl, Daisy Miller, is pursued by the sophisticated Winterbourne, who moves in fairly conservative circles. Their courtship is frowned upon by the other Americans they meet in Switzerland and Italy because Daisy is too vivacious and flirtatious and neither belongs to, nor follows the rules of, their society. The novella is a comment on American and European attitudes towards each other and on social and cultural prejudice.

Explores the pleasures of the hedonistic life. Set on the fictional island of Nepenthe (another depiction of Capri), South Wind tells the very loosely developed story of Thomas Heard, Bishop of Bambopo, during the season of the sirocco (south wind), which considerably affects the attitudes and behavior of the islanders. He encounters people holding various unorthodox views on moral and sexual questions.

Long hailed as a seminal work of modernism in the tradition of Joyce and Kafka, and now available in a supple new English translation, Italo Svevo's charming and splendidly idiosyncratic novel conducts readers deep into one hilariously hyperactive and endlessly self-deluding mind. The mind in question belongs to Zeno Cosini, a neurotic Italian businessman who is writing his confessions at the behest of his psychiatrist. Here are Zeno's interminable attempts to quit smoking, his courtship of the beautiful yet unresponsive Ada, his unexpected -- and unexpectedly happy -- marriage to Ada's homely sister Augusta, and his affair with a shrill-voiced aspiring singer. -- Text refers to other edition.

Francis Parkman may have been America’s most famous historian in the 19th century, and is still well-known for books on the Oregon Trail and the French in North America. He is also still highly regarded for his prose, although there is less consensus about the quality of his historical interpretation. Historian C. Van Woodward wrote that “…Modern sensibilities will be nettled by his casual stereotypes of national character and by the sharp distinction he draws between “civilization” and “savagery”.” (Foreword to Parkman’s Montcalm and Wolfe: The French and Indian War, p. xxx.)