Classics

A woman's weekend away in the Austrian mountains takes an inexplicable and sinister turn - and becomes a fight for survival. A woman takes a holiday in the Austrian mountains, spending a few days with her cousin and his wife in their hunting lodge. When...

At once a chase novel, black comedy, and softly keening death song, Count Luna starts off at a gallop and accelerates into warp speed At the start of WWII, Alexander Jessiersky, an Austrian aristocrat, heads a great Viennese shipping company. He detests...

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...

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...

As a girl, Clara del Valle can read fortunes, make objects move as if they had lives of their own, and predict the future. Following the mysterious death of her sister, Rosa the Beautiful, Clara is mute for nine years. When she breaks her silence, it is...

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 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...

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...

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,...

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...

Immortalised by Audrey Hepburn's sparkling performance in the 1961 film of the same name, Breakfast at Tiffany's is Truman Capote's timeless portrait of tragicomic cultural icon Holly Golightly, published in Penguin Modern Classics.It's New York in the...

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,...

Finally back in print, a frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriageThe Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of...

Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantès is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to...

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,...

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...

'One of the best books I've ever read' -- Richard Osman'Tender and elegant' -- Guardian'Unlike anything else in modern English literature' -- D.J. Taylor, SpectatorA damaged survivor of the First World War, Tom Birkin finds refuge in the quiet village...

'Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one's reach.'In The Trouble With Being Born, E. M. Cioran grapples with the major questions of human existence: birth, death, God, the passing of time, how to relate to...

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...