Classics

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...

'The foremost work on the key democratic task: helping people to identify and challenge the sources of their oppression ... a transformative text' George Monbiot, Guardian. Arguing that 'education is freedom', Paulo Freire's radical international...

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...

"Akutagawa displays an insightful and keenly creative intelligence in prose so lucid its sophistication is hardly visible." —Chris Power, The Guardian.Japan's master storyteller Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892 - 1927) wrote more than 150 short...

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...

Going to the Dogs is set in Berlin after the crash of 1929 and before the Nazi takeover, years of rising unemployment and financial collapse. The moralist in question is Jakob Fabian, “aged thirty-two, profession variable, at present advertising...

'It is stripped off - the paper - in great patches . . . The colour is repellent . . . In the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so - I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about . . . 'Based...

'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...

Centuries old and still captivating readers, The Odyssey has become a genre in and of itself. Join Odysseus and Co. as they trick a cyclops, outsmart syrens and vie for survival against the ever-crafty creatures of Greek mythology. Told in beautiful...

To the Lighthouse is Woolf's most autobiographical and best-known novel, and this new edition provides a comprehensive introduction to all aspects of its appeal. David Bradshaw is a well-known and respected Woolf scholar whose OWC edition...

'For there she was.' Mrs Dalloway follows a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class woman in London, in June 1923, as she prepares for a party. Clarissa's thoughts and actions are interwoven with the trauma and bereavement of...

Selected & Introduced by David Stuart Davies. Traumatised by ghost stories in her youth, Pulitzer Prize winning author Edith Wharton (1862 -1937) channelled her fear and obsession into creating a series of spine-tingling tales filled with spirits...

A rediscovered gothic classic with a groundbreaking, gender-nonconforming protagonist at its heart.‘I do not sin,’ he smiled. ‘I am Sin’In a quiet medieval city, alone in his shadowy chambers, Dirk Renswoude worships the devil...

From the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author: a magnificent novel that recalls Iceland's medieval epics and classics, set in the early twentieth century starring an ordinary sheep farmer and his heroic determination to achieve independence. • "A...

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...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books.'He stretched out his two long, lank arms, that looked like spider’s claws, and seemed to embrace with them the expanse before him.'His inheritance squandered and engagement severed, Guido di...