Classics

This edition of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's Relacion offers readers Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz's celebrated translation of Cabeza de Vaca's account of the 1527 Panfilo de Narvaez expedition to North America. The dramatic narrative tells the...

Oscar Wilde was already famous as a brilliant wit and raconteur when he first began to publish his short stories in the late 1880s. Admired by George Orwell and W. B. Yeats, the stories include poignant fairy-tales such as "The Happy Prince" and "The...

"There were only seven out of the twenty-six on whom we knew we could rely; and out of those seven one was a boy ..."When a mysterious seafarer puts up at the Admiral Benbow, young Jim Hawkins is haunted by his frightening tales; the sailor's sudden...

Cecilia is an heiress, but she can only keep her fortune if her husband will consent to take her surname. Fanny Burney's unusual love story and deft social satire was much admired on its first publication in 1782 for its subtle interweaving of...

Little Women, the charming story of the brave and resilient March sisters, has been adored by generations of readers who have identified with the struggles of kind and pretty Meg; gentle, delicate Beth; precocious, artistic Amy; and of course wild,...

Gold! - his own gold - brought back to him as mysteriously as it had been taken away!Falsely accused of theft, Silas Marner is cut off from his community but finds refuge in the village of Raveloe, where he is eyed with distant suspicion. Like a spider...

'This is tragedy naked, godless and unredeemed' -- Kenneth TynanAn embittered Roman general returns from war, having captured the Queen of the Goths and her three sons. Sacrificing the eldest in memory of his own sons killed in battle, he provokes the...

Republic is the central work of the Western world's most famous philosopher. Essentially an inquiry into morality, Republic also contains crucial arguments and insights into many other areas of philosophy. It is also a literary masterpiece: the...

With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex. Richard Hannay finds a corpse in his flat, and becomes involved in a plot by spies to precipitate war and subvert British naval power. The resourceful victim of...

A gripping tale of adventure that has enthralled readers since it was first published, John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps is edited with an introduction and notes by Sir John Keegan in Penguin Classics. Adventurer Richard Hannay has just returned from...

'Among his associates no one loved him, many disliked him, and more feared him.' Father Schedoni is enlisted by the imperious Marchesa di Vivaldi to prevent her son from marrying the beautiful Ellena. Schedoni has no scruples in kidnapping Ellena and in...

`If any man or woman should ask what I wish this romance... to be called, it is the Romance of the Rose, in which the whole art of love is contained'. Guillaume de Lorris's own introduction to his allegorical account of the progress of a courtly love...

Edgar Allan Poe's Gothic tales have established themselves as classics of horror fiction, and as the inventor of the modern mystery, Poe created many of the conventions which still dominate the genre of detective fiction. Attentive to the historical and...

'When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin.' With a bewildering blend of the everyday and the fantastical, Kafka thus begins his most famous short story, The Metamorphosis. A...

Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. and his friends George and Harris decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them to a 'T'. But when they set off, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead with tow-ropes, unreliable...

Richard III is one of the finest of Shakespeare's historical dramas. Although it has a huge cast, Richard himself, gleefully wicked, charismatically Machiavellian, always dominates the play: a role to gratify such leading actors as David Garrick,...

‘The plot is the source and the soul of tragedy’In his near-contemporary account of Greek tragedy, Aristotle examines the dramatic elements of plot, character, language and spectacle that combine to produce pity and fear in the audience, and asks why we...

Karen Blixen's Out of Africa is the lyrical and luminous memoir of Kenya that launched a million tourist trails, beautifully repackaged as part of the Penguin Essentials range. 'I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills . . . Up in this high...

A fantastic collection of much-loved, classic stories for all the family! Mrs Pepperpot can't choose when she will shrink to the size of a pepperpot - it just happens! But whatever she encounters, whether it be a monstrous mousetrap, a crafty fox or a...

Black Beauty is a perennial children's favourite, one which has never been out of print since its publication in 1877. It is a moralistic tale of the life of the horse related in the form of an autobiography, describing the world through the eyes of the...