Classics

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...

Arthur Miller's classic parable of mass hysteria draws a chilling parallel between the Salem witch-hunt of 1692 - 'one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history' - and the American anti-communist purges led by Senator McCarthy in the...

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...

'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,...

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...

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...

'That sense of the meaninglessness of existence that runs through much of twentieth-century writing - from Conrad and Kafka, to Beckett and beyond - starts in Dostoyevsky's work' Malcolm BradburyAlienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own...

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...

Now recognized as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, Silent Spring exposed the destruction of wildlife through the widespread use of pesticidesRachel Carson's Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human...

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 new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Alas that mortals. Should blame the gods! From us, they say, All evils come. Yet they themselves. It is who through defiant deeds. Bring sorrow on them-far more sorrow...

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...

An obsessive and revealing self-portrait of a remarkable woman humiliated by the circumstances of her birth and by her physical appearance, La Bâtarde relates Violette Leduc’s long search for her own identity through a series of...

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 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...