Classics

'Intense sexual desire is the greatest thing in the world' A tale of art, sex, blood, junkies and whores in New York's underground, from cult literary icon Kathy Acker. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic...

A classic work that has charmed generations of readers, this collection assembles Carson McCullers’s best stories, including her beloved novella “The Ballad of the Sad Café.” Glowingly impressive, informed with feeling and...

The brilliant tale of Anais Nin's true love affair with Henry Miller, and her ambiguous, charged relationship with his wife, June. Drawn from the journals of a single momentous year in Paris, Henry and June provides a wildly lyrical account of...

First published in 1939, a few years before his most influential works in theatre and philosophy, The Wall was Sartre’s first and only collection of short fiction. The title piece tells the story of a prisoner during the Spanish Civil War, on the...

The definitive cult, post-modern novel – a shocking blend of violence, transgression and eroticism – reissued with an introduction from Zadie Smith. After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find...

In Nobel Prize-winning author Peter Handke’s The Left-Handed Woman, a young woman faces loneliness and alienation on a journey to find her own life outside of being a wife and mother.One evening, when Marianne and her husband, Bruno, are dining out...

Handsome would-be poet Lucien Chardon is poor and naïve, but highly ambitious. Failing to make his name in his dull provincial hometown, he is taken up by a patroness, the captivating married woman Madame de Bargeton, and prepares to forge his way...

Dispatch the maimed, the old, the weak, destroy the very world itself, for what is the point of life if the promise of fulfilment lies elsewhere? On the windswept coast of rural Suffolk, a deranged scientist attempts to extract the essence of life itself...

A space cruiser, in search of its sister ship, encounters beings descended from self-replicating machines. In the grand tradition of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, Stanislaw Lem's The Invincible tells the story of a space cruiser sent to an obscure planet...

A generous one-volume selection of the best and most important works—poems, songs, stories, essays, novellas, and novels—by the prolific Bard of Bengal, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.Rabindranath Tagore published...

Basil and Josephine charts the coming of age of two privileged youths from quiet Midwestern towns, Basil Duke Lee and Josephine Perry - based on Fitzgerald himself and a combination of his first love Ginevra King and his wife Zelda. As one struggles to...

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...

Four Chinese women, four America daughters - can they learn to understand each other? In 1949 a group of Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and...

The illegitimate son of a landowner and his common-law peasant wife, Arkady Dolgoruky has scarcely seen these parents during his nineteen years of life. In a narrative combining farce and pathos, Dostoevsky describes Arkady's visit to St Petersburg in...

An enduring classic and a passionate commentary on the shattering realities of social inequality, Steinbeck’s all-powerful Great Depression era tale follows an Oklahoma family heading to California in search of land, dignity and a future...

A Fabulous Find from the Moomin Archives.A classic Moomin Book with COLOUR ILLUSTRATIONS.And a beautiful FOLD-OUT PANORAMA.In 1961, at the request of her Italian publishers, Tove Jansson created a unique new edition of Moominland Midwinter, the tale...

Special Collector's Edition Hardcover.In case you didn't know, the Moomins are kind, loyal and welcoming creatures with smooth round snouts, who live in a tall blue house shaped like an old stove in a valley in the forests of Finland. They love sunshine...

A luminous tale of a man rejected by his first true love who refuses to forget her,Love in the Time of Cholera is another timeless masterpiece from the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude. 'It was inevitable: the scent of...

Here is a lively new translation of Cornelius Tacitus' timeless history of three of Rome's most memorable emperors. Tacitus, who condemns the depravity of these rulers, which he saw as proof of the corrupting force of absolute power, writes caustically...

The Lives of the Caesars include the biographies of Julius Caesar and the eleven subsequent emperors: Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitelius, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian. Suetonius composed his material from a variety of...