Classics

“There it lay, the great pearl, perfect as the moon.” A Penguin Classic One of Steinbeck’s most taught works, The Pearl is the story of the Mexican diver Kino, whose discovery of a magnificent pearl from the Gulf beds means the promise of a...

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...

Eusebius's account is the only surviving historical record of the Church during its crucial first 300 years.Bishop Eusebius, a learned scholar who lived most of his life in Caesarea in Palestine, broke new ground in writing the History and provided a...

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...

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 establish...

The prequel to Love Me Tender, narrating Debré’s transformation from affluent career woman to broke single lesbian and writer.I see all her beauty, I see the beauty of women. I see my own body, new. I tell myself there are so many...

The darkly comic Transparent Things, one of Nabokov's final books, traces the bleak life of Hugh Person through murder, madness, prison and trips to Switzerland. One of these was the last journey his father ever took; on another, having been sent to...

"I really don't understand how people can blame a priest so much, when he strays from the path."Serge Mouret, is an obsessively devout priest, aspiring to perfect purity and sanctity. A serious illness leaves him with amnesia, and no longer knowing he is...

"She tried to settle that most difficult problem for women, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working."North and South is a novel about rebellion. Moving from the industrial riots...

'What was the beginning, or how did things start? What was there before?'The Prose Edda is the most renowned of all works of Scandinavian literature and our most extensive source for Norse mythology. Written in Iceland a century after the close...

In the 1920s the eminent French novelist and critic André Gide was given a copy of James Hogg's neglected masterpiece, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and went on to record how he had read 'this astounding book [.....

Set in the author’s beloved small-town New England and filled with all the bittersweet promise of frustrated desire and forbidden love discovered and undone, Summer follows the tragic progress of Charity Royall and the passionate affair...

Behind the glamour of Gilded Age New York, a marriage of convenience between an artisan and a ballerina masks their shared appetite for revenge in this darkly seductive gothic romance.   In early 1900s New York, former ballerina Petronille De...

“A very good novel indeed about the fragility and also the tenacity of love.”—The Spectator. Written in 1953, the last book by best-selling novelist Dorothy Whipple, Someone at a Distance is a quietly gripping story about the...

Philosophy in the Bedroom accounts the lascivious education of a privileged young lady at the dawn of womanhood.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700...

Award-winning classicist and historian Emily Hauser takes readers on an epic journey to uncover the astonishing true story of the real women behind ancient Greece’s greatest legends, and the real heroes of those ancient epics, Homer's Iliad and...

A brilliant and impassioned biography of one of the founding fathers of humanism, from one of its greatest defenders in the 20th century.Written during the Second World War, Zweig's typically passionate and readable biography of Michel de Montaigne, is...

A spectacular display of this key European writer's early work. This dazzling collection of stories follows the individual adventures of a varied cast of characters and masterfully illustrates Calvino's unique perspective and narrative gifts. As well as...

This iconic, fantastical short story from the acclaimed author of Norwegian Wood and 1Q84 about a man who joins forces with a giant frog to save Tokyo is presented in an exquisite hardback edition, translated by Jay Rubin...

In time for the centennial of his birth, the Noble Prize winner’s moving final novel Deeply insightful, Saul Bellow’s moving last novel is a journey through love and memory, an elegy to friendship, and a poignant meditation on death. Told in...