Classics

Empire Thriller of the Month for April 2020. Blood will have blood… I lean forward on my elbows, so my face is only a few inches from his, so he hears every word when I lower my voice. “It must eat you alive, not knowing. Not knowing who,...

Read the greatest rediscovered classic of recent years'A beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life' -- Ian McEwanWilliam Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes...

Following a man miraculously in tune with nature and far less so with his community, this nuanced masterpiece from the author of The Ice Palace is a striking and profoundly humane portrait of neurodiversity and the beauty and pain of seeing things...

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...

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...

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...

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo. Sylvia Plath's groundbreaking semi-autobiographical novel offers an intimate, honest and often wrenching glimpse into...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

"... 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...

WINNER OF THE 2018 LUCIEN STRYK ASIAN TRANSLATION PRIZE.The English-language premiere of Qiu Miaojin's coming-of-age novel about queer teenagers in Taiwan, a cult classic in China and winner of the 1995 China Times Literature Award. An NYRB Classics...

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...

'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...

Tales of desire and madness from this giant of Brazilian literature. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary,...

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...

'This century's most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism' -- Angela DavisWritten at the height of the Algerian war for independence from French colonial rule and first published in 1961, Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth has provided...