Classics

An utterly unforgettable novel that portrays a vast internal emptiness by using the cool, haunting voice of a young woman in Scotland lost in the profound anomie of her generation—from “one of the most talented, original and interesting...

A forgotten mid-century genius, recently rediscovered in France and never before translated into English, Hélène Bessette is a treasure and a bracing force to reckon with. Lili Is Crying, Hélène Bessette’s debut novel,...

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. What would happen if a doctor implanted the pituitary gland and testicles of a man into the body of a stray dog? In Mikhail Bulgakov’s topsy-turvy world, the dog starts to walk on two legs,...

The city is Rome, the hub of Italian life and culture. The house is Le Margherite, a home where the sprawling cast of The City and the House is welcome. At the center of this lush epistolary novel is Lucrezia, mother of five and lover...

Each working day from January 29 to November 1, 1951, John Steinbeck warmed up to the work of writing East of Eden with a letter to the late Pascal Covici, his friend and editor at The Viking Press. It was his way, he said, of "getting my...

Brookner’s evocative, Booker Prize-winning tale of a doggedly single romantic novelist staying in a hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva is a surprising and unique meditation on finding happiness in your own company.   Winner of the Booker...

'Inspired and enlightening ... here is a work of staggering ambition, exceptional accomplishment, and surprisingly pleasant reading ... an excellent gift for anyone interested in classical literature' A. E. Stallings, Telegraph. 'Read cover to...

Poe and Kafka meet The Twilight Zone in this anthology of fifty fantastical tales, many of them reflecting the political and social energies of the time, by an Italian master of the short story.Dino Buzzati was a prolific writer of stories,...

Thomas Mann wrote his last great novel, Doctor Faustus, during his exile from Nazi Germany. Although he already had a long string of masterpieces to his name, in retrospect this seems to be the novel he was born to write. A modern reworking of the Faust...

Lose yourself in the tortured love lives of expats in 1920s Paris in this iconic cult classic. 'Nightwood is itself. It is its own created world, exotic and strange, and reading it is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass ... From now...

A beautiful hardback edition of Huxley's inconic dystopian classic, introduced by Yuval Noah Harari. 'A masterpiece of speculation... As vibrant, fresh, and somehow shocking as it was when I first read it' Margaret Atwood. 'If you have time for just one...

One of the landmark Japanese novels, Tanizaki’s immense family saga is as reliable a record of 1940s Osaka as any history book. Winningly affectionate yet bitingly critical, the horror and excess of the Second World War and Japan’s subsequent...

Borges' first collection of stories (1935). In his writing, Borges always combined high seriousness with a wicked sense of fun. Here he reveals his delight in re-creating (or making up) colorful stories from the Orient, the Islamic world, and the Wild...

No-one in the grip of Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, with its mythic-minded hero and its highly sympathetic monster who reads Goethe and longs to be at peace with himself, can fail to notice how much more excellent the original is than all the...

A black comedy of manners about vast wealth and a woman who can define herself only through the perceptions of others. The beautiful Lily Bart lives among the nouveaux riches of New York City – people whose millions were made in railroads,...

It is the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet of the Aeneid and Caesar's enchanter, has been summoned to the palace, where he will shortly die. Out of the last hours of Virgil's life and the final stirrings of his...

Two small masterpieces in one volume. First, The Double, a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare that foreshadows Kafka and Sartre. A minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelganger - a man who has his name and his face...

Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex. Antony and Cleopatra is one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies: a spectacular, widely-ranging drama of love and war, passion and...

In 1849 the young Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years' hard labour in a Siberian prison camp for advocating socialism. Notes from a Dead House (sometimes translated as The House of the Dead), the novel he wrote on his release, tells of shocking...

Here, in more than twenty essays, Nin shares her unique perceptions of people, places, and the arts. Includes several lectures and two interviews.