Classics

The 19th-century horror novel that inspired Sarah Perry's MelmothA Penguin ClassicCreated by an Irish clergyman, Melmoth is one of the most fiendish characters in literature. In a satanic bargain, Melmoth exchanges his soul for immortality. The...

From the author of My Phantoms and First Love, a droll and quietly evocative novel about work, friendship, family, and the path—so often muddled—toward finding one’s place in life.Laura Miller and Edmund Putnam have been...

Max Reddick, a novelist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter, has spent his career struggling against the riptide of race in America. Now terminally ill, he has nothing left to lose. An expat for many years, Max returns to...

Toby Withers, a young man with epilepsy, leaves New Zealand after the death of his mother. While on board a ship to England, he meets Zoe, a middle-aged woman looking for a life of meaning and Pat, an Irishman who claims to have many friends but treats...

A brilliant, lost feminist classic that is equal parts domestic drama and international intrigue.Shirley and Coenraad’s affair has been going on for decades, but her longing for him is as desperate as ever. She is a Toronto housewife; he works for...

A coming of age story that is a classic of gay literature, now in English for the first time An NYRB Classics OriginalErnesto is a classic of gay literature, a tender and complex tale of sexual awakening by one of Italy’s most admired poets...

Rachel Waring is deliriously happy. Out of nowhere, a great-aunt leaves her a Georgian mansion in another city—and she sheds her old life without delay. Gone is her dull administrative job, her mousy wardrobe, her downer of a roommate. She will...

A world away from Brewster Place, yet intimately connected to it, lies Linden Hills. With its showcase homes, elegant lawns, and other trappings of wealth, Linden Hills is not unlike other affluent black communities. But residence in this community is...

Guy Crouchback, determined to get into the war, takes a commission in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. His spirits high, he sees all the trimmings but none of the action. And his first campaign, an abortive affair on the West African coastline, ends with...

As far as Benjamin Braddock's parents are concerned, his future is sewn up. Now he has graduated from college, he will go to Yale or Harvard, get a good job and enjoy a life of money, cocktails and pool parties in the suburbs, just like them. For...

The Old English Baron is an ambitious rewriting of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, transporting the trappings of the Gothic to medieval England. The noble hero endures many adventures of romantic horror in order to obtain his rightful...

The Fiery Angel is one of the great achievements of modern Russian literature, as powerful and revolutionary as its contemporary, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. In a vividly atmospheric recreation of the occult underworld of sixteenth...

As part of the Smith & Taylor Classics collection, this edition preserves Fanny Hill in its full provocative force, complete with new critical commentary.  Banned from publication in the United States until 1966 for its...

'The best prose writer in English' - Gore Vidal. Celebrated as a masterpiece from its first publication, "A Single Man" is the story of George Falconer, an English professor in suburban California left heartbroken after the death of his lover Jim. With...

Hemingway''s early stories told in his distinctive style.''When she goes, he though. I''ll have all I want. Not all I want but all there is''In these early Hemingway stories, which are partly autobiographical, men and women of passion live, fight, love...

'A work of art...altogether a joyous and lovely thing' New York TimesSet in a remote fishing village in Japan, The Sound of Waves is a timeless story of first love.It tells of Shinji, a young fisherman and Hatsue, the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest...

Toru Okada's cat has disappeared.His wife is growing more distant every day.Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has recently been receiving.As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and...

Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father's dark prophesy.The aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down...

VINTAGE CLASSICS WEIRD GIRLS: Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of women’s weird fiction.'The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.'In the throes of a ‘temporary nervous...

These intimate love letters reveal the close, open relationship between de Beauvoir and Sartre, two of the twentieth century’s most groundbreaking thinkers - two people living out their philosophy.De Beauvoir lived her feminist philosophy. She...