Classics

One of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time Vol. 1: The Way by Swann's is published in a new translation from the French by Lydia Davis in Penguin Classics.The Way by Swann's is one...

A masterpiece of transgressive, surrealist erotica, George Bataille's Story of the Eye was the Fifty Shades of Grey of its era. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is translated by Joachim Neugroschal, and published with essays by...

In the magnificent feast of Clarice Lispector’s books, her crônicas—short, intensely vivid newspaper pieces—are the delicious canapés. The things I’ve learned from taxi drivers would be enough to fill a book. They...

A cult classic since its publication in the early years of this century, Caliban and the Witch is Silvia Federici's history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages through the European...

Steeped in the sexual tension between two young women, this is a beautiful, brand-new edition of the original cult classic which influenced Dracula and all the vampire stories that followed, including Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles.In an isolated castle...

Clarice Lispector's masterly second novel, now available in English for the first time'She found the best clay that one could desire: white, supple, sticky, cold ... She would get a clear and tender material from which she could shape a world'Like the...

"Mountain," Baldwin said, "is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With...

The most popular work from provocative Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher is a searing portrait of a woman bound between a repressive society and her darkest desires. Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the prestigious and formal...

NOW A MAJOR NETFLIX FILM. From the exclusive beaches of Monte Carlo to the verdant grounds of Maxim de Winter’s stately home Manderley, Daphne du Maurier’s gothic classic transports the reader into a social and psychological world of...

From Justin Torres, author of We the Animals, comes National Book Award-winner Blackouts, a gorgeous novel exploring love, loss and the stories we leave behind. With inventive and transformative form and prose that only deepens the resonance of the...

Jorge Luis Borges declared The Invention of Morel a masterpiece of plotting, comparable to The Turn of the Screw and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Set on a mysterious island, Bioy's novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a...

A classic of fantastic literature, Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet is the occult twin to Alice in Wonderland, published with an introduction by Ali Smith in Penguin Modern Classics.One of the first things ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby...

Now a major Netflix series. The best-known of Shirley Jackson's novels, and the inspiration for writers such as Neil Gaiman and Stephen King, The Haunting of Hill House is a chilling story of the power of fear. Four seekers have arrived at the...

"... a human being, an intellectual human being who constantly bends the entire force of his mind on the ridiculous task of forcing a wooden king into the corner of a wooden board, and does it without going mad!"A group of passengers on a cruise ship...

"Everyone’s life begins on a level where races, armies, and churches stop. And yet everyone’s life is always shaped by races, churches, and armies."In these eight extraordinary stories of love, conflict, desperation and fear, James Baldwin...

'There is in this world a kind of desire like stinging pain'A Japanese teenager is overcome with longing for his male classmate. He imagines his body punctured with arrows, like the body of St Sebastian in the painting that obsesses him. Over and over...

Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. Is he in love or insane? A tortured soul or a monster?...

Potent and vividly emotional, Simone de Beauvoir’s captivating novel questions freedom and individual responsibility in the face of brutality. ‘These carefree faces, on which we allowed our smiles to spread, were for others the mask of...

E.M. Forster’s beloved novel of forbidden love, culture clash, and the confines of Edwardian society Visiting Florence with her prim and proper cousin Charlotte as a chaperone, Lucy Honeychurch meets the unconventional, lower-class Mr. Emerson and his...

Ten tales of loss and longing, from one one Japan's greatest writers It was the height of summer, and there was anger in the rays of the sun A summer holiday that turns to tragedy; a moonlit journey to fulfil a wish; a couple’s unusual way of...