Classics

In recent decades, interest in hunger artists has greatly diminished.'Kafka published two collections of short stories in his lifetime, A Country Doctor: Little Tales (1919) and A Hunger Artist: Four Stories (1924). Both collections are included in their...

'The Queen and the bat had been talking a good deal that afternoon...'The Victorian fascination with fairyland vivified the literature of the period, and led to some of the most imaginative fairy tales ever written. They offer the shortest path to the...

At its simplest, Anna Karenina is a love story. It is a portrait of a beautiful and intelligent woman whose passionate love for a handsome officer sweeps aside all other ties - to her marriage and to the network of relationships and moral values that...

The image of Sparta, and the Spartans, is one dyed indelibly into the public consciousness: musclebound soldiers with long hair and red cloaks, bearing shiny bronze shields emblazoned with the Greek letter lambda. 'This is Sparta!', bellows Leonidas on...

With an Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury. From its first publication in 1719, Robinson Crusoe has been printed in over 700 editions. It has inspired almost every conceivable kind of imitation...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'It happen'd one Day about Noon going towards my Boat, I was exceedingly surpriz'd with the Print of a Man's naked Foot on the Shore.' Shipwrecked in a storm at sea,...

'The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts' The greatest 'state of the nation' novel in English, Middlemarch addresses ordinary life at a moment of great social change, in the years leading to the Reform Act of 1832. Through...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. 'The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into...

“A truly great translation . . . This English version . . . really is better.” —A. N. Wilson, The SpectatorNominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American ReadThis acclaimed new translation of Dostoyevsky’s “psychological...

A revelatory new translation of the playful, incomparable masterpiece of one of the greatest Black authors in the AmericasMachado de Assis is not only Brazil's most celebrated writer but also a writer of world stature. In his masterpiece, the 1881...

Tod Hackett is a brilliant young artist - and a man in danger of losing his heart. Brought to an LA studio as a set-designer, he is soon caught up in a fantasy world where the cult of celebrity rules.But when he becomes besotted by the beautiful Faye, an...

A companion volume to the masterly The Pursuit of Love, Mitford’s beguiling tale of social climbing and high society scandal confirms her reputation as a doyenne of the British comic novel.  Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate and Other Novels casts a...

Flann O'Brien's innovative metafictional work, whose unruly characters strike out their own paths in life to the frustration of their author, At Swim-Two-Birds is a brilliant impressionistic jumble of ideas, mythology and nonsense published in Penguin...

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr. Jacqueline Belanger, University of Cardiff. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man represents the transitional stage between the realism of Joyce's Dubliners and the symbolism of Ulysses, and is essential to the...

Playful and experimental, James Joyce's autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a vivid portrayal of emotional and intellectual development. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by Seamus Deane...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race...

A devastating portrait of a narcissistic Edinburgh school mistress and the coterie of impressionable girls that she takes under her wing, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie cloaks a deliciously scathing attack on the abuse of power in exquisitely crafted and...

This new collection brings together First Love, The Calamative, The End and The Expelled; these four novellas are among the first major works of Beckett's decision to use French as his language of literary composition. Rich in verbal and situational...

A sweeping historical adventure set during one of the most turbulent periods of British history—featuring a heroine you’ll never forget ...   Dorset, 1642. When bloody civil war breaks out between the king and Parliament, families and communities across...

Subtitled An Anglo-American Tragedy, Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One is a witty satirical novel on artistic integrity and the British expat community in Hollywood, published in Penguin Modern Classics.The more startling for the economy of its prose and...