Classics

On the banks of the River Avon, five sisters are born. The seasons come and go, the girls take their lessons under the ash tree, and always there is the sound of water swirling through the weir. Then, unexpectedly, an air of decay descends upon the...

A heady mix of desire, humour, pain and politics, Burroughs autobiographical novel finds a queer man in the American expat community of early-1950s Mexico City on a desperate quest for satisfaction. Originally written in 1952 but not published till...

Author of The Savage Detectives and 2666. Crushed by a devastating scandal, university professor Óscar Amalfitano flees Barcelona for Santa Teresa—a Mexican city close to the U.S. border, where women are being killed in staggering numbers...

New to Penguin Classics, the remarkable, devastating collected stories by the author of Wide Sargasso Sea. Some of Jean Rhys's most powerful writing is to be found in this rich, dark collection of her collected stories. Her fictional world is haunted by...

A celebrated new translation of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece reveals the “social problems facing our own society” (Nation). Published to great acclaim and fierce controversy in 1866, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment has left...

'This is as much a mystery as the Immaculate Conception, which of itself must make a doctor an unbeliever.' A stunning pair of short stories about faith and sacrificial love. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little...

For the first time—and in the best translation ever—the complete Book of Disquiet, a masterpiece beyond comparison. The Book of Disquiet is the Portuguese modernist master Fernando Pessoa’s greatest literary achievement. An...

The first volume in his Roads to Freedom trilogy, Jean-Paul Sartre's The Age of Reason is a philosophical novel exploring existentialist notions of freedom, translated by Eric Sutton with an introduction by David Caute in Penguin Modern Classics. Set in...

'If life could write, it would write like Tolstoy.' -- Isaac BabelTolstoy'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...

What does it mean to live a life of completeness? And how far must one go to understand the pain of others? Is change truly possible? This is the story that proves that it is. In what could be described as equal parts self-help book and a novelistic...

The infamous and controversial work that made a lasting impression on both modern Protestant theology and existentialist philosophers such as Sartre and Camus Writing under the pseudonym of Johannes de silentio, Kierkegaard expounds his personal view of...

'I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone. I just miss you...'At a dinner party in 1922, Virginia Woolf met the renowned author, aristocrat - and...

NOW CELEBRATING ITS 75th ANNIVERSARY.Betty Smith's debut novel is universally regarded as a modern classic. The sprawling tale of an immigrant family in early 20th-century Brooklyn, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is one of the great distinctively...

'May be the most detailed, painstaking anatomy of desire that we are ever likely to see or need again... An ecstatic celebration of love and language' -- Washington PostThe language we use when we are in love is not a language we speak. It is a language...

A beautifully packaged hardback edition of Haruki Murakami's breakout hit, now with a new introduction by the authorWhen he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki...

The brilliant tale of Anais Nin's true love affair with Henry Miller, and her ambiguous, charged relationship with his wife, June. Drawn from the journals of a single momentous year in Paris, Henry and June provides a wildly lyrical account of...

Two novellas about domestic life, isolation, and the passing of time by one of the finest Italian writers of the twentieth century.Carmine, an architect, and Ivana, a translator, lived together long ago and even had a child, but the child died, and their...

A hardboiled novel about life in the American underground, from the pool halls of Portland to the cells of San Quentin. Simply one of the finest books ever written about being down on your luck. Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling is a...

This volume brings together Freud's main contributions to the psychology of love. His illuminating discussions of the ways in which sexuality is always psychosexuality - that there is no sexuality without fantasy, conscious or unconscious - have...

A breathtaking melange of political satire, playful invention and sparkling fantasy, Marquez's bewitching chronicle of seven generations of the Buendia family is a cornerstone of the magical realist tradition. Equally tragic, joyful and comical,...