Penguin Classics

Annals is presented in a compelling new translation by Cynthia Damon. Tacitus' Annals recounts the major historical events from the years shortly before the death of Augustus to the death of Nero in AD 68. With clarity and vivid intensity, Tacitus describes the reign of terror under the corrupt Tiberius, the great fire of Rome during the time of Nero,...

A new translation of this classic text The Ancien Regime and the Revolution is a comparison of revolutionary France and the despotic rule it toppled. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) is an objective observer of both periods—providing a merciless critique of the ancien regime, with its venality, oppression and inequality, yet acknowledging the reforms introduced under Louis XVI, and claiming that...

A History of My Times is a fascinating historical account of Greece at a point of crisis. Xenophon's history recounts nearly fifty turbulent years of warfare in Greece between 411 and 362 BC. Continuing the story of the Peloponnesian War at the point where Thucydides finished his magisterial history, this is a captivating chronicle of the conflicts that ultimately led...

Writing at the time of Napoleon's greatest campaigns, Prussian soldier and writer Carl von Clausewitz created this treatise on the art of warfare, which presented war as part of a coherent system of political thought. He is best remembered for his pronouncement that war is a continuation of politics by other means and for his observations on total war. Clausewitz...

Livy (c. 59 BC – AD 17) dedicated most of his life to writing some 142 volumes of history, the first five of which comprise The Early History of Rome. With stylistic brilliance, he chronicles nearly 400 years of history, from the founding of Rome (traditionally dated to 757 BC) to the Gallic invasion in 386 BC—an era which witnessed...

Winston Churchill's six-volume history of the cataclysm that swept the world remains the definitive history of the Second World War. Lucid, dramatic, remarkable both for its breadth and sweep and for its sense of personal involvement, it is universally acknowledged as a magnificent reconstruction and is an enduring, compelling work that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for...

Xenophon's account of the Greek war with Persia through the eyes of a young Athenian searching for his destiny abroad. In The Persian Expedition, Xenophon, a young Athenian noble who sought his destiny abroad, provides an enthralling eyewitness account of the attempt by a Greek mercenary army—the Ten Thousand—to help Prince Cyrus overthrow his brother and take the Persian throne....

The defeat of the Aztecs by Hernan Cortes and his small band of adventurers is one of the most startling military feats in history. Fifty years after the event, Bernal Diaz (c. 1498-1580), who served under Cortes, wrote this account of the march from the coast, Montezuma's death, the massacre of the Spaniards, and the eventual capture of the capital...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. The Three Electroknights poses the question, "What use to a being that lives beneath a sun are jewels of gas and silver stars of ice?" From a giant of twentieth-century science fiction, these four miniature space...

The first English-language publication of one of the greatest Polish science fiction novels of all time. Is BER-66 a human or a machine? As he navigates the corridors and locked rooms of a strange bunker, he must solve the mysteries of murderous doppelgängers, a slow-motion city on the verge of destruction, and ultimately, the all-powerful Mechanism itself... Considered to be...

A darkly funny satire from the most acclaimed and popular Russian science-fiction writers. Astrophysicist Dmitri Malianov is on the precipice of a major discovery - a Nobel Prize-worthy breakthrough. Yet, home alone in his Leningrad apartment, his work is beginning to be stymied. Strange and improbable distractions are mounting around him - and he is not alone. Across the city,...

A classic of intergalactic, metaphysical science fiction and one of Philip Pullman's favourite books. After journeying across the stars, a man from Earth finds himself lost among the scarlet deserts, black cliffs, and semi-sentient oceans of Tormance, a world lit by the star Arcturus. Pulled northward by the sound of drums, and undergoing strange physical transformations, the Earthman's adventures with...

New to Penguin Classics, the astonishing story of the Copernican Revolution, told through the words of the ground-breaking scientists who brought it about. 'How great, then, must be the incomprehensible space all the way to the furthest fixed stars? How wide and immense must be the depth of that fantastical sphere?' In the late fifteenth century, it was believed that...

The night after a shooting star is seen streaking through the sky from Mars, a cylinder is discovered on Horsell Common in London. At first, naive locals approach the cylinder armed just with a white flag, only to be quickly killed by an all-destroying heat-ray, as terrifying tentacled invaders emerge. Soon the whole of human civilisation is under threat, as...

The story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse only to be taken in by a den of thieves, shocked readers when it was first published. Dickens's tale of childhood innocence beset by evil depicts the dark criminal underworld of a London peopled by vivid and memorable characters - the arch-villain Fagin, the artful Dodger, the menacing...

The Bright Young Things of 1920s Mayfair, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercise their inventive minds and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade, whether it is promiscuity, dancing, cocktail parties or sports cars. A vivid assortment of characters, among them the struggling writer Adam Fenwick-Symes and the glamorous, aristocratic Nina Blount, hunt fast and furiously...

Shocking, banned and the subject of obscenity trials, Miller's first novel is a Penguin Modern Classic for the first time. One of the most scandalous and influential books of the 20th century, Tropic of Cancer redefined the novel. Set in Paris in the 1930s, it features a starving American writer who lives a bohemian life among prostitutes, pimps, and artists....

A haunting portrayal of addiction and a troubled young woman. She understands Karma, she says- "What I do, I reap" Her name means sadness, yet Tristessa, a prostitute and morphine addict, lives without cares in her shabby room with a menagerie of pets and an altar to the Virgin Mary. Based on Jack Kerouac's own real-life love affair in Mexico...

A compulsive novel from one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. A recently divorced actor and a no less lonely woman meet by chance in a New York diner. The city—its bars, its cheap motels, and its rented rooms—becomes the cinematic setting of the couple's escalating and mysterious relationship. A move against desperation and drift, their affair...

A gripping tale of small town suspicion and revenge, part of the new Maigret series. 'There was an exaggerated humility about her. And yet he sensed, beneath that image, glints of pride held firmly in check. She was anaemic. Her flat chest was not formed to rouse desire. Nevertheless, she was strangely appealing, perhaps because she seemed troubled, despondent, sickly.'...

New to Penguin Modern Classics, the seminal work of gay literature that sparked a notorious legal trial. The Well of Loneliness tells the story of tomboyish Stephen, who hunts, wears trousers and cuts her hair short - and who gradually comes to realise that she is attracted to women. Charting her romantic and professional adventures during the First World War...

The Waves is Woolf's innovative modernist novel. Tracing the lives of a group of friends, this novel follows their development from childhood to middle age. While social events, individual achievements, and disappointments form its narrative, the novel is most remarkable for the rich poetic language that expresses the inner life of its characters—their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness...

Though best known in the English-speaking world for his short fictions and poems, Borges is revered in Latin America equally as an immensely prolific and beguiling writer of non-fiction prose. In The Total Library, more than 150 of Borges' most brilliant pieces are brought together for the first time in one volume—all in superb new translations. More than a hundred...

New to Penguin Classics, the international bestseller by one of Europe's pre-eminent literary figures. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is a masterful retelling of the ancient myths and fables we may only think we know. From the tale of Europa and the bull to the fall of Troy, Roberto Calasso weaves his way through the entire world of Greek...

New to Penguin Classics, this is the funny and deeply moving story of the apocalypse - as seen from one small village in England. Self-important and more or less friendless, retired teacher Edgar Hopkins lives for the thrill of winning poultry prizes. But his narrow world is shattered when he discovers that the moon is about to come crashing to...

The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith, one of America's foremost economists, follows the incredible economic rise and fall that led to the great crash of 1929. No account of the financial insanity of 1929 has been issued in a form at once so readable, so humorous, and so carefully authenticated as this classic book. J.K. Galbraith examines the...

Drawing together for the first time his poems, letters, essays, songs, and photographs, this wide-ranging collection is the essential record of the Beat icon. Visionary poet Allen Ginsberg was one of the most influential cultural and literary figures of the 20th century, his face and political causes familiar to millions who had never even read his poetry. Yet, he is...

Laing's radical approach to insanity offered a rich existential analysis of personal alienation and made him a cult figure in the 1960s. Yet his work was most significant for its humane attitude, which put the patient back at the centre of treatment. His groundbreaking exploration of the nature of madness, R.D. Laing's The Divided Self, illuminated the nature of mental...

Another addition to Penguin Modern Classics' key Kerouac holdings. The Dharma Bums appeared just one year after the author's explosive On the Road had put the Beat Generation on the literary map and Kerouac on the best-seller list. The same expansiveness, humour, and contagious zest for life that sparked the earlier novels sparks this one too, but through a more...

The Day of the Triffids introduces readers to the triffids, a monstrous species of stinging plant; they walk, they talk, they dominate the world. The narrator of this novel wakes up in hospital to find that, by missing the end of the world, he has survived to witness a new world. But the new world that awaits him is both...

A charming, mind-bending, and anarchic book of imagined civilizations. 'Most cosmic civilizations long for things, in the depths of their souls, they would never openly admit to...' Trurl and Klapaucius are 'constructors'—they travel around the universe creating machines of astonishing inventiveness and power, visiting a bewildering variety of violent, peculiar, and morose civilizations. The Cyberiad is oddly reminiscent of Gulliver's...

First paperback publication of Italo Calvino's phenomenally funny account of the universe as a cosmic joke. The Complete Cosmicomics enchants with stories about the evolution of the universe, presenting characters fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures. These characters disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms, and...

Available in English for the first time, The Chandelier is one of Lispector's most radical books and a key part of what made her a Brazilian legend. 'She found the best clay that one could desire- white, supple, sticky, cold ... She would get a clear and tender material from which she could shape a world' Like the clay from...

The adventures of one of Lem's most endearing characters, Pirx—a 'space truck driver' and everyman in Outer Space. Mission: Vertical launch at half booster power. Ascent to ellipsis B68. Correction to stable oriental path, with orbital period of four hours and twenty-six minutes. Proceed to rendezvous with shuttlecraft vehicles of the JO-2 type. There await further instructions. Tales of Pirx...

New to Penguin Modern Classics, one of the most important works ever written on the problem of social stigma. In this groundbreaking work, acclaimed sociologist Erving Goffman examines how society treats those who it considers abnormal. Forced to adjust their social identities from situation to situation, Goffman analyses the variety of strategies that stigmatised individuals deploy to deal with the...

SS-GB offers a chilling alternative history of the Second World War, in which the Nazis have conquered Britain. It is 1941, and Germany has won the war. Britain is occupied, Churchill has been executed, and the King is imprisoned in the Tower of London. At Scotland Yard, Detective Inspector Archer tries to do his job and keep his head down....

A new narrator provides some long-awaited answers to the Bernard Samson mystery in the final novel of the Hook, Line and Sinker trilogy. Of all the mysteries Bernard Samson has encountered, the greatest is his wife Fiona. Dedicated agent of the Service and a woman of secrets, she will risk everything to play the long game. As the truth about...

The second book of the Hook, Line and Sinker series finds Bernard Samson on the run through Berlin, Vienna and Prague. Bernard Samson is a spy on the run. But in the murky streets of Berlin, he knows where to hide. Wanted for an act of treachery he has not committed, he must not only escape the grasp of London...

Spy Hook introduces us to Bernard Samson, a spy forced on the run from his own government in this nail-biting first instalment of the Hook, Line and Sinker series. Millions of pounds have gone missing, and the Department has sent agent Bernard Samson to Washington to track them down. But this mission is just the start of something far deeper...

W.B. Yeats's Selected Poems is edited with an introduction and notes by Timothy Webb in Penguin Modern Classics. Few have lived their ideas so passionately and nobly as W.B. Yeats in his love affairs, politics, and poetry. From his youth in the 1880s, as a fertile dreamer rediscovering and remaking the Irish tradition, he grew into a great and innovative...

The bestselling epic novel of family, treachery, rivalry, religious fervour and the turbulent fate of a people. The year is 1797, and the kingdom of Segu is flourishing. The people of Segu, the Bambara, are guided by their griots and priests while their lives are ruled by nature. But change is about to come - from the east comes a...

New to Penguin Modern Classics, the very first selection of stories featuring the irrepressible Rumpole. Horace Rumpole, the old boy committed to defending the apparently indefensible, trusting of a jury, and scornful of the law's pomposities, appears here in a new edition of the 1978 iconic Rumpole debut. This volume collects the much-loved stories Rumpole and the Younger Generation, Rumpole...

A major career-spanning collection from the inimitable Nobel Prize-winning poet. For the past fifty years, Louise Glück has been a major force in modern poetry, distinguished as much for the restless intelligence, wit, and intimacy of her poetic voice as for her development of a particular form—the book-length sequence of poems. This volume brings together the twelve collections Glück has...

Ambler's classic thriller of post-war international politics and intrigue, centring on gun-smuggling in South-East Asia. Girija Krishnan, an Indian clerk, sees the opportunity of his lifetime when he stumbles on a lost cache of arms hidden in the Malayan jungle. If he can find a buyer for the weapons, he will be able to achieve his life-long dream of creating...

One of America's most influential and admired short story writers, new to Penguin Modern Classics. From the gothic Old South to revolutionary Mexico, few writers have evoked such a multitude of worlds, both exterior and interior, as powerfully as Katherine Anne Porter. This collection gathers together the best of her Pulitzer Prize-winning short fiction, including Pale Horse, Pale Rider, where...

From the moment Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya in 1914 to manage a coffee plantation, her heart belonged to Africa. Drawn to the intense colours and ravishing landscapes, Karen Blixen spent her happiest years on the farm, and her experiences and friendships with the people around her are vividly recalled in these memoirs. Out of Africa is the story of...

Only When I Larf is a comedy thriller about three New York con artists whose biggest heist goes awry. The three confidence tricksters had a style that earned them millions. Silas was the leader, slick and self-assured—but dissatisfied. Bob was the junior partner, longing for the open road where pickings were rich and the living was easy. And Liz, Silas'...

New to Penguin Modern Classics Numbers in the Dark is a collection of short stories covering the length of Italo Calvino's extraordinary writing career, from when he was a teenager to shortly before his death. They include witty allegories and wise fables; a town where everything has been forbidden apart from the game of tip-cat; a pitiable tribe watching the...

First time in Modern Classics Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is his account of that atrocity—the ever-increasing horrors he endured, the loss of his family, and his struggle to survive in a world that stripped him of humanity, dignity, and faith....

A soaring, sensual coming-of-age novel, by the legendary Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet. If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive. A little black girl opens her eyes in 1930s Harlem. Around her, a heady swirl of passers-by, car horns, kerosene lamps, the stock market falling, fried bananas,...

Volume one of Javier Marías's acclaimed and evocative novel in parts. Recently divorced, Jacques Deza moves from Madrid to London to start anew. At a party held by retired don, semi-retired spy and old friend Sir Peter Wheeler, he meets the inscrutable Bertram Tupra. Tupra is impressed by Deza's talent for seeing through people and enlists him in a mysterious...

Professor Timofey Pnin, late of Tsarist Russia, is now precariously perched on a college campus in the fast beating heart of the USA. In a series of funny and sad misunderstandings, Pnin does halting battle with American life and language.

Iris Origo's most famous book, her classic study of the life and times of a medieval Italian merchant. In 1870, an astonishing cache, containing some 150,000 letters and great numbers of business documents, came to light. Iris Origo drew on this material to paint, in detail, a picture of Italian domestic life on the eve of the Renaissance. Francesco di...

The Making of the English Working Class is the revolutionary account of working-class culture and ideals, reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic to mark the 50th anniversary of its publication. This brilliant account of working-class society in its formative years, 1780 to 1832, revolutionised our understanding of English social history. E. P. Thompson shows how the working class took part...

Key reading for 2018 - Orwell's moving reflections on the English character and his passionate belief in the need for political change. The Lion and the Unicorn was written in London during the worst period of the Blitz. It is vintage Orwell, a dynamic outline of his belief in socialism, patriotism, and an English revolution. His fullest political statement, it...

A tale of intense friendship and almost overwhelming grief amongst the frozen fjords of rural Norway. In winter, the black ice cracks like a gunshot across the lake, growing thicker and darker every night. Nearby, a frozen waterfall transforms into a fantastic, baroque structure with dripping buttresses, flying spurs of ice and translucent, sparkling towers. The schoolchildren call it the...

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 her own, painful memories—of cheap hotels and drab Parisian cafes; of devastating love affairs; of her childhood in...

One of the seminal texts on child development, which continues to influence contemporary ideas on parenting. The Child, the Family, and the Outside World by D. W. Winnicott remains a pivotal work in the field of child psychiatry. In this landmark publication, re-issued on the fiftieth anniversary of Winnicott's death, the author presents his ground-breaking theories of child development and...

The most acclaimed volume of poetry by the legendary Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic Filled with rage and tenderness, Audre Lorde's most acclaimed poetry collection speaks of mothers and children, female strength and vulnerability, renewal and revenge, goddesses and warriors, ancient magic and...

Hailed as the greatest modern lyrical poet of Germany, Rainer Maria Rilke's genius lies in his passion for perfection, artistic integrity and 'willingness to remain a perpetual beginner'. The verse contained in this selection ranges from the objective, naturalistic descriptions of his earliest works to the increasingly effusive outpourings of half-religious ecstasy and anguish that characterise his later poems. This...

Spain's greatest and most well-loved modern poet, Lorca has long been admired for the emotional intensity and dark brilliance of his work, which drew on music, drama, mythology and the songs of his Andalusian childhood. From the playful Suites and stylised Gypsy Ballads, to his own dark vision of urban life, Poet in New York, and his elegiac meditation on...

The most beautiful and powerful of Milosz's poems from across his writing life This selection brings together the most beautiful and powerful of Czeslaw Milosz's poems, spanning his writing life. In verses such as Cafe, he considers the upheaval, revolutions, and two world wars that he had witnessed, while My Faithful Mother Tongue reflects the loyalty he felt to his...

A brilliantly atmospheric and gripping portrayal of the dark heart of a killer, new to Penguin Modern Classics. At the Universal Advertising Agency on the Strand, London, a murder is being planned. Three men have been discovered taking bribes and face the grim prospect of the dole queue, unless they can get rid of the person who caught them. Their...

Thirteen strangely wrought stories make up Nabokov's Dozen. In some of these stories, shadowy people pass through, cooped up by life, mangled by it, with nowhere to escape to. Their dreams lie stifled, smothered by routine and repetition, and frustrations lurk in all the corners. In others, there are elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness, which flutter away before they can...

Three works of erotic prose fusing sex and spirituality, new to Penguin Modern Classics. In these three works of erotic prose, Georges Bataille fuses sex and spirituality in a highly personal and philosophical vision of the self. My Mother is a frank and intense depiction of a young man's sexual initiation and corruption by his mother, where the profane becomes...

The final novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is a celebration of the American Midwest with Cather's strongest heroine at its heart. Jim and Ántonia meet as children in the wide open plains of Nebraska at the end of the nineteenth century. Jim leaves for college and a career in the east, while Ántonia stays at home, dedicating herself...

A reissue of the PMC edition of Woolf's masterpiece, now with a new jacket. One of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century - Michael Cunningham Mrs Dalloway introduces us to Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, as she prepares for a party and reflects on those she once loved. Meanwhile, in another part of London, Septimus Warren Smith...

Kerouac's famed freewheeling poem joins the Penguin Modern Classics. 'I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday' Freewheeling and spontaneous, Mexico City Blues is Jack Kerouac's most significant and emblematic poem. Consisting of 242 loosely linked 'choruses', it takes in life, death, spirituality, jazz improvisation, memory, fantasies and dreams,...

In her memoirs, Simone de Beauvoir created a remarkable portrait of a twentieth-century woman's struggle for independence. A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family. Beauvoir writes about rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of...

Maigret's Dead Man plunges into the murky Parisian underworld in the latest addition to the Penguin Maigret series. Without the injuries, the man's face would have been unremarkable, fairly young and probably quite cheerful. Even in death, there were traces of something open and honest in his expression. That shoeless foot looked incongruous lying on the pavement next to another...

The discovery of a dismembered body leads Maigret into one of his strangest cases yet. When a man's headless body is pulled from the Canal Saint Martin, Maigret and his colleagues are puzzled. In a chance encounter at a local café, Maigret uncovers the truth behind this disturbing murder in an intriguing story of an estranged family, adulterous affairs, and...

New to Penguin Modern Classics Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez tells the enduring tale of Florentino Ariza, who has never forgotten his first love. For nearly a lifetime, he has waited in silence since his beloved Fermina married another man. No woman can replace her in his heart. But now, her husband is dead. Finally—after...

In one of the wittiest novels of them all, Nancy Mitford casts a finely gauged net to capture perfectly the foibles and fancies of the English upper class. Set in the privileged world of the county house party and the London season, this is a comedy of English manners between the wars by one of the most individual, beguiling, and...

The first novel by the great American novelist, now the subject of a major new film starring Jude Law. Look Homeward, Angel tells the story of Eugene Gant, who was born in 1900 to hard-drinking stone-cutter Oliver and entrepreneurial Eliza, growing up in small-town America. Eugene is both a lonely outsider and a passionate chronicler of American life. As Eugene...

Another addition to Penguin Modern Classics' key Kerouac holdings, alongside On the Road, The Town and the City & The Subterraneans. As he roams the US, Mexico, Morocco, Paris and London, Kerouac records life on the road in prose of pure poetry. Standing on the engine of a train as it rushes past fields of prickly cactus; witnessing his first...

A tour de force of passion and desire from Anaïs Nin, the master of erotic literature — now a major series on Sky Atlantic. Combining startling lyricism with what often seems like the entire breadth of human sensuality, Little Birds is Anaïs Nin's masterwork. Each of the volume's thirteen stories builds on the other, embracing desire in all its variety,...

The bluesy, gutsy, no-holds-barred memoir of jazz legend Billie Holiday. "I've been told that no one sings the word 'hunger' like I do. Or the word 'love'." Lady Sings the Blues is the inimitable autobiography of one of the greatest icons of the twentieth century. Born to a single mother in 1915 Baltimore, Billie Holiday had her first run-in with...

A remarkable retelling of Hindu mythology, from one of Europe's greatest literary figures. In Ka, Roberto Calasso delves into the corpus of classical Sanskrit literature, recreating and re-imagining the enchanting world of ancient India. Beginning with the Rig-Veda, Ka weaves together myths from the Upanishad, the Mahabharata, and the stories of the Buddha, all of which pose questions that have...

'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked' Beat movement icon and visionary poet, Allen Ginsberg broke boundaries with his fearless, pyrotechnic verse. This new collection brings together the famous poems that made his name as a defining figure of the counterculture. They include the apocalyptic Howl, which became the subject of an obscenity...

An unsettling story of a teenage girl's self-destruction from the author of The Lottery. Natalie Waite, daughter of a mediocre writer and a neurotic housewife, is increasingly unsure of her place in the world. In the midst of adolescence, she senses a creeping darkness in her life, which will spread among nightmarish parties, poisonous college cliques, and the manipulations of...