Penguin Classics

The theme of the great Shakespearean tragedies is the fall from grace of a great man due to a flaw in his nature. Whether it is the ruthless ambition of Macbeth or the folly of Lear, the irresolution of Hamlet or the suspicion of Othello, the cause of the tragedy—even when it is the murder of a king—is trifling compared...

Reflections by the creator of the essay form display the humane, sceptical, humorous, and honest views of Montaigne, revealing his thoughts on sexuality, religion, cannibals, intellectuals, and other unexpected themes. Included are such celebrated works as On Solitude, To Philosophise Is to Learn How to Die, and On Experience.

A special look for the books featuring his iconic character, George Smiley. After a routine security check by George Smiley, civil servant Samuel Fennan apparently kills himself. When Smiley finds Circus head Maston is trying to blame him for the man's death, he begins his own investigation, meeting with Fennan's widow to find out what could have led him to...

A beautiful 60th anniversary special edition of the novel that introduced the world to George Smiley, now with a new introduction by John le Carré. After a routine security check by George Smiley, civil servant Samuel Fennan apparently kills himself. When Smiley finds Circus head Maston is trying to blame him for the man's death, he begins his own investigation,...

Jean Rhys's unique prequel to Jane Eyre, a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature. Jean Rhys's late, literary masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea was inspired by Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent...

The new paperback series- Penguin English Library The Penguin English Library Edition of Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster 'I had got an idea that everyone here spent their lives in making little sacrifices for objects they didn't care for, to please people they didn't love; that they never learned to be sincere - and, what's as...

Depicting the daily struggle of the individual against a tyrannical dictatorship, We the Living shows the terrible impact of a revolution on three people who demand the right to live their own lives and pursue their happiness. Kira, determined to maintain her independence and courageous in the face of starvation and poverty; Leo, upper class and paralysed by state repression;...

Vile Bodies is Evelyn Waugh's brilliant skewering of the Roaring Twenties, now available in a wonderful new hardback edition. 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...

A must-have new edition of Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, featuring a cover illustrated by Alison Bechdel, the New York Times bestselling author of Fun Home, and a new foreword by Patricia Lockwood. A Penguin Classics Graphic Deluxe Edition Every summer, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey and their eight children vacation on Scotland's idyllic Isle of Skye, surrounded by artist friends. They expect...

The best satire of journalism ever written, now in a wonderful new hardback edition. Lord Copper, newspaper magnate and proprietor of The Daily Beast, has always prided himself on his intuitive flair for spotting ace reporters. That is not to say he has not made the odd blunder, however, and may in a moment of weakness make another. Acting on...

A collectible hardcover edition of Virginia Woolf's pioneering novel about a time-travelling sixteenth-century nobleman who wakes up in the body of a woman, with a new foreword by Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. "A brilliant book that teaches you so much about identity and love—all these fundamental questions that we ask ourselves." -...

The first novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is an ode to the American Midwest and the immigrants who transformed it. To the anger of her brothers, it is Alexandra who is entrusted to manage their family farm in the tough, hostile prairie of Hanover, Nebraska, following the death of their father. As the years pass, Alexandra rises heroically...

A dreamlike, frozen dystopia from one of the twentieth century's most unique writers. No one knows why the ice has come, and no one can stop it. Every day it creeps further across the earth, covering the land in snow and freezing everything in its path. Through this bleached, devastated world, one man pursues the silver-haired girl he loves, as...

An unforgettable portrait of a woman bravely confronting loneliness and despair in her quest for self-determination, from the author of Wide Sargasso Sea. Jean Rhys was a talent before her time, with an impressive ability to express the anguish of young, single women. In Good Morning, Midnight, Rhys created the powerfully modern portrait of Sophia Jansen, whose emancipation is far...

When Connecticut mechanic and foreman Hank Morgan is knocked unconscious, he wakes not to the familiar scenes of nineteenth-century America but to the bewildering sights and sounds of sixth-century Camelot. Although confused at first and quickly imprisoned, he soon realises that his knowledge of the future can transform his fate. Correctly predicting a solar eclipse from inside his prison cell,...

An existential masterpiece from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. In The Outsider, Camus explores the alienation of an individual who refuses to conform to social norms. Meursault, his anti-hero, will not lie. When his mother dies, he refuses to show his emotions simply to satisfy the expectations of others. And when he commits a random act...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Rumi's verses have been a balm for readers' souls for over eight centuries. This exquisite selection brings together some of the Persian mystic's most profound, evocative and transcendent works. Exploring passion, heartbreak, friendship, faith and the myriad ways in which we move through the world, these strikingly modern poems are perfect...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has befallen no man before.' After five years of 'strange amnesia', Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee remains haunted by madness and memories that cannot be real. Desperate for answers, he travels to Western Australia, joining an archaeological excavation...

A Poet Can Survive Everything But a Misprint by Oscar Wilde is one of 90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. "All art," Oscar Wilde once announced, "is quite useless." Selected here are some of his finest prose works on the subject of art—useless, illuminating, artificial, uplifting, radical, gorgeous, boring, sublime—and his most brilliant aphorisms on the creative...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books What would happen if a doctor implanted the pituitary gland and testicles of a man into the body of a stray dog? In Mikhail Bulgakov's topsy-turvy world, the dog starts to walk on two legs, drink, smoke, thieve, chase women, and recite every swear word in Russian. The perfect candidate for...

Primo Levi was one of the most astonishing voices to emerge from the twentieth century. This landmark selection of his short stories opens up a world of wonder, love, cruelty, and curious twists of fate, where nothing is as it seems. In The Fugitive, an office worker composes the most beautiful poem ever, with unforeseen consequences. Meanwhile, Magic Paint sees...

A powerful 1931 portrayal of a German town on the brink of chaos, from bestselling author Hans Fallada. It is summer, 1929, and in a small German town a storm is brewing. The shabby reporter Tredup leads a precarious existence working for the Pomeranian Chronicle—until he takes some photographs that offer the chance to make a fortune. In Kruger's bar,...

Little Black Classics - the new series to celebrate Penguin's 80th anniversary. I will go in, out of this dust and heat, out of this dry glitter of vanity, out of these toilsome futilities. I will go and never return. Three disturbing, mysterious and moving stories from Wells, science-fiction pioneer. Introducing Little Black Classics- 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday....

New selection of the best science fiction stories of the last sixty years. This new edition of Brian Aldiss's classic anthology, A Science Fiction Omnibus, brings together a diverse selection of science fiction spanning over sixty years, from Isaac Asimov's 'Nightfall', first published in 1941, to the 2006 story 'Friends in Need' by Eliza Blair. Including authors such as Clifford...

Just as the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe, Steinbeck and Capa began a remarkable journey through the Soviet Union. Their travels took them to Moscow and Stalingrad. What they saw and recorded was what Steinbeck called the "great other side", the ordinary lives of Russian men and women. Combining Steinbeck's compassion, humour, and eye for detail with Capa's photographic...

With an introduction by Maya Jaggi Chris, Ikem, and Beatrice are like-minded friends working under the military regime of His Excellency, the Sandhurst-educated President of Kangan. In the pressurised atmosphere of oppression and intimidation, they are simply trying to live and love—and remain friends. But in a world where each day brings a new betrayal, hope is hard to cling...

A powerful dystopian novel from a writer who experienced firsthand the dehumanising conditions of Soviet Russia, Ayn Rand's Anthem includes an introduction by Leonard Peikoff in Penguin Modern Classics. Equality 7-2521 is a man apart. Since The Great Rebirth, it has been a crime in his world to think or act as an individual. Even love is forbidden. Yet since...

Answered Prayers, Truman Capote's unfinished final novel, is an unsparing tell-all of New York high society that sent a seismic shock through the public and Capote's own social circle. Catapulted from a childhood spent in a Missouri orphanage to the dizzying peaks of New York high society, the destitute and debauched writer P. B. Jones spends his days moving between...

One of 15 volumes in this series, this title is part of a plan to generate non-specialist Freud for a wide readership, extending beyond the institutional and clinical market. An Outline of Psychoanalysis presents material to the reader in an alternative way and contains introductory lectures on psychoanalysis, as well as an outline of psychoanalysis itself.

This is a very personal book, about being alone and lost. In 1975, Kapuscinski's employers sent him to Angola to cover the civil war that had broken out after independence. For months, he watched as Luanda and then the rest of the country collapsed into a civil war that was, in the author's words, 'sloppy, dogged and cruel'. In his...

Bennett's remarkable sermon against parental tyranny set in the industrial world of early twentieth century England. Against the beautifully evoked backdrop of the Potteries district, the Five Towns—a gossipy community with its prayer meetings, hard physical work, small-minded bigotry and quick condemnation of others—Anna is dominated by her tight-fisted, tyrannical father. She inherits a fortune— with brilliant sympathy, charm and...

First paperback publication of the legendary collaboration between William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, a hard-boiled crime novel about a shocking murder at the dawn of the Beat Generation. In 1944, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs were charged as accessories to murder. One of their friends, Lucien Carr, had stabbed another, David Kammerer. Carr had come to each of...

How often, honestly, does the unveiling in translation of a 'forgotten genius' live up to the hype? Well here's one that does: Raduan Nassar. Times Literary Supplement I felt the powerful strength of my family overrunning me like a heavy rush of water. For André, a young man growing up on a farm in Brazil, life consists of 'the earth,...

New to PMC A Month of Sundays, Updike's seventh novel, concerns a month of seven days, a period of enforced rest and recreation as experienced by the Reverend Tom Marshfield. He is sent west from his Midwestern church in disgrace.

A Moment of War is the powerful and harrowing final book in the acclaimed trilogy that began with Cider with Rosie. A Moment of War is the magnificent conclusion to Laurie Lee's autobiographical trilogy begun in Cider with Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. It was December 1937 when the young Laurie Lee crossed the Pyrenees and...

A new translation of this atmospheric novel set in the squalid streets of Paris, part of the new Maigret series. The Czech was warming up, though in a quiet, almost dull way that was characteristic of the man. Out of the corner of his eye, Maigret noticed his hands, long hands, astonishingly white and slightly freckled. They seemed to warm...

'A bitter yet funny satire ... probably the best book to come out of West Africa' - Anthony Burgess As Minister for Culture, the Honourable M. A. Nanga is a man of the people, as cynical as he is charming, and a roguish opportunist. At first, the contrast between Nanga and Odili, a former pupil who is visiting the ministry,...

All Souls by Javier Marías is a darkly humorous Oxford novel, newly available in Penguin Modern Classics. The pretty young tutor Clare Bayes attracts many eyes at an Oxford college dinner, not least those of a visiting Spanish lecturer who is desperate to escape his conversation with an obese economist about an eighteenth-century cider tax. As they begin an affair,...

An exuberant account of Henry Miller's trip to the US. Henry Miller always said that his best writing was in his letters, and this missive to his friend Alfred Perles is an exuberant, humorous account of his visit to New York in 1935 and return to Europe aboard a Dutch ship. Despite its high repute among Miller devotees, Aller Retour...

A wonderful selection of Waugh's journalism, reissued with a new cover look. Whether celebrating Hogarth or savaging Hollywood, mocking modern manners or defending traditional English architecture, inviting readers to come inside the Catholic Church or expressing his contempt for modish Marxism and American-style religion, Evelyn Waugh's journalism is sparkling, sometimes vitriolic and always full of good sense. In this wonderful...

A Little Learning, Waugh's witty and entertaining autobiography, is reissued in a new jacket look. 'Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.' Waugh begins his story with heredity, writing of the energetic, literary and sometimes eccentric men and women who, unknown to themselves, contributed to his genius. Save...

On the marriage of Julius von Felden and Melanie Merz, the fortunes of two families are somewhat fatally entwined. In A Legacy, Sybille Bedford depicts their vastly different worlds: the wealthy bourgeois life of the Merzes in Berlin and the aristocratic eccentricity of the von Felden dynasty in rural Baden. Portrayed with exquisite wit and acute observation, their personal upheavals...

'Still the best portrait of modern rural life in England, subtle and compassionate' Roger Deakin, BBC Wildlife magazine This colourful, perceptive portrayal of English country life reverberates with the voices of the village inhabitants, from the reminiscences of survivors of the Great War evoking days gone by, to the concerns of a younger generation of farm-workers and the fascinating and...

Runciman's great Crusades trilogy reissued in Penguin Modern Classics 'The whole tale is one of faith and folly, courage and greed, hope and delusion.' In 1187, the catastrophic Battle of Hattin resulted in Saladin's destruction of the crusaders' main army. In an atmosphere of total crisis, the three principal leaders of Europe, Philip Augustus, Richard the Lionheart, and Frederick Barbarossa,...

Is it possible to die a happy death? This is the central question of Camus's astonishing early novel, published posthumously and greeted as a major literary event. It tells the story of a young Algerian, Mersault, who defies society's rules by committing a murder and escaping punishment, then experimenting with different ways of life and finally dying a happy man....

Originally published in 1967, Ngugi's third novel is his best known and most ambitious work. A Grain of Wheat portrays several characters in a village whose intertwined lives are transformed by the 1952-1960 Emergency in Kenya. As the action follows the village's arrangements for Uhuru (independence) Day, this is a novel of stories within stories, a narrative interwoven with myth...

Miller's provocative play about a guilt-ridden man, fighting his inner demons. Quentin is a successful lawyer in New York, but inside his head he is struggling with his own sense of guilt and the shadows of his past relationships. One of these is an ill-fated marriage to the charming and beautiful Maggie, who went from operating a switchboard to become...

A brilliant, yet brutal, portrait of a woman struggling to retrieve both life and love. For six months, Julia has lived alone in a drab Parisian hotel on an allowance from her ex-lover, Mr Mackenzie. When his cheques stop, Julia decides to leave France and return to London. The tale of her ten-day visit contains some of Jean Rhys's most...

Mailer's superb account, written as it was happening, of the first attempt to land men on the moon. 'Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.' A Fire on the Moon tells the scarcely credible story of the Apollo 11 mission. It is suffused with Mailer's obsession both with the astronauts themselves and with his own anxieties and terrors about...

An essential guide to the life and work of one of America's most controversial writers. Advertisements for Myself is a comprehensive collection of the best of Norman Mailer's essays, stories, interviews, and journalism from the Forties and Fifties, linked by anarchic and riotous autobiographical commentary. Laying bare the heart of a witty, belligerent, and vigorous writer, this manifesto of Mailer's...

A reissue in a beautiful new PMC jacket of one of the 20th century's great American novels. Published in 1957, two years after its author's death at the age of forty-five, A Death in the Family remains a near-perfect work of art, an autobiographical novel that contains one of the most evocative depictions of loss and grief ever written. As...

From the acclaimed writer Margaret Drabble come her short stories, in Penguin Modern Classics for the first time. Margaret Drabble is one of the major literary figures of her generation. In this collection of her complete short fiction from across four decades, she examines the intense private worlds and passions of everyday people. From one man's honeymooning epiphany in Hassan's...

An erotic and intricate novella from one of the most enigmatic and important figures in Brazilian literature. Yes, bastard, you're the one I love A pair of lovers - a young female journalist and an older man who owns an isolated farm in the Brazilian outback - spend the night together. The next day they proceed to destroy each other....

The first unabridged English translation of the electrifying novel of secrets and delusions, from one of the greatest Italian writers of the twentieth century. Elisa—orphaned as a child, raised by a 'fallen woman', fed by fairy tales—has lived in an outlandish imaginary world for years. When her guardian dies, she feels compelled to confront her family's tortured and dramatic past,...

An essential new translation of the author's complete, uncensored diaries - revealing the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century's most influential writers. Dating from 1909 to 1923, Franz Kafka's Diaries contains a broad array of writing, including accounts of daily events, assorted reflections and observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, records of dreams, and unrevised texts...

The electrifying memoir of acclaimed photographer Sally Mann - An instant classic (New York Times). Where does the impulse to create come from? What are the forces that shape an artist's work? This ground-breaking memoir, a unique interplay of narrative and image, charts the making of one of America's greatest artists. As Sally Mann tells her story, her work's preoccupation...

'What Japan was she owed to the samurai. They were not only the flower of the nation, but its root as well.' Inazo Nitobe's book, the most influential ever written on Bushido, or the samurai Way of the Warrior, argues that the philosophy of Bushido is the true key to understanding the soul of Japan. GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some...

In 20 short books, Penguin Classics brings you the new canon of great environmental works. Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As humans have driven the living planet to the brink of collapse, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend it. Their words have endured, becoming the classics that define the environmental...

In 20 short books, Penguin Classics brings you the new canon of great environmental works. Taking us on an extraordinary journey into the past and around the globe, from coral reefs to the North Pole, deserts to rainforests, Tim Flannery tells the story of the earth's climate, and how we have changed it. A Warning from the Golden Toad is...

A classic of English rural life by a writer admired by Hemingway, published in Classics for the first time. Considered a classic at the time of its publication in 1910, A Shepherd's Life is a rare account of the lives of those who lived on and worked the land in nineteenth-century rural Britain. A masterful work of prose, W. H....

One of the greatest historical records of fourteenth-century England and France. The Chronicles of Froissart (1337-1410) are one of the greatest contemporary records of fourteenth-century England and France. Depicting the great age of Anglo-French rivalry from the deposition of Edward II to the downfall of Richard II, Froissart powerfully portrays the deeds of knights in battle at Sluys, Crecy, Calais...

Science fiction meets magical realism in this brilliant novel from one of Latin America's best-loved science-fiction writers. In the cafes and bars of Rosario, Argentina, there are sure to be many tall tales told. But none, perhaps, quite as spectacular as those recounted by Trafalgar Medrano. With a coffeepot and a pack of cigarettes to hand, he will nonchalantly tell...

A new selection of lyrically haunting short stories from a Japanese literary icon. A writer is seized by apocalyptic visions; a voyeuristic marquis commits a brutal act; and a trio of beatniks dance to modern jazz in the ruins of an abandoned church. Here, stark autobiography contrasts with pure horror, and the tenderness of first love cedes to obsession, heartbreak...

A thrilling crime classic, from the bestselling author of Tokyo Express. Tokyo, 1960. As the first rays of morning light hit the rails at Kamata Station, a man's body is found on the tracks. With only two leads - a distinctive accent and a single word, 'kameda' - senior inspector Imanishi Eitaro is called in to solve the puzzle. Setting...

Part biography, part detective story – the extraordinary life of the eccentric writer Frederick Baron Corvo. One summer afternoon A.J.A. Symons is handed a peculiar novel called Hadrian the Seventh and, captivated by this forgotten masterpiece, determines to learn everything he can about its mysterious author. Symons proceeds as a detective might, investigating leads, collecting evidence, and corresponding with witnesses....

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...

The final, previously unpublished volume of one of the twentieth century's seminal works. Foucault's The History of Sexuality changed the way we think about power, selfhood, and sexuality. In this fourth and final volume, he turns his attention to early Christianity, exploring how ancient ideas of pleasure were modified into the Christian notion of the 'flesh'—a transformation that would define...

Glamorous expat life in Paris is brought to life in this new translation, part of the Maigret series. Try to imagine a guest, a wealthy woman, staying at the Majestic with her husband, her son, a nurse and a governess... In a suite that costs more than a thousand francs a day... At six in the morning, she's strangled, not...

New to Modern Classics alongside Spark's The Drivers' Seat (ISBN- 0141188340). A man of devilish charm and enterprising spirit, Dougal Douglas is employed to revitalise the ailing firm of Meadows, Meade & Grindley. He succeeds, but not quite in the way his employer intended. Strange things begin to happen as Dougal exerts an uncanny influence on the inhabitants of Peckham...

The first English translation of this stirring novel of idealist loyalty and sibling love, by one of East Germany's most important writers. 1960. The border between East and West Germany has closed. For Elisabeth, a young painter, the GDR is her generation's chance to build an egalitarian socialist future. For her brother Uli, it is a place of stricture and...

The landmark poetry collection that transformed 20th-century Arabic poetry, in a brilliant new translation by Kareem James Abu-Zeid and Ivan Eubanks. Written in the early 1960s by Adonis, 'the most eloquent spokesman and explorer of Arabic modernity' (Edward Said), Songs of Mihyar the Damascene is widely considered to be the apex of the modernist poetry movement in the Arab world,...

For the first time, the phenomenal bestselling literary memoir will be published in Penguin Modern Classics. Every Thursday morning in a living room in Iran, over tea and pastries, eight women meet in secret to discuss forbidden works of Western literature. As they lose themselves in the worlds of Lolita, The Great Gatsby, and Pride and Prejudice, gradually they come...

A superb historical novel by one of Japan's greatest novelists In 1613, Father Pedro Velasco's dream came true. He set sail with a small group of Japanese Samurai, first for Mexico, then Spain, then Rome. Velasco could speak Japanese and his zealous hope was to become bishop of a converted, Catholic Japan. They were the first Japanese ever to cross...

A feminist literary classic by one of Africa's greatest writers. First published in 1979, The Joys of Motherhood is the story of Nnu Ego, a Nigerian woman struggling in a patriarchal society. Unable to conceive in her first marriage, Nnu is banished to Lagos where she succeeds in becoming a mother. Then, against the backdrop of World War II, Nnu...

Maigret's Pickpocket is an intriguing tale where Inspector Maigret himself falls victim to a curious incident involving a pickpocket. The story begins when a pickpocket steals Maigret's wallet, only to return it the next day with the unusual condition that Maigret visits the thief's apartment. Intrigued, Maigret complies, leading him to the unexpected discovery of the thief's dead wife. This...

Maigret's Memoirs takes over as author and gives a rare glimpse into the legendary character's psyche. I can still see Simenon coming into my office the next day, pleased with himself, displaying even more self-confidence, if possible, than before, but nevertheless with a touch of anxiety in his eyes . . . He trumpeted these last words as if they...

Maigret's Failure delves into a complex intertwining of duty and personal history as Maigret's integrity is put to the test. Charged with the protection of a wealthy butcher named Fumal, Maigret finds himself conflicted between his professional duty and a childhood grudge that resurfaces unexpectedly. The tension escalates when Fumal is viciously murdered, compelling Maigret to set aside his personal...

A new selection of the letters of Che Guevara, from birth to death, revealing a new side to his personal and political life. Che Guevara was an inveterate letter writer and diarist throughout his short but extraordinary life. His letters and diaries are those of a master narrator, characterized by a brutal honesty, a remarkable lack of ego, a razor-sharp...

A classic 1960s novel of J.G. Ballard-ian strangeness, from one of Britain's most haunting and unforgettable voices. The world is threatened by encroaching ice, creeping down day by day from the polar ice caps. The imminent catastrophe has thrown the world's governments into chaos, and no one knows whether the disaster has an environmental or nuclear cause, or how soon...

A magnificent account of Occupied France in both the First and Second World Wars. The most difficult and often savage relationship in 20th century western Europe was between the French and the Germans. Twice, cataclysmic wars were fought out on their borders, successfully by the French in 1914-18 and unsuccessfully in 1940. Both wars led to military occupation—for the large...