Classics

Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS.  ("You have to read them.").One of The New Yorker’s “The Best Books We Read in 2020” picks.No novel about any Black woman could ever be the same after this' TONI...

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. Razor-sharp, pugnacious and blackly funny, Wang Xiaobo’s essays established him as one of China’s most popular – and subversive – writers. From the political power of...

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. Fabien tonight was wandering over the vast splendour of a sea of clouds, but below him lay eternity. Inspired by his career as an aviator, Saint-Exupéry’s soaring novel follows the...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. ‘As for me I have one ambition only: to invent stories, very beautiful stories’ Gothic, expansive and truly spellbinding, Karen Blixen’s short stories offer incisive psychological...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books.I am a ridiculous man. They call me mad now. That would be a promotion in rank. A delusional man whose strange dream changes his life; a self-justifying husband who causes his wife’s suicide;...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books.Many years ago there lived an Emperor who was so terribly fond of beautiful new clothes that he spent all his money on dressing elegantly... Jewels in storytelling, these magical fairytales by Hans...

In this collection of short stories, drawing heavily from the author's own experiences as a medical graduate on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Bulgakov describes a young doctor's turbulent and often brutal introduction to his practice in the backward...

A dark, fantastical satire of Communist utopianism by the author of The Master and Margarita. Lauded Russian author and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov’s A Dog’s Heart (sometimes translated as The Heart of a Dog) is...

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. What would happen if a doctor implanted the pituitary gland and testicles of a man into the body of a stray dog? In Mikhail Bulgakov’s topsy-turvy world, the dog starts to walk on two legs,...

The city is Rome, the hub of Italian life and culture. The house is Le Margherite, a home where the sprawling cast of The City and the House is welcome. At the center of this lush epistolary novel is Lucrezia, mother of five and lover...

Each working day from January 29 to November 1, 1951, John Steinbeck warmed up to the work of writing East of Eden with a letter to the late Pascal Covici, his friend and editor at The Viking Press. It was his way, he said, of "getting my...

One of the undisputed jewels of American fiction, Fitzgerald’s dazzling critique of the superficiality of the Jazz Age captures the glamorous facade at the heart of the American Dream in devastating style.   Generally considered to be F...

From one of the great American writers of the twentieth century—a coming-of-age story about a fourteen-year-old boy questioning the terms of his identity, the racism he faces, and the double-edged role of religion in his life. • Presented here...

An acclaimed translation of Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy Volume 1: Inferno that retains all the style, power and meaning of the original.A Penguin Classic.This vigorous translation of Inferno preserves Dante's simple, natural style, and...

Eleven stunning stories that explore the most intimate and transforming moments of existence, from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the foremost practitioners of the short story” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York...

'people get out of prison, and when they get out, and their name is Edmond Dantès, they take their revenge!' Falsely accused of treason, the young sailor Edmond Dantès is arrested on his wedding day and imprisoned in the island fortress of...

“Spy Line is vigorous and sleazy, psychologically complex and action-packed. And it is always exciting.” —Daily Mail. Bernard Samson is a spy on the run, forced to abandon his life and job and plunge into hiding. But in the...

An original and groundbreaking examination of the psychological devastation of war through the lens of Homer’s Iliad in this “compassionate book [that] deserves a place in the lasting literature of the Vietnam War”...

The first novel of Samuel Beckett's mordant and exhilarating midcentury trilogy introduces us to Molloy, who has been mysteriously incarcerated, and who subsequently escapes to go discover the whereabouts of his mother. In the latter part of this curious...

The re-dipping of dishes was a small matter, but the emotional texture of married life is made up of small matters. This one had become invested with a fatal quality. Imogen, the beautiful and much younger wife of distinguished barrister Evelyn Gresham,...