Classics

Set amidst the snobbery and society of the interwar British aristocracy, The Pursuit of Love mines Nancy Mitford’s own larger-than-life experiences for an exquisitely funny comedy of manners and frothy coming-of-age tale. One of the funniest,...

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth has it ALL and in a super cool instagrammable/TikTokable cover! Yes, it’s got the goods to back up your next favorite social media book! Multiple heroines to root for, scary, macabre and a twinkle of...

A witty introduction to the mind of Goethe, in a new translation for the first time in 150 yearsA Penguin ClassicBy the end of the nineteenth century, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was the world's most celebrated poet, novelist, critic and thinker. Today...

Athens and Sparta, the mighty city states of ancient Greece, locked together in a quarter century of conflict: the Peloponnesian War. Alexias the Athenian was born, passed through childhood and grew to manhood in those troubled years, that desperate and...

NPR's Favorite Books of 2019Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction with the Outline Trilogy, three “literary masterpieces” (The Washington Post) whose narrator, Faye, perceives the world with a glinting, unsparing intelligence while remaining...

With its insightful portrayals of her protagonist's inner life, Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho was a hugely influential work of early Gothic horror. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by Jacqueline Howard...

One of the finest novels of the 20th century, Lampedusa’s tour de force documents the collapse of an old order and the emergence of the new. Set in 1860 and detailing the explosion of revolutionary troops into the opulent world of the Sicilian...

Collecting the inspirational, lyrical poetry of the iconic Persian mystic, this superbly curated volume showcases Rumi's towering love poetry alongside his verse on spirituality and the natural world.   The essential poems of the inspirational...

Guy de Maupassant's scandalous tale of an opportunistic young man corrupted by the allure of power, Bel-Ami is translated with an introduction by Douglas Parmee in Penguin Classics.Young, attractive and very ambitious, George Duroy, known to his admirers...

The paperback edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s final writings on the lands, inhabitants, and metaphysics of Middle-earth, perfect for those who have read and enjoyed The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings, Unfinished Tales, and The History of Middle-earth,...

The famous tale by the trailblazing subject of major new film ColetteGIGI TRANSLATED BY ROGER SENHOUSE, THE CAT TRANSLATED BY ANTONIA WHITEGigi's days are filled with cigars, lobster, lace and superstitions: the education of a future courtesan. Bored and...

'A great shout of life and individuality ... an act of defiance that gladdens the soul' -- Guardian.Lolly Willowes, so gentle and accommodating, has depths no one suspects. When she suddenly announces that she is leaving London and moving,...

The second volume of a political treatise that changed the worldA vital cornerstone to Marx’s overall theory of economics, the second volume of Capital considers in depth the nature of commodity and the market-place bourgeois society. This immensely...

A brilliant, bruising depiction of the dark side of 1950s Hollywood, from the author of In Love.At a Hollywood party, a screenwriter rescues an aspiring actress from a drunken suicide attempt. He is married, disillusioned; she is young, seemingly...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books.'One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century' - Colm Tóibín. A housewife’s life is shattered by a sudden epiphany. A simple tale of killing cockroaches fragments...

This sublime novella from the former New Yorker fiction editor explores the mysterious gravity of the past through the story of two lonely teenagers whose friendship comes to a dramatic end in 1920s rural Illinois, and the journey towards atonement one...

One of Baldwin's best known novels, often the first that readers discover; a classic of gay literature.Set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, this groundbreaking novel about love and the fear of love is "a book that belongs in the...

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...

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...

Cassandra Mortmain lives with her bohemian and impoverished family in a crumbling castle in the middle of nowhere. Her journal records her life with her beautiful, bored sister, Rose, her fading glamorous stepmother, Topaz, her little brother Thomas,...