Classics

'Shirley Jackson's stories are among the most terrifying ever written'  --  Donna TarttThis is the definitive collection of Shirley Jackson's short stories, including 'The Lottery' - one of the most terrifying and iconic stories of the twentieth century,...

Camus’s masterpiece on the effects of isolation, claustrophobia and moral recklessness in an Algerian village ravaged by the plague weaves an extraordinary tapestry of life governed by fear. Humane, haunting and timeless, The Plague is a chilling,...

With an Introduction and Notes by Peter Merchant, Canterbury Christchurch University CollegeThe Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful and sometimes violent novel of expectation, love, oppression, sin, religion and betrayal. It portrays the disintegration...

Time Regained, the final volume of In Search of Lost Time, begins in the bleak and uncertain years of World War I. Years later, after the war’s end, Proust’s narrator returns to Paris and reflects on time, reality, jealousy, artistic creation, and the...

The third volume of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth centuryThis acclaimed new translation of The Guermantes Way will introduce a new generation of readers to the literary richness of Marcel Proust. The third volume in Penguin Classics' superb...

The long-awaited fifth volume—representing "the very summit of Proust's art" (Slate)—in the acclaimed Penguin translation of "the greatest literary work of the twentieth century" (The New York Times)A Penguin Modern Classics Carol Clark's acclaimed...

The fourth volume of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth centuryJohn Sturrock's acclaimed new translation of Sodom and Gomorrah will introduce a new generation of American readers to the literary riches of Proust. The fourth volume in this superb...

In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together. Early every morning they would come out from the house where they lived and walk arm in arm down the street to work. Carson McCullers' prodigious first novel was published to instant...

Accompanied by Stevenson’s other stories brimming with Gothic unease, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is chilling slice of Victorian psychological horror, mining a rich seam of split personality, remorse and the nature of evil. His...

Towering over the rest of Greek tragedy, Sophocles' The Three Theban Plays are among the most enduring and timeless dramas ever written. This Penguin Classics edition is translated by Robert Fagles with introductions and notes by Bernard Knox.Collected...

Herodotus is not only known as the `father of history', as Cicero called him, but also the father of ethnography; as well as charting the historical background to the Persian Wars, his curiosity also prompts frequent digression on the cultures of the...

Three masterpieces of classical tragedyContaining Aeschylus's Agamemnon, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, and Euripides' Medea, this important new selection brings the best works of the great tragedians together in one perfect introductory volume. This volume...

An immaculate portrait of adolescent love from one of our most beloved novelists.'One of the last century's greatest woman writers' GuardianWhen sixteen-year-old Portia is orphaned, she is plunged into the sophisticated and politely treacherous world of...

Introduction and Notes by Norman Vance, Professor of English, University of Sussex.Far from the Madding Crowd is perhaps the most pastoral of Hardy's Wessex novels. It tells the story of the young farmer Gabriel Oak and his love for and pursuit of the...

Delicately written yet packing an emotionally devastating punch, The Go-Between resounds with lost innocence and the inevitable corruption of youth. The exploitation of a young boy drawn into conveying messages between a farmer and a rich young woman at...

Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh's stunning novel of duty and desire set amongst the decadent, faded glory of the English aristocracy in the run-up to the Second World War.The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead...

With his trademark dry wit, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle is an inventive science fiction satire that preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon - and, worse still, surviving it. Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding 'fathers' of the atomic...

With their penetrating psychological insight and their emphasis on human dignity, respect and forgiveness, Dostoyevsky's early short stories contain the seeds of the themes that came to his major novels. Poor Folk, the author's first great literary...

'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...

With an Introduction by Roger Clark, University of Kent at Canterbury. Translation by Eleanor Marx-Aveling. Castigated for offending against public decency, Madame Bovary has rarely failed to cause a storm. For Flaubert's contemporaries, the fascination...