Classics

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...

Fleeing an abusive home, Katerina, a teenager in 1880s Ukraine, is taken in by a Jewish family, finding safety in their warmth and rituals. When a pogrom is wrought upon the family, she is alone again. Decades later, having suffered and retaliated for...

Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Warren Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Smith's day interweaves with that of...

'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...

Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country is a novel of passions—sexual, racial, political, artistic.Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this "brilliantly and fiercely told" book (The New...

The Lost Estate is Robin Buss's translation of Henri Alain-Fournier's poignant study of lost love, Le Grand Meaulnes. This Penguin Classics edition also contains an introduction by Adam Gopnik. When Meaulnes first arrives at the local school in Sologne,...

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...

I have been womanfor a long timebeware my smileI am treacherous with old magicFilled with rage and tenderness, Audre Lorde's most acclaimed poetry collection speaks of mothers and children, female strength and vulnerability, renewal and revenge,...

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...

Destroy and forget. But we still have an hour before tea… Ada or Ardor is a romance that follows Ada from her first childhood meeting with Van Veen on his uncle's country estate, in a 'dream-bright' America, through eighty years of rapture, as...

A riveting selection of short stories in Spanish alongside their English translations This new dual-language edition of ten stories selected from The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories celebrates some of the very best twentieth-century literature from...

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...

Awe and exhiliration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze...

The unsettling story of a young woman's descent into mental illness, from the author ofThe Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived at the Castle.'An amazing writer' Neil GaimanElizabeth Richmond is almost too quiet to be believed, with no...

"An astonishingly beautiful book. The best gay novel written by anyone of our generation."  — Harper's magazine   One of the most important works of gay literature, this haunting, brilliant novel is a seriocomic remembrance of things past — and still...

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...

Essential poems by the late New York poet.   Lunch Poems, first published in 1964 by City Lights Books as number nineteen in the Pocket Poets series, is widely considered to be Frank O'Hara's freshest and most accomplished collection of poetry. Edited by...

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...