Classics

‘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...

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...

Bringing together novelist Osamu Dazai’s best autobiographical shorts in a single, slim volume, Self-Portraits shows the legendary writer at his best—and worst “Art dies the moment it acquires authority.” So said...

Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve...

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,...

Mary Shelley's seminal novel of the scientist whose creation becomes a monsterThis edition is the original 1818 text, which preserves the hard-hitting and politically charged aspects of Shelley's original writing, as well as her unflinching wit and...

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...

Dumas’s epic novel of justice, retribution, and self-discovery—one of the most enduringly popular adventure tales ever written—in a newly revised translation.This beloved novel tells the story of Edmond Dantès, wrongfully...

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...

The perfect books for the true book lover, Penguin's Great Ideas series features twelve more groundbreaking works by some of history's most prodigious thinkers. Each volume is beautifully packaged with a unique type-driven design that highlights the...

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...

More than 120 years after Oscar Wilde submitted The Picture of Dorian Gray for publication in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, the uncensored version of his novel appears here for the first time in a paperback edition. This volume restores all of the...

By the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window-shutters, I beheld the wretch-the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His...

A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to...