Classics

Time Regained, the final volume of In Search of Lost Time, begins in the bleak and uncertain years of World War I. Years later, after the war’s end, Proust’s narrator returns to Paris and reflects on time, reality, jealousy, artistic creation, and the...

The long-awaited fifth volume—representing "the very summit of Proust's art" (Slate)—in the acclaimed Penguin translation of "the greatest literary work of the twentieth century" (The New York Times)A Penguin Modern Classics Carol Clark's acclaimed...

A legendary love letter to Los Angeles by the city's most charming daughter, complete with portraits of rock stars at Chateau Marmont, surfers in Santa Monica, prostitutes on sunset, and Eve's own beloved cat, Rosie. Journalist, party girl,...

The New York Times Bestseller   J.R.R. Tolkien's Beren And Lúthien is one of the three 'Great Tales' of the Elder Days. The epic tale of Beren and Lúthien became an essential element in the evolution of The Silmarillion, the myths and legends of...

Turgenev's masterpiece about the conflict between generations is as fresh, outspoken, and exciting today as it was in when it was first published in 1862. The controversial portrait of Bazarov, the energetic, cynical, and self-assured `nihilist' who...

From Daphne du Maurier—the beloved author of the timeless classic Rebecca—comes this haunting novel of secrets and suspense. The coachman tried to warn young Mary Yellan away from the ruined, forbidding place on the rainswept Cornish...

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...

'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...

Thérèse Raquin is a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower classes in nineteenth-century Paris. Zola's dispassionate dissection of the motivations of his characters, mere `human beasts' who kill in order...

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...

'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...

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...

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...

The only novel written by one of the most popular writers of the twentieth centuryIn 1913, young second lieutenant Hofmiller discovers the terrible danger of pity. He had no idea the girl was lame when he asked her to dance-so begins a series of visits,...

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...

The Ladies' Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames) recounts the spectacular development of the modern department store in late nineteenth century Paris. The store is a symbol of capitalism, of the modern city, and of the bourgeois family; it is emblematic of...