Classics

A shocking exposé of the desperate subculture surrounding heroin addiction, William S. Burroughs' Junky is edited with an introduction by Oliver Harris in Penguin Modern Classics. Burroughs' first novel, a largely autobiographical...

The final hours of the doomed British ex-consul Geoffrey Firmin in the swirl and swelter of Mexico’s Day of the Dead festivities are a fever dream of pirouetting prose and oblique, delirious imagery in Lowry’s outstanding tour de force...

In a run-down quarter of Paris, Gervaise Macquart struggles to earn a living and support her family. She earns a pittance washing other people's dirty clothes in the local washhouse, and dreams of having her own laundry. But in order to start her...

'Only the earth is immortal...the earth we love enough to commit murder for her.'Zola's novel of peasant life, the fifteenth in the Rougon—Macquart series, is generally regarded as one of his finest achievements, comparable...

His haunting, impressionistic study of a man's slow corruption by jealousy, Emile Zola's The Beast Within (La Bete Humaine) is translated from the French with an introduction and notes by Roger Whitehouse in Penguin Classics. Roubaud is consumed by a...

A brilliant new translation of a perennial favorite of Russian literature The first major Russian novel, A Hero of Our Time was both lauded and reviled upon publication. Its dissipated hero, twenty-five-year-old Pechorin, is a beautiful...

Friendship makes life worth living, and worth ending too. Eufrasia Vela is a caregiver―it’s not just her job. But when she begins working with Doña Carmen, a bedridden elderly woman who spends her days staring out the window at her...

“The most influential Colombian novel before Gabriel García Márquez.”―Times Literary Supplement A new translation of a Latin American classic, José Eustasio Rivera's The Vortex follows the young poet Arturo Cova...

Exploring the decadence of Jazz Age New York through a fictionalised version of his own marriage to Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned includes an introduction by Geoff Dyer in Penguin Modern Classics. Anthony Patch and...

I want to write a book about Vilhelm’s room and the events which took place in it, or arose from it; those that led to Lise’s death, which I have survived only so that I might write down the story of her and Vilhelm...The ripples from a...

From magical steam trains to objectionable rodents, Miyazawa's sublimely written fairy tales mine the disturbing elements of the classics with rare skill and dark beauty. Japanese fairy tales - enchanting, enigmatic stories of animals, human beings...

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...

Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the powerful, classic story about a man who receives an operation that turns him into a genius...and introduces him to heartache. Charlie Gordon is about to embark upon an unprecedented journey. Born...

'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...

James Hogg''s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a Scottish classic, a quintessentially Gothic tale of psychological horror, and a relentless attack on Calvinist dogma. The Penguin Classics edition is edited with an...

When Ettie's husband dies, her daughter Iza insists that her mother give up the family house in the countryside and move to Budapest. Displaced from her community and her home, Ettie tries to find her place in this new life, but can't seem to get it...

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...

'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 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...