Japanese, Chinese, Korean & Other Literature Books

The English-language debut of Hiroko Oyamada—one of the most powerfully strange young voices in Japan The English-language debut of one of Japan's most exciting new writers, The Factory follows three workers at a sprawling industrial factory. Each...

‘If there’s any metaphor I would use for the act of writing, it would have to be listening,’ says Jon Fosse in A Silent Language, the lecture he delivered after being awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. When he writes, Fosse...

ABANDON THE PURSUIT OF ORDINARY HAPPINESS! One young man’s barren college life changes forever when he shares a budding romance with a girl named Mizuo...only for it to all come crashing down when she has the gall to dump him! With the specter of a...

In 1849 the young Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years' hard labour in a Siberian prison camp for advocating socialism. Notes from a Dead House (sometimes translated as The House of the Dead), the novel he wrote on his release, tells of shocking...

Pale Horse is a thinly disguised retelling of the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich. Written in the form of a diary by the leader of a group of five revolutionaries, the novel provides a straightforward and clinical account of the...

From the international best-selling author of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, a collection exploring the intimacies of contemporary Korean womanhood. A woman is born. A woman is filmed in public without consent. A woman suffers domestic violence. A woman is...

It is 1913, and Viennese high society is determined to find an appropriate way of celebrating the seventieth jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef. But as the aristocracy tries to salvage something illustrious out of the collapse of the...

Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading chivalric romances that he determines to become a knight-errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, his exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote's fancy often...

'What is the life of a human being - a drop of dew, a flash of lightning? This is so sad, so sad.'Autobiographical stories from one of Japan's masters of modernist story-telling.Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday...

A spellbinding novel that places one family’s tragedies against the uncontainable life force of the land itself.Near a village high in the Pyrenees, Domènec wanders across a ridge, fancying himself more a poet than a farmer, to “reel...

In the much-anticipated follow-up to the bestselling and beloved The Travelling Cat Chronicles, seven cats weave their way through their owners’ lives, climbing, comforting, nestling, and sometimes just tripping everyone up in this uplifting...

From the writer of the classic Letters to a Young Poet, reflections on grief and loss, collected and published here in one volume for the first time.“A great poet’s reflections on our greatest mystery.”—Billy...

“Yokomizo at his absolute best... From the ominous opening through the brilliant final reveal, [he] ably blends suspense and fair-play detection... A classic of the genre.” —Publishers Weekly, starred reviewAn ingenious classic...

A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal BoredomIzumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of the land. In this new collection, her skewed...

Among Dostoevsky's later novels, The Adolescent occupies a very special place: published three years after The Devils and five years before his final masterpiece, The Karamazov Brothers, the novel charts the story of nineteen-year-old Arkady – the...

Returning to Russia from a tour in Italy, twenty-three-year-old Dimitry Sanin breaks his journey in Frankfurt. There he encounters the beautiful Gemma Roselli, who works in her parents' patisserie, and falls deeply and deliriously in love for the first...

Two of the most important Buddhist tracts from JapanA Penguin ClassicBoth of these works on life’s fleeting pleasures are by Buddhist monks from medieval Japan, but each represents a different worldview. In Essays in Idleness, his lively and...

Book Two of 1Q84 ended with Aomame standing on the Metropolitan Expressway with a gun between her lips. She knows she is being hunted, and that she has put herself in terrible danger in order to save the man she loves. But things are moving forward, and...

Growing up in the suburbs in post-war Japan, it seemed to Hajime that everyone but him had brothers and sisters. His sole companion was Shimamoto, also an only child. Together they spent long afternoons listening to her father's record collection. But...

A major new collection of Japanese short stories, many appearing in English for the first time, with an introduction by Haruki Murakami A Penguin Classic. This fantastically varied and exciting collection celebrates the art of the Japanese short story,...