Classics

A goblin with no body and a monster with no face. A resourceful samurai and a faithful daughter. A spirit of the moon and a dragon king.This collection of 15 traditional Japanese folktales transports readers to a time of adventure and enchantment. Drawn...

'Although he feared death, he could not stop. 'If I stopped now, after coming all this way - well, they'd call me an idiot!'A pair of short stories about greed, charity, life and death from one of Russia's most influential writers and thinkers...

This powerful novel, Tolstoy's third major masterpiece, after War and Peace and Anna Karenina, begins with a courtroom drama (the finest in Russian literature) all the more stunning for being based on a real-life event. Dmitri Nekhlyudov, called to jury...

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr T.C.B.Cook. Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is best known for War and Peace and Anna Karenina, commonly regarded as amongst the greatest novels ever written. He also, however, wrote many masterly short stories, and this...

Collected here are Gogol's finest tales - from the demon-haunted 'St John's Eve' to the strange surrealism of 'The Nose', from the heart-rending trials of the copyist in 'The Overcoat' to those of the delusional clerk in 'The Diary of a Madman' -...

Masterfully atmospheric and chilling to the core, Hill’s pitch-perfect horror story about a mysterious woman all dressed in black who haunts an English village surrounded by marshes and sea fog is a gloriously ghostly read. Arthur Kipps, a...

Introduction and Notes by R.T. Jones, Honorary Fellow of the University of York. This novel, based on George Eliot's own experiences of provincial life, is a masterpiece of ambiguity in which moral choice is subjected to the hypocrisy of the Victorian...

Maggie Tulliver is a brilliant woman who finds herself at the center of a love triangle between her childhood crush and a cousin’s potential fiancé. The controversial romance makes her a town pariah, damaging her most beloved relationships.   Maggie...

'Was her life to be always like this? - always bringing some new source of inward strife?'When the miller Mr Tulliver becomes entangled in lawsuits, he sets off a chain of events that will profoundly affect the lives of his family and bring into conflict...

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Mill on the Floss by George EliotIf life had no love in it, what else was there for Maggie?Tragic and moving, The Mill on the Floss is a novel of grand passions and tormented lives. As the rebellious Maggie's...

Be irresistibly drawn into Barchester's clerical skirmishes as Archdeacon Grantly declares war on Bishop Proudie and his retinue in Trollope's most popular novel.This 1857 sequel to The Warden wryly chronicles the struggle for control of the English...

Robin Kirkpatrick's masterful verse translation of The Divine Comedy, published in a single volume, is the ideal edition for students as well as the general reader coming to this great masterpiece of Italian literature for the first time The Divine...

A group of pilgrims bound for Canterbury Cathedral agree to pass the weary miles by taking turns at storytelling. The travelers ― noble, coarse, jolly, and pious ― offer a vibrant portrait of fourteenth-century English life. Their narratives form English...

'Nevill Coghill's easy, seductive translation ensures that this, the most popular work in English Literature - now 600 years old - will run through yet more centuries' -- Melvyn BraggIn The Canterbury Tales Chaucer created one of the great touchstones of...

'Whoever best acquits himself, and tells The most amusing and instructive tale,Shall have a dinner, paid for by us all...'In Chaucer's most ambitious poem, The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387), a group of pilgrims assembles in an inn just outside London and...

The Story of the Stone (c. 1760), also known by the title of The Dream of the Red Chamber, is the great novel of manners in Chinese literature.Divided into five volumes, The Story of the Stone charts the glory and decline of the illustrious Jia family...

Edited, Introduced and Annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex.The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series, with Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and The Merchant of Venice as its inaugural volumes, presents a...

Introduced and Annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex. Three Men in a Boat is a comic classic. When it first appeared in 1889 it became a best seller, and has remained popular ever since. This motley...

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle"Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!"The terrible spectacle of the beast, the fog of the moor, the discovery of a body: this classic horror...

With an Introduction by David Stuart Davies. The Hound of the Baskervilles is the classic detective chiller. It features the world's greatest detective, Sherlock Holmes, in his most challenging case.The Baskerville family is haunted by a phantom beast...