Classics

Anthony C. Yu’s translation of The Journey to the West,initially published in 1983, introduced English-speaking audiences to the classic Chinese novel in its entirety for the first time. Written in the sixteenth century, The Journey to...

Sophia Willoughby, a young Englishwoman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed her cheating husband off to Paris. He can have his tawdry mistress. She intends to devote herself to the serious...

A cornerstone of Sartre’s philosophy, The Imaginary was first published in 1940. Sartre had become acquainted with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl in Berlin and was fascinated by his idea of the 'intentionality of consciousness' as a key...

It is September 1938 and during a heatwave Europe tensely awaits the outcome of the Munich conference, where they will learn if there is to be a war. In Paris people are waiting too, among them Mathieu, Jacques and Philippe, each wrestling with their own...

In what is one of the finest autobiographies to come out of the First World War, the distinguished poet Edmund Blunden records his experiences as an infantry subaltern in France and Flanders. Blunden took part in the disastrous battles of the Somme,...

Auden, Day, Lewis, Spender, MacNeice and the other key poets of the Thirties were children of the First World War, obsessed by war and by communalism, by the class-struggle and a passionate belief in poets as people whose actions are as publically...

'McCullers shows a sort of subterranean and ageless instinct for probing the hidden in men's hearts and minds' New York Herald-TribuneSet on a Southern army base in the 1930s, Reflections in a Golden Eye tells the story of Captain...

Saki is perhaps the most graceful spokesman for England's 'Golden Afternoon' - the slow and peaceful years before the First World War. Although, like so many of his generation, he died tragically young, in action on the Western Front, his reputation as a...

These three great plays by one of the founding fathers of the theatre of the absurd, are alive and kicking with tragedy and humour, bleakness and farce. In Rhinoceros we are shown the innate brutality of people as everyone, except for Berenger, turn into...

The writing of Fernando Pessoa reveals a mind shaken by intense inner suffering. In these poems he adopted four separate personae: Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and himself, using them to express 'great swarms of thought and feeling'...

'We are Progress and the New Age. Nothing can stand in our way.' When Oxford-educated Emperor Seth succeeds to the throne of the African state of Azania, he has a tough job on his hands. His subjects are ill-informed and unruly, and corruption,...

Set in a superficially romantic, between-wars Paris, QUARTET is a poignant tale of a lonely woman. Set against a background of winter-wet streets, Pernod in smoky cafes and cheap hotel rooms with mauve- flowered wallpaper, Marya tries to make something...

The new Penguin Freud, under Adam Phillips' general editorship, offers a fantastic opportunity to see Freud in a fresh light. This endlessly beguiling, suggestive, thought-provoking writer can be appreciated nowhere more vividly than in The Case...

He did not ask things to have a meaning or to tell a story. To be was the only story A semi-autobiographical novel from the author of The Green Fool and The Great Hunger A man's mother can be a terrible burden sometimes. For Tarry Flynn - poet, farmer...

A dark, psychological tale of deadly obsession, in a masterful new translation'My dear Judge, I would like one man, just one, to understand me. And I really hope that man can be you.'In a small town in western France, Dr Charles Alavoine seems to lead...

The classic Victorian masterpiece that paints a magnificent portrait of a provincial town and its inhabitants in the midst of modern changesIn Middlemarch, George Eliot explores a fictional nineteenth-century Midlands town facing immense political,...

When Kino, a poor Indian pearl-diver, finds 'the Pearl of the world' he believes that his life will be magically transformed. He will marry Juana and their son Coyotito will be able to attend school. Obsessed by his dreams, Kino is blind to the greed and...

The Pearl is a haunting and timeless tale of the dangers of unexpected wealth by Nobel prizewinner John Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath. It is one of The Originals from Penguin - iconic, outspoken, first.Kino is a desperately poor...

Strong Opinions offers Nabokov's trenchant, witty, and always engaging views on everything from the Russian Revolution to the correct pronunciation of Lolita. - "First published in 1973, this collection of interviews and essays offers an intriguing...

Written by an eccentric Anglican curate in Dublin, Melmoth Wanderer brought the terrors of the Gothic novel to a new pitch of claustrophobic intensity. Its tormented villain, a Faustian transgressor desperately seeking a victim to release him...