Classics

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...

The landmark novel that inspired Verdi’s opera La Traviata, in a sparkling new translation"One of the greatest love stories of all time," according to Henry James, and the inspiration for Verdi’s opera La Traviata, the...

'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...

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-Office Girl.  The Grand Budapest...

Discover an American masterpiece. This unassuming story about the life of a quiet English professor has earned the admiration of readers all over the globe. William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming...

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...

Wittgenstein's Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson or anyone else has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the reader as well that she is the only person left on earth...

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...

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...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World' 'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past' Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past...

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...

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...

A novel from "one of the outstanding writers of the world” (The New York Times) that explores the vicious nature of youth that is sometimes mistaken for innocence. • “A major work of art...

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...