Classics

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...

Internationally acclaimed Egyptian feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi's landmark novel Woman at Point Zero, published here with a new foreword.Firdaus is on death row. Her crime, the murder of a man. Born into poverty in a rural Egyptian village, her...

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.

‘Everything everybody does is so—I don’t know—not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and—sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that,...

As he was finishing Finnegans Wake, Joyce proclaimed, “I have discovered I can do anything with language I want.” Indeed, with his last book, which took him seventeen years to write, Joyce takes literary modernism to new territories by...

With an Introduction and Notes by Professor Len Platt, Professor of Modern Literatures and Head of Goldsmiths Learning Enhancement Unit, Goldsmiths, University of London. Finnegans Wake is the book of Here Comes Everybody and Anna Livia Plurabelle and...

Books XXXI to XLV cover the years from 201 b.c. to 167 b.c., when Rome emerged as ruler of the Mediterranean.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than...

When Machiavelli's brief treatise on Renaissance statecraft and princely power was posthumously published in 1532, it generated a debate that has raged unabated until the present day. Based upon Machiavelli's first-hand experience as an emissary of the...

A man returns from the dead, and the body of a mysterious stranger is found in his roomA few weeks after marrying an attractive young widow, Gordon Cloade is tragically killed by a bomb blast in the London blitz. Overnight, the former Mrs Underhay finds...

For six decades, John le Carré wrote novels that came to define our age. Although they are all bookshelf worthy, perhaps the most notable is Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy. If it’s your first journey into the world of le Carré’s...

Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, the Red Queen and the White Rabbit all make their appearances, and are now familiar figures in writing, conversation and idiom. So too are Carroll's delightful verses such as The Walrus and the...

A Christmas Carol is the most famous, heart-warming and chilling festive story of them all. In these pages we meet Ebenezer Scrooge, whose name is synonymous with greed and parsimony: 'Every idiot who goes about with "Merry Christmas" on his lips, should...

The Little Prince is a modern fable, and for readers far and wide both the title and the work have exerted a pull far in excess of the book’s brevity. Written and published first by Antoine de St-Exupéry in 1943, only a year before his plane...

Immerse yourself in the haunting world of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's legendary gothic horror novel. First published in 1818, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's classic tale of science gone wrong that has electrified readers for over 200 years. This deluxe...