Classics

A heady mix of desire, humour, pain and politics, Burroughs autobiographical novel finds a queer man in the American expat community of early-1950s Mexico City on a desperate quest for satisfaction. Originally written in 1952 but not published till...

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...

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...

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...

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...

A mysterious stranger named Chichikov arrives in a small provincial Russian town and proceeds to visit a succession of landowners, making each of them an unusual and somewhat macabre proposition. He offers to buy the rights to the dead serfs who are...

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,...

The unsettling story of a young woman's descent into mental illness, from the author ofThe Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived at the Castle.'An amazing writer' Neil GaimanElizabeth Richmond is almost too quiet to be believed, with no...

The stories of Exile and the Kingdom explore the dilemma of being an outsider - even in one's own country - and of allegiance. With intense power and lyricism, Camus evokes beautiful but harsh landscapes, whether the shimmering deserts of his native...

#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...

Austerlitz is W. G. Sebald's haunting novel of post-war Europe.In 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents. This childless couple promptly erase from the boy all knowledge of his...

This new collection brings together First Love, The Calamative, The End and The Expelled; these four novellas are among the first major works of Beckett's decision to use French as his language of literary composition. Rich in verbal and situational...

'What can be said at all can be said clearly; and of what one cannot talk, about that one must be silent.'Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in German in 1921 and in English translation in 1922, is one of the most influential...

Including a previously-unpublished story 'The Bargain', Truman Capote's The Complete Stories is the first ever complete collection stories from one of the masters of American literature, and the author of Breakfast at Tiffany's. This Penguin Classics...

THE BOOK OF SAND was the last of Borges' major collections to be published. The stories are, in his words, 'variations on favourite themes... combining a plain and at times almost colloquial style with a fantastic plot'. It includes such marvellous tales...

In July 1917, when the Provisional Government issued a warrant for his arrest, Lenin fled from Petrograd; later that year, the October Revolution swept him to supreme power. In the short intervening period he spent in Finland, he wrote his impassioned,...

GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014.No marriage of a major twentieth-century writer lasted longer than Vladimir Nabokov's. Véra Slonim shared his delight at the enchantment of life's trifles and literature's treasures, and he rated her as having the...

This delirious 1925 Jazz Age classic introduced readers to Lorelei Lee, the small-town girl from Little Rock, who has become one of the most timeless characters in American fiction. Outrageous and charming, this not-so-dumb blonde has been portrayed on...

This collection of writings is famous for giving us the phrase 'Freudian slip'. It also builds up a strong social history of Vienna and the middle-class social milieu of Freud and his patients. Through a series of case histories, some no longer than a...