Classics

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...

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...

A Heart so White is the breathtaking international bestseller and IMPAC Award-winning masterpiece by Javier Marias, whose highly-anticipated new novel The Infatuations is published in 2013. This Penguin Modern Classics edition features a new Introduction...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

Often described as the first ‘Non-Fiction novel’, Truman Capote’s infamous account of the appalling murder of a Kansas family which shocked America in the ‘50s is also a classic of the true crime genre, a fastidious piece of investigative journalism,...

The young Danish aristocrat Malte Laurids Brigge has been left rootless by the early death of his parents. Now living in Paris, Malte begins to record his life in a series of loosely connected notes, diary entries, prose poems, parables and stories,...

The third volume of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth centuryThis acclaimed new translation of The Guermantes Way will introduce a new generation of readers to the literary richness of Marcel Proust. The third volume in Penguin Classics' superb...

In January 1850 Dostoyevsky was sent to a remote Siberian prison camp for his part in a political conspiracy. The four years he spent there, startlingly re-created in The House of the Dead, were the most agonizing of his life. In this fictionalized...