Classics

Two famous, firsthand accounts of the holy war in the Middle Ages translated by Caroline SmithOriginally composed in Old French, the two chronicles brought together here offer some of the most vivid and reliable accounts of the Crusades from a Western...

'The life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short'Written during the chaos of the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan asks how, in a world of violence and horror, can we stop ourselves from descending into anarchy? Hobbes' case for a...

Ulysses, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, has had a profound influence on modern fiction. In a series of episodes covering the course of a single day, 16 June 1904, the novel traces the movements of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus...

J.M. Barrie's classic tale of the "boy who would not grow up"Peter Pan originally appeared as a baby living a magical life among birds and fairies in J.M. Barrie’s sequence of stories, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. His later role as flying boy hero...

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...

'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly...

Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl is an inspiring and tragic account of an ordinary life lived in extraordinary circumstances that has enthralled readers for generations. This Penguin Classics edition is edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler,...

Combining epigrammatic brilliance and shrewd social observation, the works collected in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays are edited with an introduction, commentaries and notes by Richard Allen Cave in Penguin Classics.'To...

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. No author perfected the twist in the tale better than Roald Dahl. His stories – many of which were filmed as Tales of the Unexpected – take us into a world that is shocking, funny and...

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...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books.Yes, as my swift days near their goal,’Tis all that I implore;In life and death, a chainless soul,With courage to endure. In this new selection of Emily Brontë’s heart-rending...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories have lost none of their power to horrify. He remains a destabilizingly terse sketcher out of ideas, a writer who allows the reader to fill in the many ghastly...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. Plagued by ill-health, violently sick at sea, irritated by renovation costs: Seneca is never less than sympathetically human. In these letters written 2000 years ago, the ancient philosopher speaks...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. ‘Waking, I cry “Oh, is this your – buried treasure? The light in the heart.”’ In these exquisite stories from the genius of English modernism, everyday objects acquire...

Considered by many to be the most characteristically American of our twentieth-century poets, William Carlos Williams "wanted to write a poem / that you would understand / ,,,But you got to try hard―." So that readers could more fully understand the...

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • Set in eighteenth-century France, the classic novel that provokes a terrifying examination of what happens when one man’s indulgence in his greatest passion—his sense of smell—leads to murder...

This generous collection of fifty-two stories, selected from across her prolific career by the author, includes a preface in which she discusses the sources of her art.A widely admired master of the short story, Mavis Gallant was a Canadian-born writer...

This sublime novella from the former New Yorker fiction editor explores the mysterious gravity of the past through the story of two lonely teenagers whose friendship comes to a dramatic end in 1920s rural Illinois, and the journey towards atonement one...

Long hailed as a seminal work of modernism in the tradition of Joyce and Kafka, and now available in a supple new English translation, Italo Svevo’s charming and splendidly idiosyncratic novel conducts readers deep into one hilariously...