Classics

The first novella in Jack Kerouac's Duluoz Legend, detailing the writer’s early life as refracted through the prism of the untimely loss of his brother.“The earliest and most heartfelt chapter of Kerouac’s fictionalized autobiography...

'One of his masterpieces . . . without doubt a great novel' Guardian One of Hermann Hesse's greatest novels, Narcissus and Goldmund is an extraordinary recreation of the Middle Ages, contrasting the careers of two friends, one of whom shuns life in a...

Hines’s classic story of a troubled Yorkshire lad and the salvation he finds in raising a kestrel hawk combines a bleakly compelling coming-of-age tale with a blistering slice of social realism. With prose that is every bit as raw, intense and...

James Joyce's Dubliners is an enthralling collection of modernist short stories which create a vivid picture of the day-to-day experience of Dublin life. This Penguin Classics edition includes notes and an introduction by Terence Brown.Joyce's first...

'I concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature resides only in thinking, and which, in order to exist, has no need of place and is not dependent on any material thing.' Descartes's A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting...

A masterpiece of realism, Machado de Assis’s Dom Casmurro probes the mind of a distrustful husband with delusions of grandeur. Originally published in 1899, Dom Casmurro is widely considered to be Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s masterpiece...

The classic, award-winning novel, made famous by Steven Spielberg’s film, tells of a young boy’s struggle to survive World War II in China.Jim is separated from his parents in a world at war. To survive, he must find a strength greater than...

In twenty short books, Penguin Classics brings you the ideas that have changed the way we think and talk about the living Earth. Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary...

The beloved story of an orphaned girl living in the Swiss Alps is now available in an unabridged, illustrated cloth hardcover edition in Union Square and Co.’s Children's Signature Clothbound Classics series.When Heidi’s parents die and she...

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner, a passionate, profound story of love and obsession that brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life. With a foreword by...

Kafka's most celebrated tale of a commercial salesman unexpectedly freed from the drudgery of his job by his inexplicable transformation into a huge insect is an enduring masterwork of dark humour, existentialist dread and sublime sense of drama. This...

A new selection of the much-loved Father Brown stories, now part of the Penguin English Library.'No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be'With his round, unassuming face, his pipe and umbrella, the bumbling priest Father Brown...

INTRODUCED BY LOUIS DE BERNIERES.Formidable Miss Doggett fills her life by giving tea parties for young academics and acting as watchdog for the morals of North Oxford. Anthea, her great-niece, is in love with a dashing undergraduate with political...

Dulcie Mainwearing is always helping others, but never looks out for herself – especially in the realm of love. Her friend Viola is besotted by the alluring Dr Aylwin Forbes, so surely it isn’t prying if Dulcie helps things along? Aylwin,...

'I'm alive inside. A bird is my heart. Mama and Daddy is not win. I'm winning.' This is the story of Precious, a sixteen-year-old illiterate Black girl who has never been out of Harlem. Pregnant by her own father for the second time, she is kicked out...

'He must know by now, I should think, that I can give as good as I get!' This is the story of Gigi, educated as a future courtesan in Paris, her days are filled with cigars, lobster, lace and superstitions. Bored and unconvinced by what she's taught,...

In this classic of American literature, Thoreau gives an account of his two years' experience of the 'simple life' in the woods, telling how he sought and found material and spiritual sustenance in the solitude of the cabin which he built for himself on...

Borges' stories have a deceptively simple, almost laconic style. In maddeningly ingenious stories that play with the very form of the short story, Borges returns again and again to his themes: dreams, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the...

The largest and richest English-language volume of poetry from “the greatest twentieth-century writer you have never heard of” (Los Angeles Times). Edited, Translated, and with an Introduction by Richard Zenith, the author of the...

In November 1929, Christopher Isherwood - determined to become a 'permanent foreigner' - packed a rucksack and two suitcases and left England on a one-way ticket for Berlin. With incredible candour and wit, Isherwood recalls the decadence of Berlin's...