Classics

'One of the few great and perfect works of poetic imagination written during this century' -- Elias Canetti.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ADAM THIRWELL.One morning, Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect. His family is...

A beautifully packaged hardback edition of Haruki Murakami's mesmerizingly surreal classic, now with a new introduction by the authorKafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy.The aging Nakata,...

'Drawn on by his eagerness for the open sky, he left his guide and soared upwards...'Ovid tells the tales of Theseus and the Minotaur, Daedalus and Icarus, the Calydonian Boar-Hunt, and many other famous myths.Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books...

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...

Jane Eyre (1847) has enjoyed huge popularity since first publication, and its success owes much to its exceptional emotional power. Jane Eyre, a penniless orphan, is engaged as governess at Thornfield Hall by the mysterious Mr Rochester. Her integrity...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World''Rhys took one of the works of genius of the 19th Century and turned it inside-out to create one of the works of genius of the 20th Century' -- Michele RobertsJean Rhys's masterpiece tells the story...

'Brilliant interweaving of personal experience, imaginative musing and political clarity' -- Kate MosseThis volume combines two books which were among the greatest contributions to feminist literature this century. Together they form a brilliant attack...

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...

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...

'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,...

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...

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...

The One State is the perfect society, ruled over by the enlightened Benefactor. It is a city made almost entirely of glass, where surveillance is universal and life runs according to algorithmic rules to ensure perfect happiness. And D-503, the Builder,...

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...