Classics

Winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, this is one of the defining books of the 1970s, an experimental novel about a young journalist trying to navigate life in America. When Speedboat burst on the scene in the late ’70s it was like...

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,...

“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...

Described by The Times on its first publication in 1865 as an excellent piece of nonsense, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has gone on to become one of the most popular books ever written, loved by children and adults alike and...

When a grumbling volcano causes Moominvalley to flood, the Moomins escape by boat, finding refuge on a floating theatre. Adventures abound when the theatre casts adrift leaving Moomin,The Snorkmaiden and Little My marooned. Will they all be reunited...

'This delicious confection will work its magic on all' Daily Telegraph. The discreet advertisement in The Times, addressed 'To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine', offers a small medieval castle for rent, above a bay on the Italian Riviera. Four...

A formally innovative work of modernist fiction, Virginia Woolf's The Waves is edited with an introduction by Kate Flint in Penguin Modern Classics. More than any of Virginia Woolf's other novels, The Waves conveys the full complexity and richness of...

The Setting Sun is a gorgeous and deeply sensible story of the changing of Japanese tradition after World War II, all from the lens of a heroine going through her own changes offset by the challenges of modernity. Timeless and lyrical, it's a story...

Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as a classic not to the controversy its subject matter aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness. With an introduction...

Wes Anderson on Stefan Zweig:  "I had never heard of Zweig...when I just more or less by chance bought a copy of Beware of Pity. I loved this first book.  I also read the The Post-OfficeGirl.  The Grand Budapest Hotel has elements that...

In The Possessed, Witold Gombrowicz, considered by many to be Poland’s greatest modernist, draws together the familiar tropes of the Gothic novel to produce a darkly funny and playful subversion of the form. With dreams of...

From the acclaimed author of Woman in the Dunes comes Secret Rendezvous, the bizarrely erotic and comic adventures of a man searching for his missing wife in a mysteriously vast underground hospital.From the moment that an ambulance...

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...

US writer Scott (1896-1940) published the collection of short stories in 1922. Editor James L. W. West III (English, Pennsylvania State U.) characterizes it as uneven, but calls attention to May Day and The Diamond as Big as the Ritz as masterpieces. In...

'Speak, memory', said Vladimir Nabokov. And immediately there came flooding back to him a host of enchanting recollections - of his comfortable childhood and adolescence, of his rich, liberal-minded father, his beautiful mother, an army of relations and...

Albinus - rich, married middle-aged and respectable - is an art critic and aspiring filmmaker who lusts after the coquettish young cinema usherette Margot. Gradually he seduces her and convinces himself he is irresistible to her, but Margot has other...

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...

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...

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...