Classics

A fresh and vivid translation of Flaubert’s influential bildungsroman. Gustave Flaubert conceived Sentimental Education, his final complete novel, as the history of his own generation, one that failed to fulfill the promise of the Revolution of...

Part love story, part historical novel, part satire, and an evocative tale youthful passion, Gustave Flaubert's A Sentimental Education is translated by Robert Baldick and revised with an introduction by Geoffrey Wall in Penguin Classics. Frederic...

'For certain men the stronger their desire, the less likely they are to act.' With his first glimpse of Madame Arnoux, Frédéric Moreau is convinced he has found his romantic destiny, but when he pursues her to Paris the young student is...

'She decided she would teach him to speak and he was very soon able to say, 'Pretty boy!', 'Your servant, sir!' and 'Hail Mary!'' With pathos and humour, Flaubert imagines the unexamined life of a servant girl. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80...

Illustrated by leading US manga artists, this series feeds into the growing popularity of manga worldwide, and presents Shakespeare's classic works in a highly visual and dynamic form.  Shakespeare's tale of fantasy has fascinated audiences for...

Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex. Richard II is one of Shakespeare’s finest works: lucid, eloquent, and boldly structured. It can be seen as a tragedy, or a...

A sizzling drama of desire, avarice and deception set in the American Deep South, Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is published in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Big Daddy' Pollitt, the richest cotton planter in the Mississippi Delta, is about to...

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...

Introduction and Notes by Dr Ian Littlewood, University of Sussex. Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household at Mansfield Park, it has quite unexpected results. The diffident and much put-upon...

Elective Affinities was written when Goethe was sixty and long established as Germany's literary giant. This is a new edition of his penetrating study of marriage and passion, bringing together four people in an inexorable manner. The novel asks...

Eduard and Charlotte are an aristocratic couple who live a harmonious but idle life in their estate. But the peace of their existence is thrown into chaos when two visitors - Eduard's friend the Captain and Charlotte's passionate young ward Ottilie -...

Goethe's account of his passage through Italy from 1786 to 1788 is a great travel chronicle as well as a candid self-portrait of a genius in the grip of spiritual crisis.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic...

"I can promise to be candid, not, however, to be impartial."A selection of the most insightful maxims and reflections from one of Germany's greatest ever thinkers.Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black...

One of Voltaire's earliest tales, Zadig is set in the exotic East and is told in the comic spirit of Candide; L'Ingenu, written after Candide, is a darker tale in which an American Indian records his impressions of France

Inspired by Voltaire's two-year stay in England (1726-8), this is one of the key works of the Enlightment. Exactly contemporary with Gulliver's Travels and The Beggar's Opera, Voltaire's controversial pronouncements on politics, philosophy, religion, and...

Candide (1759) is a bright, colourful literary firework display of a novella. With sparkling wit and biting humour, Voltaire hits several targets with fierce and comic satire: organised religion, the overweening pride of aristocrats, merchants' greed,...

A Fabulous Find from the Moomin Archives.A classic Moomin Book with COLOUR ILLUSTRATIONS.And a beautiful FOLD-OUT PANORAMA.In 1961, at the request of her Italian publishers, Tove Jansson created a unique new edition of Moominland Midwinter, the tale...

'Did she know and if she knew would she speak?' The story of an unsolved literary mystery that explores what James referred to as "troubled artistic consciousness" Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black...

'Hoodwink'd in faery fancy...' This volume contains a selection of Keats's greatest verse - including his gothic story in verse, 'The Eve of St Agnes', and the mysterious 'Lamia' - exploring themes of love, enchantment, myth and magic. Introducing...

"An ass, clothed in the skin of a lion..."Aesop's animal fables are some of the earliest stories ever told, thought to have been composed by a slave in Greek antiquity and giving glimpses of a world that is harsh, pitiless and yet also eerily familiar...