Classics

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,...

'There are certain words which possess, in themselves, when properly used, a virtue which illumines and lifts up towards the good'The philosopher and activist Simone Weil was one of the most courageous thinkers of the twentieth century. Here she writes,...

In Either/Or, using the voices of two characters—the aesthetic young man of part one, called simply "A," and the ethical Judge Vilhelm of the second section—Kierkegaard reflects upon the search for a meaningful existence, contemplating subjects as...

The third of Dostoevsky's five major novels, Devils (1871-2), also known as The Possessed, is at once a powerful political tract and a profound study of atheism, depicting the disarray that follows the appearance of a band of modish radicals in a small...

Demons, also known as The Possessed or The Devils, is a dark masterpiece that evokes a world where the lines between and good and evil long ago became blurred. This Penguin Classics edition of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Demons is translated by Robert A...

Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a father's death yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria and the boy's...

This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their...

The Art of Money Getting was written by P. T. Barnum, who is widely known as an important historical entrepreneur as founder of the famous traveling circus, but in this publication Barnum shares his knowledge of business and teaches readers how to be...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘There are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows about but me, or ever will’ Hailed as one of the most distinctive and compelling literary voices of her era,...

A woman finds herself filling a pit in the forest in the middle of the night; a family lock each other in their bedrooms to battle a strange plague; a wizard punishes two beautiful ballerinas by turning them into one hugely fat circus performer; a...

On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American...

"One of the most acute and thoughtful achievements of French fiction at mid-century." — New York Times   Set in Paris on the eve of World War II and sizzling with love, anger, and revenge, She Came to Stay explores the changes wrought in the soul of a...

"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel...Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." —from If On A Winter's Night a Traveler.  Italo Calvino's stunning classic imagines a novel...

Blaise Pascal, the precociously brilliant contemporary of Descartes, was a gifted mathematician and physicist, but it is his unfinished apologia for the Christian religion upon which his reputation now rests. The Penseés is a collection of philosohical...

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,...

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,...

“As sharp and lucent and alarming as a piece of broken crystal.”— Deborah Eisenberg, author of Your Duck Is My Duck The last of the four novels Jean Rhys wrote in interwar Paris, Good Morning, Midnight is the culmination of a searing...

Over the past sixty years the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre have probably been more influential in the West than those of any other philosopher and literary figure. In his theoretical writings, Sartre laid the foundation for an original doctrine of...

A sensational 1954 French novel that has become a contemporary classic. Set against the translucent beauty of France in summer, Bonjour Tristesse is a bittersweet tale narrated by Cecile, a seventeen-year-old girl on the brink of womanhood,...

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...