Classics

Aristophanes is the only surviving representative of Greek Old Comedy, an exuberant form of festival drama which flourished in Athens during the fifth century BC. One of the most original playwrights in the entire Western tradition, his comedies are...

“A lacerating story of loss and of seeking, written in prose that is charged with emotion but is always held under impeccable control.”—Kansas City Star.Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American...

Winner of the Yomiuri Prize and recipient of the 2022-23 William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation. Introducing Tatsuhiko Shibusawa—Japan’s Italo Calvino—in this fantastical tale of a Japanese prince who...

'He was not blind to the fact that murder, like the religions of the Pagan world, requires a victim as well as a priest...' Wilde's supremely witty tale of dandies, anarchists and a murderous prophecy in London high society.Introducing Little Black...

"I did have hallucinations, but did they harm anyone? Who did they harm, that's what I'd like to know!' From the supreme artist of the short story, three disturbing tales of supernatural hallucinations, hysterical obsession and moral decay. One of 46 new...

'All those excessive, useless regrets...' A collection of nostalgic, erotic poetry from one of the greatest Greek poets to have ever lived. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge...

Restoration-era poet, playwright and novelist Aphra Behn was the first truly professional woman writer in English, and Oroonoko is her sophisticated and insightful condemnation of slavery. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction by...

Showing more flashes of dark humour than readers of Cormac McCarthy may be used to, Suttree is a semi-autobiographical novel rich in eccentric characterisation that tells the story of the eponymous outcast living on a disintegrating houseboat. Suttree...

A lyrical tour of life as a young working-class man born into the first days of the 20th century, Caliban Shrieks is a lost masterpiece of 1930s British literature.WITH NEW INTRODUCTIONS BY ANDREW McMILLAN AND JACK CHADWICK.Caliban Shrieks’...

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and...

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Helen’s beloved brother Declan is dying. Now, she must join her mother and grandmother in a crumbling old house by the sea, three generations calling an uneasy truce after years of strife, to be by his side...

From one of the 20th century's great writers comes one of the finest autobiographies of our time. Speak, Memory was first published by Vladimir Nabokov in 1951 as Conclusive Evidenceand then assiduously revised and republished in 1966. The Everyman's...

In the summer of 1946, while secluded in August Strindberg’s small cabin in the Stockholm archipelago, Stig Dagerman wrote Island of the Doomed. This novel was unlike any other yet seen in Sweden and would establish him as the country’s...

On June 23rd, 1950, Pavese, Italy's greatest modern writer received the coveted Strega Award for his novel Among Women Only. On August 26th, in a small hotel in his home town of Turin, he took his own life. Shortly before his death, he methodically...

With an Introduction by Angus Calder. As Angus Calder states in his introduction to this edition, 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom is one of the major statements about the fighting experience of the First World War'. Lawrence's younger brothers, Frank and Will,...

"In the vast literature of love, The Seducer's Diary is an intricate curiosity—a feverishly intellectual attempt to reconstruct an erotic failure as a pedagogic success, a wound masked as a boast," observes John Updike in his foreword to...

In this classic social commentary from Dickens, Mr. Samuel Pickwick, retired business man and confirmed bachelor, is determined that after a quiet life of enterprise the time has come to go out into the world. Together with the other members of the...

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...'Vividly interweaving epic historical drama with personal tragedy, Dickens's gripping novel depicts the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney...

Introduction and Notes by Dinny Thorold, University of Westminster. Illustrated by F. Walker and Maurice Greiffenhagen.Unusually for Dickens, Hard Times is set, not in London, but in the imaginary mid-Victorian Northern industrial town of Coketown with...

'Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.’ Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school owner and model of...