Classics

Heartwarming and profound, this account of one writer's relationship with his beloved German Shepherd is "one of the bonafide dog-lit classics" (New Yorker).The distinguished British man of letters J. R. Ackerley hardly thought of himself as a dog lover...

'Every generalisation that we settled forty years ago, is abandoned'As a journalist, historian and novelist born into a family that included two past presidents of the United States, Henry Adams was constantly focused on the American experiment. An...

The only trilogy in Greek drama that survives from antiquity, Aeschylus' The Oresteia is translated by Robert fagles with an introduction, notes and glossary written in collaboration with W.B. Stanford in Penguin Classics.In the Oresteia Aeschylus...

George, a disillusioned academic, and Martha, his caustic wife, have just come home from a faculty party. When a handsome young professor and his mousy wife stop by for a nightcap, an innocent night of fun and games quickly turns dark and dangerous...

(Available after August 30th, 2022)A quietly influential force in African American literature and art, Clarence Major makes his Penguin Classics debut with the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Dirty Bird BluesSet in post-World War II Chicago and...

Tolstoy's epic masterpiece intertwines the lives of private and public individuals during the time of the Napoleonic wars and the French invasion of Russia. The fortunes of the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys, of Pierre, Natasha, and Andrei, are intimately...

A rediscovered dystopian gem, Kay Dick’s dark, chilling tale of England - where books are confiscated and National Gallery cleared - is a stunning meditation on art, memory and nonconformity in the face of the most terrifying of cleansings: the erasure...

A collection of Sojourner Truth's iconic words, including her famous speech at the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron, OhioA former slave and one of the most powerful orators of her time, Sojourner Truth fought for the equal rights of black women...

'We live within a spectacle of empty clothes and unworn masks'In this series of remarkable pieces from across his career, John Berger celebrates and dissects the close links between art and society and the individual. Few writers give a more vivid and...

'Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one's enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival'Advocating love as strength and non-violence as the most powerful weapon there is, these sermons and writings from the...

Brilliantly entertaining and eerie ghost stories, regarded as major classics in Japan, by the Irish writer and Japanophile Lafcadio Hearn—whose life inspired bestselling writer Monique Truong's novel The Sweetest FruitsA Penguin ClassicIn this collection...

Soar into the modern classic about a young witch and her clever cat—the inspiration for the Hiyao Miyazaki film that became a phenomenom!Half-witch Kiki never runs from a challenge. So when her thirteenth birthday arrives, she's eager to follow a witch's...

(Available after May 30th, 2022) Hannah Arendt's authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi SS leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in the New Yorker in 1963. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of...

Introduction and Notes by Gene M. Moore, Universiteit van Amsterdam. Generally regarded as the pre-eminent work of Conrad's shorter fiction, Heart of Darkness is a chilling tale of horror which, as the author intended, is capable of many interpretations...

John Milton's celebrated epic poem exploring the cosmological, moral and spiritual origins of man's existenceA Penguin ClassicIn Paradise Lost Milton produced poem of epic scale, conjuring up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos and ranging across huge...

'The first example of non-fiction, the text that underlies the entire discipline of history ... it is above all a treasure trove' -- Tom HollandOne of the masterpieces of classical literature, The Histories describes how a small and quarrelsome band of...

The ancient Sumerian poem The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest written stories in existence, translated with an introduction by Andrew George in Penguin Classics.Miraculously preserved on clay tablets dating back as much as four thousand years, the...

'Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf . . . you incarnate insult to the English language: I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba'Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of...

Medea/Hecabe/Electra/HeraclesFour devastating Greek tragedies showing the powerful brought down by betrayal, jealousy, guilt and hatredThe first playwright to depict suffering without reference to the gods, Euripides made his characters speak in human...

'The classic tale of alien invasion, and still the best' -- The TimesThe first modern depiction of extra-terrestrials attacking the earth, The War of the Worlds remains one of the most influential of all science-fiction works. It shows the whole of human...