Classics

An NYRB Classics Original.When the pioneering Taiwanese novelist Qiu Miaojin committed suicide in 1995 at age twenty-six, she left behind her unpublished masterpiece, Last Words from Montmartre. Unfolding through a series of letters written by an...

Framed as a letter from the Roman Emperor Hadrian to his successor, Marcus Aurelius, Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian is translated from the French by Grace Frick with an introduction by Paul Bailey in Penguin Modern Classics.In her magnificent...

The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age.National Bestseller.New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral...

"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel...Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." —from If On A Winter's Night a Traveler.  Italo Calvino's stunning classic imagines a novel...

In his own day the dominant personality of the Western Church, Augustine of Hippo today stands as perhaps the greatest thinker of Christian antiquity, and his Confessions is one of the great works of Western literature. In this intensely personal...

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...

This eclectic, moving and richly enjoyable collection is the essential introduction to Korean literature.Journeying through Korea's dramatic recent past, from the Japanese occupation and colonial era to the devastating war between north and south and the...

'people get out of prison, and when they get out, and their name is Edmond Dantès, they take their revenge!' Falsely accused of treason, the young sailor Edmond Dantès is arrested on his wedding day and imprisoned in the island fortress of...

When the beautiful, ambitious actress Regina takes Fosca into her life and learns his amazing truth, she is obsessed with the thought that in his memory her performances will live forever. But, as he recounts the story of his existence over more than six...

DISCOVER THE DU MAURIER DARK ROMANCE COLLECTION. 'Feared and hated by friend and foe. The King's General in the West. The man I love.' On her eighteenth birthday, Honor Harris meets Sir Richard Grenvile - proud, reckless, and utterly captivating - and...

A compelling new translation of Tacitus' Annals, one of the greatest accounts of ancient Rome, by Cynthia Damon. Tacitus' Annals recounts the major historical events from the years shortly before the death of Augustus to the death of Nero...

Four of Baldwin's critically-acclaimed, bestselling essay collections in a single volume, with a terrific new introduction by Eddie S. Glaude. "[Baldwin] is an artist, a writer, in conversation with a wide range of influences (inheritances and ancestors)...

An unforgettable portrait of defiance and authoritarian rule, The Handmaid's Tale is a classic dystopian vision of a terrifyingly believable future. A devastatingly powerful exploration of female oppression with an all-too chilling resonance for our...

'It was useless to think I'd ever be able to throw open the door behind which I was yet again hiding ... Not now. Not ever.' School is a place of unspoken hierarchies and rivalries for a young teenage boy growing up in the provincial town of Ferrara. But...

The first new translation of Kierkegaard's masterwork in a generation brings to vivid life this essential work of modern philosophy. Brilliantly synthesizing human insights with Christian dogma, Søren Kierkegaard presented, in 1844, The Concept of...

'We shall speak. We shall sing. We shall shout.' This blazing autobiographical poem by the founder of the négritude movement became a rallying cry for decolonisation when it appeared in 1939. Following one man's return from Europe to his homeland...

Over the past sixty years the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre have probably been more influential in the West than those of any other philosopher and literary figure. In his theoretical writings, Sartre laid the foundation for an original doctrine of...

This study of natural goodness is Dostoevsky’s most touching novel. Prince Myshkin, the last, poverty-stricken member of a once great family and regarded by many as an idiot, returns to Russia from a sanatorium in Switzerland in order to collect an...

Short Letter, Long Farewell is one the most inventive and exhilarating of the great Peter Handke’s novels. Full of seedy noir atmospherics and boasting an air of generalized delirium, the book starts by introducing us to a nameless young German who...

Vladimir Lenin created this hugely significant Marxist text to explain fully the inevitable flaws and destructive power of Capitalism: that it would lead unavoidably to imperialism, monopolies and colonialism. He prophesied that those third world...