Love: Classics from the Modern Library — Modern Library

The Modern Library is happy to present Love, which is the fourth--following Christmas Classics, Mothers, and The Raven and the Monkey's Paw--in its series of reading treasuries. This original collection is dedicated to literary representations of our most essential emotion. In stories, excerpts, essays, and poems, Love celebrates the joys of Eros and some of its heartache, longing, and melancholy.

Love includes selections by many of our most cherished writers and poets and ranges across the ages to find the best examples of classic love literature. Thomas Bulfinch takes us back to Venus and Adonis, Cupid and Psyche--the great Greek and Roman fables that show us the love of legend. In "The Diary of Adam and Eve" Mark Twain gives his inimitable twist to the original boy-meets-girl story. This selection includes offerings from expert practitioners of the short story, like Anton Chekhov, D. H. Lawrence, Oscar Wilde, and Edith Wharton. Love also borrows from some of the great romantic novels, with extracts from Jane Eyre, Sense and Sensibility, Wuthering Heights, Washington Square, and The Scarlet Letter. And in essay form, Mary Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Louis Stevenson describe their experience of love.

Love is best celebrated in verse, and the collection closes with offerings from some of the most renowned poets of all, among them Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, Geoffrey Chaucer, Lord Byron, Andrew Marvell, Walt Whitman, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Donne, and William Shakespeare, whose sonnets may be the most satisfying evocation of love that we have in the English language.

This is a collection to cherish and to share, to read and read aloud, and to come back to again and again.