Classics

The novels that the great Italian writer Alberto Moravia wrote in the years following the World War II represent an extraordinary survey of the range of human behavior in a fragmented modern society. Boredom, the story of a failed artist and...

Oakley Hall's legendary Warlock revisits and reworks the traditional conventions of the Western to present a raw, funny, hypnotic, ultimately devastating picture of American unreality. First published in the 1950s, at the height of the McCarthy...

No evocation of Parisian life in the second half of the nineteenth century can match that found in the journals of the brothers GoncourtThe journal of the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt is one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century French...

Times Literary Supplement

A New York Review Books Original. Winner of the Best Translated Book Award. Deception—the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell others—is the subject of this, Tove Jansson’s most unnerving and unpredictable novel. Here Jansson...

Now a major motion picture starring Glenn Close and directed by Charlie McDowell.In The Summer Book Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer—its sunlight and storms—into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel...

‘People seem to get over things, don’t they? I don’t know how, but they do – ordinary people. I’m very ordinary, so I expect I shall do what they do.’Lucy Carmichael is jilted at the altar. But no matter. Her...

The Penguin English Library edition of The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James'She knew of no wrong that he had done; he was not violent, he was not cruel; she simply believed that he hated her'When Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited...

With his Odyssey, best-selling author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn has created a momentous new work, hailed by classicists and poets alike – a translation to stand with those of E. V. Rieu and Robert Fagles. Setting aside the streamlining,...

A smart, funny classic about a young and beautiful American woman who moves to Paris determined to live life to the fullest.The Dud Avocado follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the...

Sally Jay Gorce is a girl hellbent on living. It’s the 1950s and she’s an American in Paris: witty, headstrong and disaster-prone. She dyes her hair pink, wears evening dresses in the daytime and prowls the Left Bank in search of love,...

'Acker gives her work the power to mirror the reader's soul' William S. Burroughs 'Kathy Acker's writing is virtuoso, maddening, crazy, so sexy, so painful, and beaten out of a wild heart that nothing can tame. Acker is a landmark writer' Jeanette...

The final hours of the doomed British ex-consul Geoffrey Firmin in the swirl and swelter of Mexico’s Day of the Dead festivities are a fever dream of pirouetting prose and oblique, delirious imagery in Lowry’s outstanding tour de force...

Featuring Venetian clairvoyants and a party of pilgrims who meet disaster in Jerusalem, Don’t Look Now and Other Stories curates five feverishly unsettling tales of deep-rooted fears and destructive desire. Collecting five stories of...

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolize the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd...

Is it wrong to love whatever is beautiful and rich? I love it precisely because it is beautiful, because it is rich — because, I think, it brings joy to my heart. . .On Christmas day, in the flurry of a snow storm, the Huberts discover a ragged...

'Only the earth is immortal...the earth we love enough to commit murder for her.'Zola's novel of peasant life, the fifteenth in the Rougon—Macquart series, is generally regarded as one of his finest achievements, comparable...

Turgenev's timeless tale of generational collision, in a sparkling new translationWhen Arkady Petrovich returns home from college, his father finds his eager, naïve son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen...

Selda Heddle, a famously reclusive composer, is found dead in a snowy field near her Cornish home. She was educated at Agnes's Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, which for centuries has offered its young wards a grounding in the gift - an...

What is it like to live with chronic insomnia? For Marie Darrieussecq, not sleeping began after the birth of her first child and continues more than twenty years later. She wonders if it is connected to her hypervigilance, to her fear of her children...