Classics

Oakley Hall's legendary Warlock revisits and reworks the traditional conventions of the Western to present a raw, funny, hypnotic, ultimately devastating picture of American unreality. First published in the 1950s, at the height of the McCarthy...

No evocation of Parisian life in the second half of the nineteenth century can match that found in the journals of the brothers GoncourtThe journal of the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt is one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century French...

A New York Review Books Original. Winner of the Best Translated Book Award. Deception—the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell others—is the subject of this, Tove Jansson’s most unnerving and unpredictable novel. Here Jansson...

‘People seem to get over things, don’t they? I don’t know how, but they do – ordinary people. I’m very ordinary, so I expect I shall do what they do.’Lucy Carmichael is jilted at the altar. But no matter. Her...

The Penguin English Library edition of The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James'She knew of no wrong that he had done; he was not violent, he was not cruel; she simply believed that he hated her'When Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited...

With his Odyssey, best-selling author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn has created a momentous new work, hailed by classicists and poets alike – a translation to stand with those of E. V. Rieu and Robert Fagles. Setting aside the streamlining,...

A smart, funny classic about a young and beautiful American woman who moves to Paris determined to live life to the fullest.The Dud Avocado follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the...

Sally Jay Gorce is a girl hellbent on living. It’s the 1950s and she’s an American in Paris: witty, headstrong and disaster-prone. She dyes her hair pink, wears evening dresses in the daytime and prowls the Left Bank in search of love,...

'Acker gives her work the power to mirror the reader's soul' William S. Burroughs 'Kathy Acker's writing is virtuoso, maddening, crazy, so sexy, so painful, and beaten out of a wild heart that nothing can tame. Acker is a landmark writer' Jeanette...

Featuring Venetian clairvoyants and a party of pilgrims who meet disaster in Jerusalem, Don’t Look Now and Other Stories curates five feverishly unsettling tales of deep-rooted fears and destructive desire. Collecting five stories of...

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolize the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd...

Is it wrong to love whatever is beautiful and rich? I love it precisely because it is beautiful, because it is rich — because, I think, it brings joy to my heart. . .On Christmas day, in the flurry of a snow storm, the Huberts discover a ragged...

Turgenev's timeless tale of generational collision, in a sparkling new translationWhen Arkady Petrovich returns home from college, his father finds his eager, naïve son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen...

Selda Heddle, a famously reclusive composer, is found dead in a snowy field near her Cornish home. She was educated at Agnes's Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, which for centuries has offered its young wards a grounding in the gift - an...

What is it like to live with chronic insomnia? For Marie Darrieussecq, not sleeping began after the birth of her first child and continues more than twenty years later. She wonders if it is connected to her hypervigilance, to her fear of her children...

A retired art teacher is beset one stormy night by terrifying knocking at the door in this unforgettable psychological portrait from the author of The Edge of the Alphabet. Magical powers inhabit the land to which Malfred Signal retires –...

A prophetic, darkly comic lost classic about down-and-outs in a fractured Berlin by the author of the Sunday Times bestselling rediscovery The Passenger 'A writer of great insight and talent' FT Berlin, 1920s: a beacon of culture and...

The ancient Roman empire was the supreme arena, and to rule as a Caesar was to stand as an actor upon the great stage of the world. No biographies invite us into the lives of the Caesars more vividly or intimately than those by Gaius Suetonius...

'Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was a groan of mortal terror ... the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul.'Stories about murder, mystery and madness, portraying the author's feverish imagination at its creative...

'I could see that she was still terribly afraid, but I didn't soften anything; instead, seeing that she was afraid I deliberately intensified it.'In this short story, Dostoyevsky masterfully depicts desperation, greed, manipulation and suicide...