Classics

Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio. Unloved, unseen, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes. In this way she dreams of...

New to Penguin Classics, the remarkable, devastating collected stories by the author of Wide Sargasso Sea. Some of Jean Rhys's most powerful writing is to be found in this rich, dark collection of her collected stories. Her fictional world is haunted by...

This volume brings together Freud's main contributions to the psychology of love. His illuminating discussions of the ways in which sexuality is always psychosexuality - that there is no sexuality without fantasy, conscious or unconscious - have...

A celebrated new translation of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece reveals the “social problems facing our own society” (Nation). Published to great acclaim and fierce controversy in 1866, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment has left...

For the first time—and in the best translation ever—the complete Book of Disquiet, a masterpiece beyond comparison. The Book of Disquiet is the Portuguese modernist master Fernando Pessoa’s greatest literary achievement. An...

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...

The second volume of In Search of Lost Time, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth centuryJames Grieve's acclaimed new translation of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower will introduce a new century of American readers to the literary riches of...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Grapes of Wrath is an epic human drama, with a stunning new cover by renowned artist Bijou Karman.'To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut...

"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...

When Matthew Lewis’s The Monk was published in 1796, readers were shocked by this gripping and horrific novel. Lewis’s story, which drove the House of Commons—of which he was a member—to deem him licentious and perverse, follows the abbot Ambrosio as he...

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...

A hardboiled novel about life in the American underground, from the pool halls of Portland to the cells of San Quentin. Simply one of the finest books ever written about being down on your luck. Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling is a...

A breathtaking melange of political satire, playful invention and sparkling fantasy, Marquez's bewitching chronicle of seven generations of the Buendia family is a cornerstone of the magical realist tradition. Equally tragic, joyful and comical,...

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...

One of the great short novels of the twentieth century-in an edition marking the 100th anniversary of the author's birth. An unforgettable psychological novel of obsessive love, The Tunnel was championed by Albert Camus, Thomas Mann, and Graham...

A special hardback edition of Murakami's epic, magical masterpiece, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, now with a new introduction from the authorToru Okada's cat has disappeared.His wife is growing more distant every day.Then there are the increasingly...

Included in this volume are the dialogues On the Shortness of Life and On Tranquility of Mind, which are eloquent classic statements of Stoic ideals of fortitude and self-reliance. This selection also features extracts from Natural...

NOW CELEBRATING ITS 75th ANNIVERSARY.Betty Smith's debut novel is universally regarded as a modern classic. The sprawling tale of an immigrant family in early 20th-century Brooklyn, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is one of the great distinctively...

An epic, Pulitzer winning story of the great American West and search for honour, heroism and love. Portraying the bravery, ambition, defiance and ruthlessness of the settlers in the great wilderness, McMurthy’s novel delicately balances myth and fact,...

A philosophical novel described by fellow existentialist Sartre as 'perhaps the most beautiful and the least understood' of his novels, Albert Camus' The Fall is translated by Robin Buss in Penguin Modern Classics.Jean-Baptiste Clamence is a soul in...