Classics

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...

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...

An NYRB Classics Original.Don Lope is a Don Juan, an aging but still effective predator on the opposite sex. He is also charming and generous, unhesitatingly contributing the better part of his fortune to pay off a friend’s debts, kindly assuming...

‘A deeply touching, enjoyable novel, beautifully written and fascinatingly mysterious and intricate in its designs’ -- New York Times.In a city that could be Paris, London or Vienna, a loose-knit group of travellers, artists, and...

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...

The 120 Days of Sodom is the most extreme book in the history of literature. The Marquis de Sade narrates the escalating sex-crimes of four libertines who barricade themselves in a remote castle with both male and female victims and accomplices for a...

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...

'Venus in Furs' describes the obsessions of Severin von Kusiemski, a European nobleman who desires to be enslaved to a woman. Severin finds his ideal of voluptuous cruelty in the merciless Wanda von Dunajew. This is a passionate and powerful portrayal of...

Blending piercing perception with endlessly reinventive language, Mercies is a searing collection of poems from one of the most ground-breaking voices of her generation. When Anne Sexton took her own life in October 1974, she left behind a body of...

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...

One woman’s quest for freedom in a world reluctant to give it. Jane Eyre continues to be a soaring narrative of love and hate, self-discovery and the search for home. It’s nothing short of a masterpiece.Charlotte Brontë's moving...

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...

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...

Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horried Russians in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a "novel-pamphlet" in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land...

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...

'The most magnificent novel ever written' Sigmund FreudThe murder of brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov changes the lives of his sons irrevocably: Mitya, the sensualist, whose bitter rivalry with his father immediately places him under suspicion for...

Translated by W.H.White and A.K.Stirling. With an Introduction by Don Garrett. Benedict de Spinoza lived a life of blameless simplicity as a lens-grinder in Holland. And yet in his lifetime he was expelled from the Jewish community in Amsterdam as a...

Shrewd, enchanting and extremely funny, Bulgakov’s seminal masterpiece is one of the most sparkling critiques of totalitarianism ever produced. Ingeniously intertwining narratives, from remorse-ridden Pontius Pilate to a persecuted writer in Stalinist...

#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...