Herve Jacquet is one of the founders of the modern theory of automorphic representations and their associated $L$-functions. This volume represents a selection of his most influential papers not already available in book form. The volume contains papers on the $L$-function attached to a pair of representations of the general linear group. Thus, it completes Jacquet's papers on the subject (joint with Shalika and Piatetski-Shapiro) that can be found in the volume of selected works of Piatetski-Shapiro. In particular, two often quoted papers of Jacquet and Shalika on the classification of automorphic representations and a historically important paper of Gelbart and Jacquet on the functorial transfer from $GL(2)$ to $GL(3)$ are included. Another series of papers pertains to the relative trace formula introduced by Jacquet. This is a variant of the standard trace formula which is used to study the period integrals of automorphic forms. Nearly complete results are obtained for the period of an automorphic form over a unitary group.