Classics

From his childhood on the wild, windswept shores of Cornwall and his college days at Cambridge to his life as a lawyer in London and a fateful journey to the Mediterranean, Jacob Flanders's story is told by the women in his life, whether through his...

(Available after February 30th, 2022)As Katherine Hilbery is helping her mother write the biography of her grandfather, a famous man of letters buried in Poets' Corner, she becomes engaged to William Rodney, a budding writer with an exaggerated opinion...

Never before, the entire history of the American theater, has so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage, observed James Baldwin shortly before A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959.Indeed Lorraine Hansberry's...

Charles Portis has long been acclaimed as one of America's foremost comic writers. True Grit is his most famous novel--first published in 1968, and the basis for the movie of the same name starring John Wayne. It tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is...

Award-winning author Iona Grey's unforgettable historical novel about true love found and lost and the secrets we keep from one another, is now in trade paperbackSelina Lennox is a Bright Young Thing. Her life is a whirl of parties and drinking, pursued...

A hilarious satire about college life and high class manners, this is a classic of postwar English literature.Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently...

Named by the Observer as “one of the 100 greatest novels of all time,” this dark comedy with a disturbing twist follows two working-class women in 1970s London.Unlikely friends Brenda and Freda share a rundown room in London and toil away at an Italian...

'Upward, yet not Northward.' How would a creature limited to two dimensions be able to grasp the possibility of a third? Edwin A. Abbott's droll and delightful 'romance of many dimensions' explores this conundrum in the experiences of his protagonist, A...

The only trilogy in Greek drama that survives from antiquity, Aeschylus' The Oresteia is translated by Robert fagles with an introduction, notes and glossary written in collaboration with W.B. Stanford in Penguin Classics.In the Oresteia Aeschylus...

George, a disillusioned academic, and Martha, his caustic wife, have just come home from a faculty party. When a handsome young professor and his mousy wife stop by for a nightcap, an innocent night of fun and games quickly turns dark and dangerous...

(Available after August 30th, 2022)A quietly influential force in African American literature and art, Clarence Major makes his Penguin Classics debut with the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Dirty Bird BluesSet in post-World War II Chicago and...

A rediscovered dystopian gem, Kay Dick’s dark, chilling tale of England - where books are confiscated and National Gallery cleared - is a stunning meditation on art, memory and nonconformity in the face of the most terrifying of cleansings: the erasure...

A collection of Sojourner Truth's iconic words, including her famous speech at the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron, OhioA former slave and one of the most powerful orators of her time, Sojourner Truth fought for the equal rights of black women...

'We live within a spectacle of empty clothes and unworn masks'In this series of remarkable pieces from across his career, John Berger celebrates and dissects the close links between art and society and the individual. Few writers give a more vivid and...

'Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one's enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival'Advocating love as strength and non-violence as the most powerful weapon there is, these sermons and writings from the...

Brilliantly entertaining and eerie ghost stories, regarded as major classics in Japan, by the Irish writer and Japanophile Lafcadio Hearn—whose life inspired bestselling writer Monique Truong's novel The Sweetest FruitsA Penguin ClassicIn this collection...

Soar into the modern classic about a young witch and her clever cat—the inspiration for the Hiyao Miyazaki film that became a phenomenom!Half-witch Kiki never runs from a challenge. So when her thirteenth birthday arrives, she's eager to follow a witch's...

(Available after May 30th, 2022) Hannah Arendt's authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi SS leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in the New Yorker in 1963. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of...

'The first example of non-fiction, the text that underlies the entire discipline of history ... it is above all a treasure trove' -- Tom HollandOne of the masterpieces of classical literature, The Histories describes how a small and quarrelsome band of...

'Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf . . . you incarnate insult to the English language: I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba'Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of...