Classics

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot is an immaculate portrait of innocence tainted by the brutal reality of human greed. This Penguin Classics edition is translated from the Russian by David McDuff, with an introduction by William Mills Todd III.Returning to...

An intimate reflection on Japanese art and architecture from one of the country's greatest novelists.This is an enchanting essay on aesthetics by one of the greatest Japanese novelists. Tanizaki's eye ranges over architecture, jade, food, toilets, and...

Time Regained, the final volume of In Search of Lost Time, begins in the bleak and uncertain years of World War I. Years later, after the war’s end, Proust’s narrator returns to Paris and reflects on time, reality, jealousy, artistic creation, and the...

The long-awaited fifth volume—representing "the very summit of Proust's art" (Slate)—in the acclaimed Penguin translation of "the greatest literary work of the twentieth century" (The New York Times)A Penguin Modern Classics Carol Clark's acclaimed...

An epic, Pulitzer winning story of the great American West and search for honour, heroism and love. Portraying the bravery, ambition, defiance and ruthlessness of the settlers in the great wilderness, McMurthy’s novel delicately balances myth and fact,...

Julio Cortazar's crazed masterpiece, the forbearer of the Latin Boom in the 1960s - published in Vintage Classics for the first time'Cortazar's masterpiece. This is the first great novel of Spanish America... A powerful anti-novel but, like deeply...

A key work in the German 'Sturm und Drang' movement, Johann Goethe's autobiographical epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther is a defining moment in early Romanticism, which has influenced writers from Mary Shelley to Thomas Mann. This Penguin...

'A Latin American James Dean or Jack Kerouac' -- Washington Post'It's true; Marxists just wanna have fun... a revolutionary bestseller' -- GuardianAt the age of twenty-three, Ernesto 'Che' Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado set out from their native...

Presented with the original Illustrations. One of the classics of American children's literature, Daddy-Long-Legs tells the tale of Judy Abbott - an ebullient orphan beginning a college degree with the aim of becoming a writer - through her letters to...

From the International Booker Shortlisted author of Still Born, a powerful collection of stories about characters coping with estrangement, isolation, and the unknown.   Acclaimed for her piercing insights and razor-sharp prose, award winning...

Step into the unsettling world of Shirley Jackson this autumn with a collection of her finest, darkest short stories, revealing the queen of American gothic at her mesmerising best. There's something nasty in suburbia. In these deliciously dark tales,...

A gripping vision of American society radically overturned by a theocratic revolution, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Talehas become one of the most powerful novels of our time. Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, serving in the...

One of the great short novels of the twentieth century-in an edition marking the 100th anniversary of the author's birth. An unforgettable psychological novel of obsessive love, The Tunnel was championed by Albert Camus, Thomas Mann, and Graham...

Tolstoy’s titanic masterpiece redefined world literature and shifted the boundaries of psychological realism in the novel. Set during the maelstrom of Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Russia, War and Peace focuses on the inner lives and...

Like an elegantly chilling postscript to The Metamorphosis, this classic of postwar Japanese literature describes a bizarre physical transformation that exposes the duplicities of an entire world. The narrator is a scientist hideously deformed...

It is time that Kenji Miyazawa, long recognized as a writer of genius in his own country, enjoyed the same reputation abroad. Are his fables, in which acorns quarrel and flowers fret about losing their looks, written for children or adults? They are for...

Dissects Man's decadence in a remarkable series of moving and beautiful pieces. "To miss reading this book would be a deprivation."--Los Angeles Times.  E. M. Cioran confronts the place of today's world in the context of human history--focusing on...

A classic sci-fi dystopia that started out as a parody of H.G. Wells’s Utopian novels, Brave New World is a savage critique of the fallacy of the perfect state, the vogue for genetic engineering and the idea of the noble savage.  Far in the future,...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERIn the Tale of The Fall of Gondolin are two of the greatest powers in the world. There is Morgoth of the uttermost evil, unseen in this story but ruling over a vast military power from his fortress of Angband. Deeply opposed...

(Available after 3-20 days)Oscar Wilde’s enduringly popular story of a beautiful and corrupt man and the portrait that reveals all his secrets—The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel as flamboyant and controversial as its incomparable author.Entranced...