Classics

In Persian myth, it is said that Akbar the Great built a palace which he filled with newborns, attended only by mutes, in order to learn whether language is innate or aquired. As the children grew into their silent and difficult world, this palace became...

A wickedly clever satire uses comic inversions to offer telling insights into the nature of man and society, the Penguin Classics edition of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels is edited with an introduction and notes by Robert Demaria, Jr. Gulliver's...

The first book by the author of the classic philosophical text Beyond Good and Evil. The youthful faults of this work were exposed by the author himself in the brilliant Attempt at a Self-Criticism, which he added to the new edition of 1886. But the...

Introduced by Claire-Louise Bennett, experience one new mother’s psychological journey in this lost 1930 foremother of Sylvia Plath''s The Bell Jar.''Astonishing and moving. A pretty amazing book.'' Tessa Hadley''Extraordinary. A...

Diderot's The Nun (La Religieuse) is the seemingly true story of a young girl forced by her parents to enter a convent and take holy orders. A novel mingling mysticism, madness, sadistic cruelty and nascent sexuality, it gives a scathing...

Julian Green was born to American parents in Paris in 1900, and spent most of his life in the French capital. Paris is an extraordinary, lyrical love letter to the city, taking the reader on an imaginative journey around its secret stairways, courtyards,...

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...

'Perhaps the best chess story ever written, perhaps the best about any game' Economist 'Zweig belongs with those masters of the novella - Maupassant, Turgenev, Chekhov' Paul Bailey, TLS Chess champion Mirko Czentovic is travelling on an ocean...

As endlessly entertaining as it is scathing in its political insight, Orwell’s classic lays bare the failures of Communism through the fable of the revolutionary animals of Manor Farm, who get rid of their obnoxious master Mr Jones in order to...

A modern reimagining of a classic fairy tale by one of most bewitching, idiosyncratic British writers of the twentieth century.Bella Winter has hit a low. Homeless and jobless, she is the mother of a toddler by a man whose name she...

Illuminating essays on philsophy, literature, soceity, and art by one of Ireland's greatest wits.Oscar Wilde--witty raconteur, flamboyant hedonist, and self-destructive lover--is most familiar as the author of brilliant comedies, including The...

The second of a two-book set that contains the early myths and legends which led to the writing of Tolkien’s epic tale of war, The Silmarillion. This second part of The Book of Lost Tales includes the tale of Beren and Lúthien, Túrin...

Long hailed as a seminal work of modernism in the tradition of Joyce and Kafka, and now available in a supple new English translation, Italo Svevo’s charming and splendidly idiosyncratic novel conducts readers deep into one hilariously...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this moving, poignant novel by the bestselling author of Birds of America—and a master of American fiction—we share a grown woman’s bittersweet nostalgia for the wildness of her youth. "An...

Things: A Story of the Sixties is the story of a young couple who want to enjoy life, but the only way they know how to do so is through ownership of 'things'. Perec's first novel won the Prix Renaudot and became the cult book for a generation...

Read Kurt Vonnegut's powerful masterpiece, which is as timely now as when it was first published. Billy Pilgrim – hapless barber's assistant, successful optometrist, alien abductee, senile widower and soldier – has become unstuck in time...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books.Tristessa is a strange fever-dream of morphine sickness and belly-deep sadness. Or, in the words of Allen Ginsberg: ‘a narrative meditation studying a hen, a rooster, a dove, a cat, a...

In these two captivating short stories from a towering figure in world literature and the first non-European winner of Nobel Prize for Literature, Rabindranath Tagore maps the slow undoing of two Bengali families with his customary lyricism and fierce...

“A magical writer—one of the greatest of the twentieth century.” —Margaret Atwood. “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison.A classic...

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. Arrested in Cologne for remarking that the Fuhrer looked sweaty, nineteen-year-old Sanna has fled to Frankfurt. But her troubles are far from over. Her best friend Gerti has fallen for a Jewish...