Classics

Steinbeck and Capa’s account of their journey through Cold War Russia is a classic piece of reportage and travel writing.A Penguin Classic.Just after the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Steinbeck and...

‘This is the weapon he has been seeking so assiduously since his return: the knowledge of how to destroy you’ -- Albus Dumbledore. Harry Potter is furious that he has been abandoned at the Dursleys’ house for the summer, for he...

Rosamond Lehmann’s enduring classic, told from the point of view of its seventeen-year-old heroine, who has been invited to her first dance.   Today is Olivia Curtis’s seventeenth birthday. In exactly one week, she will attend her...

ONE OF THE MOST REMARKABLE BRITISH WRITERS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.Taking up where Invitation to the Waltz left off, The Weather in the Streets shows us Olivia Curtis ten years older, a failed marriage behind her, thinner, sadder, and apparently not...

A companion volume to Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro. Álvaro de Campos is one of the most influential heteronyms created by Portugal’s great modernist writer Fernando Pessoa. According...

'The greatest Scottish novelist of modern times.' -- Ian Rankin. In this first novel by Muriel Spark - author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - the only things that aren't ambiguous are Spark's matchless originality and glittering wit. With an...

A funny and clever novel about art and reality and the way they imitate each other, from the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. With an introduction by Mark Lawson. Would-be novelist Fleur Talbot works for the snooty, irascible Sir Quentin Oliver...

Poignant, hilarious, and spooky, Memento Mori addresses old age.   In late 1950s London, something uncanny besets a group of elderly friends: an insinuating voice on the telephone reminds each: Remember you must die. Their geriatric feathers are...

When Clara returns home from the convent of her childhood to begin life at a local girls' school, she is at a loss: although she has comparative freedom, she misses the discipline the nuns imposed and worries about keeping her faith in a secular world...

'Frost in May is the unsurpassed novel of convent school life. This story of a clash between a determined young girl and an authoritarian regime is both perceptive and painfully emotional, convincing in every detail' - Hermione Lee, Observer.With a new...

This new translation of Zola's most acerbic social satire captures the directness and robustness of Zola's language and restores the omissions of earlier abridged versions. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available...

The Masterpiece is the tragic story of Claude Lantier, an ambitious and talented young artist from the provinces who has come to conquer Paris and is conquered by the flaws in his own genius. While his boyhood friend Pierre Sandoz becomes a successful...

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...

'One of the few great and perfect works of poetic imagination written during this century' -- Elias Canetti.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ADAM THIRWELL.One morning, Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect. His family is...

Though best known in the English speaking world for his short fictions and poems, Borges is revered in Latin America equally as an immensely prolific and beguiling writer of non-fiction prose. In THE TOTAL LIBRARY, more than 150 of Borges' most brilliant...

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...

Primo Levi's The Periodic Table is a collection of short stories that elegantly interlace the author's experiences in Fascist Italy, and later in Auschwitz, with his passion for scientific knowledge and discovery. This Penguin Modern Classics edition of...

The bestselling classic about three generations of a deaf family in modern America, by the author of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. ‘A miracle of empathy, a tour de force’ -- The New York Times. Two young deaf people, Abel and Janice,...

Based on his experiences as a policeman in Burma, George Orwell's first novel presents a devastating picture of British colonial rule. Burmese Days describes corruption and imperial bigotry in a society where, 'after all, natives were natives'. When...