Classics

The most popular anthology of Jorge Luis Borges's short stories, Fictions is a wildly original and influential collection of fantastic tales, translated from the Spanish with an afterword by Andrew Hurley in Penguin Modern Classics.Jorge Luis...

One of the most remarkable philosophical works of the nineteenth century, The Sickness Unto Death is also famed for the depth and acuity of its modern psychological insights. Writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard explores the concept of...

At once a chase novel, black comedy, and softly keening death song, Count Luna starts off at a gallop and accelerates into warp speed At the start of WWII, Alexander Jessiersky, an Austrian aristocrat, heads a great Viennese shipping company. He detests...

Baron Bagge, a cavalry officer stationed in Eastern Europe during the First World War, receives orders to ride into a platoon of Russian machine guns. But instead of meeting certain death, he and his brigade pass, unscathed, into a bizarrely peaceful...

A stylishly original collection of seven newly translated stories from the iconic Japanese writerThe stories in this fantastical, unconventional collection are subtly wrought depictions of the darkness of our desires. From an isolated bamboo grove, to a...

Donna Tartt, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her most recent novel, The Goldfinch, established herself as a major talent with The Secret History, which has become a contemporary classic. Under the influence of their charismatic...

The fourth volume of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth centuryJohn Sturrock's acclaimed new translation of Sodom and Gomorrah will introduce a new generation of American readers to the literary riches of Proust. The fourth volume in this superb...

'Unlike any other person I had come across, Welch seemed to be speaking particularly to me' -- Alan Bennett.'Vivid ... surprising ... an exquisite balance of pain and beauty' -- Guardian.Orvil Pym does not fit in. A waifish, eccentric,...

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF PICADOR BOOKS.I like to dissect girls. Did you know I'm utterly insane?Patrick Bateman has it all: good looks, youth, charm, a job on Wall Street, and reservations at every new restaurant in town. He is also a psychopath. A man...

This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their...

Julio Cortazar's crazed masterpiece, the forbearer of the Latin Boom in the 1960s - published in Vintage Classics for the first time'Cortazar's masterpiece. This is the first great novel of Spanish America... A powerful anti-novel but, like deeply...

One of the greatest love stories in world literature' -- Vladimir NabokovAnna is a beautiful, intelligent woman whose passionate affair with the dashing Count Vronsky leads her to ruin. But her story is also about a search for meaning, and by twinning it...

Reflective and characteristically perceptive, this exquisite novella from the philosopher and author of The Second Sex focuses on a retired French's couple's holiday to Russia. A captivating novella about long-term relationships, getting older and...

Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Karamazov Brothers (1880) is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered; his sons - the atheist intellectual Ivan,...

Essentially the start of Dazai's career, Schoolgirl gained notoriety for its ironic and inventive use of language. Now it illuminates the prevalent social structures of a lost time, as well as the struggle of the individual against them–a theme...

As a girl, Clara del Valle can read fortunes, make objects move as if they had lives of their own, and predict the future. Following the mysterious death of her sister, Rosa the Beautiful, Clara is mute for nine years. When she breaks her silence, it is...

A shimmering collection of stories from the author of The Copenhagen Trilogy, translated into English for the first timeFrom one of Denmark's most celebrated writers and the author of Childhood, Youth and Dependency, these short stories are brief,...

When Matthew Lewis’s The Monk was published in 1796, readers were shocked by this gripping and horrific novel. Lewis’s story, which drove the House of Commons—of which he was a member—to deem him licentious and perverse, follows the abbot Ambrosio as he...

Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths is a collection of short stories and essays showcasing one of Latin America's most influential and imaginative writers. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, with an...

An early-twentieth-century classic — the turbulent, dreamlike story of a businessman torn between middle-class respectability and sensational bohemia.“No one who has read it has failed to love it.” — Nicholas Lezard.Mihály...