Classics

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...

'When silence or tricks of language contribute to maintaining an abuse that must be reformed or a suffering that can be relieved, then there is no other solution but to speak out'Written when execution by guillotine was still legal in France, Albert...

Thomas Bernhard was one of the most original writers of the twentieth century. His formal innovation ranks with Beckett and Kafka, his outrageously cantankerous voice recalls Dostoevsky, but his gift for lacerating, lyrical, provocative prose is...

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...

As ripe for revisiting as The Night Manager, John le Carré’s 1983 thriller - now adapted for television - brilliantly presages the duplicity of our times. Razor-sharp, precisely plotted and gripping. Soon to be a major BBC TV series Terrorist...

'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...

Collected here are Gogol's finest tales - from the demon-haunted 'St John's Eve' to the strange surrealism of 'The Nose', from the heart-rending trials of the copyist in 'The Overcoat' to those of the delusional clerk in 'The Diary of a Madman' -...

Gogol's stories are admired for their skillful mingling of fantasy and reality, quiet good humor and use of mundane details — as Gogol put it — "to extract the extraordinary from the ordinary." Imaginative and timeless, they remain as fresh and...

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,...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics,...

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...

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...

A heady mix of desire, humour, pain and politics, Burroughs autobiographical novel finds a queer man in the American expat community of early-1950s Mexico City on a desperate quest for satisfaction. Originally written in 1952 but not published till...

'A masterpiece... One of the best prose writers in our time' -- Michael Ondaatje. An epic miniature of one man's life journey through the American West at the turn of the twentieth century. Robert Grainier is a day labourer in the American West, felling...