Penguin Classics

A fascinating account of the time of the Vikings and the feuds of the Orkney Isles. Written around AD 1200 by an unnamed Icelandic author, Orkneyinga Saga is an intriguing fusion of myth, legend, and history. The only medieval chronicle to have Orkney as the central place of action, it tells of an era when the islands were still part...

Schiller's famous treatise on art, politics and society On the Aesthetic Education of Man is one of the most profound works of German philosophy, in which Friedrich Schiller analyses politics, revolution and the history of ideas to define the relationship between beauty and art. Resulting from Schiller's deep disillusionment with the course of the French Revolution and expressed as a...

Poet, pattern-designer, environmentalist and maker of fine books, William Morris (1834–96) was also a committed socialist and visionary writer, obsessively concerned with the struggle to achieve a perfect society on earth. News from Nowhere, one of the most significant English works on the theme of utopia, is the tale of William Guest, a Victorian who wakes one morning to find...

Gaius Plinius Secundus, known as Pliny the Elder, was born in AD 21. He served both as a cavalry officer in Germania and as a procurator, and he combined this public service with a deep interest in science. Natural History is Pliny's sole surviving work, and in it, he records the sum total of Roman scientific knowledge in the first...

In this cautionary tale, a ruthless businessman finally gets his comeuppance. When a wealthy wine merchant is shot and killed in Paris, Inspector Maigret must investigate a long list of family, colleagues, and lovers to uncover just who could have committed the crime. Delving into the depths of the man's personality, Maigret discovers that the victim may have made one...

In 1818, when he was in his mid-thirties, Stendhal met and fell passionately in love with the beautiful Mathilde Dembowski. She, however, was quick to make it clear that she did not return his affections, and in his despair, he turned to the written word to exorcise his love and explain his feelings. The result is an intensely personal dissection...

Twenty new titles in the much-loved and hugely successful Penguin English Library series "Oh, my dear, relations are like drugs, - useful sometimes, and even pleasant, if taken in small quantities and seldom, but dreadfully pernicious on the whole, and the truly wise avoid them" Taking respite from the Man of Wrath, her children, and her stifling household, Elizabeth discovers...

Italian Journey 1786-1788 is Goethe's famous account of his time and travels in Italy. In 1786, already recognised as the leader of the Sturm und Drang literary movement, Goethe embarked on a journey to Italy. This journey was both a personal and artistic quest, aiming to provide relief from his responsibilities and the pains of unrequited love. As he visited...

No philosopher has held a higher opinion of art than Hegel, yet nor was any so profoundly pessimistic about its prospects despite living in the German golden age of Goethe, Mozart, and Schiller. For if the artists of classical Greece could find the perfect fusion of content and form, modernity faced complicating and ultimately disabling questions. Christianity, with its code...

A wonderful new collection of Henry James's short stories about Americans in Europe. Daisy Miller is one of Henry James's great heroines—a young, independent American travelling in Europe, whose flouting of social conventions has the potential to lead to disaster. Her story is here accompanied by six more tales set among English castles, Swiss hotels, and French ports, all riffing...

A witty introduction to the mind of Goethe, a classic in a new translation for the first time in 150 years. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was the world's most celebrated poet, novelist, critic, and thinker, and this is the best way of knowing him. Today, his name is echoed as that of a 'great man' alongside Plato, Montaigne, and Shakespeare....

The final volume in the new Penguin Ibsen series: superb modern translations of four of Ibsen's greatest plays. In these four unforgettably intense plays, Henrik Ibsen explores the complex nature of truth, the tension between freedom and responsibility, and the terrible pull that the past exerts over the present. In The Wild Duck, an idealist destroys a family by exposing...

The bestselling novel by cult writer Wang Xiaobo, a satire of the Cultural Revolution, in its first full English translation. ‘Life is but a slow, drawn-out process of getting your balls crushed.’ Twenty-one-year-old Wang Er, stationed in a remote mountain commune, spends his days herding oxen, napping, and dreaming of losing his virginity. His dreams come true in the shape...

The final novel in the trailblazing Harlem Detective series, set in a New York City at boiling point. Bawdy and tough-talking, wickedly funny and wantonly sensual, Blind Man with a Pistol is a surreal joyride through Harlem in a heatwave. Detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson are side-tracked from investigating a series of organised race riots when a...

A dreamlike, chimerical masterpiece from a lost pre-war Europe—critically acclaimed and rightly revered. Baron Bagge, a cavalry officer stationed in Eastern Europe during the First World War, receives orders to ride into a platoon of Russian machine guns. But instead of meeting certain death, he and his brigade pass, unscathed, into a bizarrely peaceful land where festivities are in full...

A new selection and translation of the best of de Maupassant's short stories. Set in the Paris of society women, prostitutes, and small-minded bourgeoisie, as well as the isolated villages of rural Normandy that de Maupassant knew as a child, the thirty-three tales in this volume are among the most darkly humorous and brilliant short stories in nineteenth-century literature. They...

While walking in the Swiss Alps, two English travellers fall into a space-warp, and suddenly find themselves in another world. In many ways the same as our own— even down to the characters that inhabit it—this new planet is still somehow radically different, for the two walkers are now upon a Utopian Earth controlled by a single World Government. Here,...

Twenty new titles in the much-loved and hugely successful Penguin English Library series. 'It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.' After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last is bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with...

The cult classic from one of France's most stylish writers Impish, foul-mouthed Zazie arrives in Paris from the country to stay with her uncle Gabriel. All she really wants to do is ride the metro, but finding it shut because of a strike, Zazie looks for other means of amusement and is soon caught up in a comic adventure that...

Conrad's last great novel, featuring one of his most fascinating heroes, Victory is a psychological thriller, a tragic romance and a commentary on the lies that we tell ourselves. Axel Heyst, a dreamer and a restless drifter, believes he can avoid suffering by cutting himself off from others. Then he becomes involved in the operation of a coal company on...

One of the most important essays on religious tolerance and freedom of thought. In 1762, Jean Calas, a merchant from Toulouse, was executed after being falsely accused of killing his son. As it became clear that Calas was, in fact, persecuted for being a Protestant, Voltaire began a campaign to get his sentence overturned. In the process, he made the...

First published in 1877, these three stories are dominated by questions of doubt, love, loneliness, and religious experience, and together form a triumphant conclusion to Flaubert's literary career. With elegant simplicity, A Simple Heart relates the story of Felicite - an uneducated serving-woman who retains her Catholic faith despite a life of desolation and loss. Inspired by a stained-glass window...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. Everything was dead, everything unreal; the dark mob was made up of stiff lay-figures One of America's greatest writers explores mob violence, voyeurism, and betrayal in these unforgettable tales of Californian life.

A hardboiled story of abduction and murder in the Los Angeles hills. Private Detective Lew Archer doesn't believe in coincidences... A forest fire has mysteriously broken out in the hills above southern California. Meanwhile, Lew Archer has been asked by a desperate mother to find her six-year-old son. Instead, he discovers the boy's wealthy father, murdered, and buried in a...

An insight into the splendour, squalor and energy of everyday Roman life. Perhaps more than any other writer, Juvenal (c. AD 55-138) captures the splendour, the squalor and the sheer energy of everyday Roman life. In The Sixteen Satires, he evokes a fascinating world of whores, fortune-tellers, boozy politicians, slick lawyers, shameless sycophants, ageing flirts and downtrodden teachers. A member...

An updated translation of this risqué and comic account of three travellers. The Satyricon is one of the most outrageous and strikingly modern works to have survived from the ancient world. Most likely written by an advisor of Nero, it recounts the adventures of Encolpius and his companions as they travel around Italy, encountering courtesans, priestesses, con men, brothel-keepers, and...

A new translation by Alan H. Sommerstein of four of Aeschylus' most celebrated plays. Aeschylus (525-456 BC) brought a new grandeur and epic sweep to the drama of classical Athens, raising it to the status of high art. The Persians, the only Greek tragedy to deal with events from recent Athenian history, depicts the final defeat of Persia in the...

One of Poland's most significant twentieth-century epics, by the 1924 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the village of Lipce, scandal, romance, and drama crackle in every hearth. Boryna, a widower and the village's wealthiest farmer, has taken the young and beautiful Jagusia as his bride - but she only has eyes for his impetuous son Antek. Over...

A beautiful, skilfully crafted work of chivalric romance. Written by an unknown author in the twelfth century, this powerful tale of murder and revenge reaches back to the earliest epochs of German antiquity, transforming centuries-old legend into a masterpiece of chivalric drama. Siegfried, a great prince of the Netherlands, wins the hand of the beautiful princess Kriemhild of Burgundy by...

New edition The Longest Journey by E M Forster follows the story of Rickie Elliot, a sensitive and intelligent young man with an intense imagination and a certain amount of literary talent, who sets out from Cambridge full of hopes to become a writer. However, when his stories are not successful, he decides instead to marry the beautiful but shallow...

Tomcat Murr is a loveable, self-taught animal who has written his own autobiography. But a printer's error causes his story to be accidentally mixed and spliced with a book about the composer Johannes Kreisler. As the two versions break off and alternate at dramatic moments, two wildly different characters emerge from the confusion - Murr, the confident scholar, lover, carouser...

This volume includes Family Happiness, The Kreutzer Sonata, The Devil, and Father Sergius. The four stories are all about love, but they take very different attitudes towards it. Tolstoy knows that his readers have fallen in love and also, often, fallen out of it; they have wanted to kill their loved ones; they have lusted vigorously; or desperately sought the...

The House on the Hill is a devastating novel set in wartime Italy, written by the great twentieth-century author Cesare Pavese, now available in a new translation by Tim Parks. Shortlisted for The Society of Authors Translation Award 2022. In June 1943, Allied aircraft are bombing industrial Turin, and Fascist Italy seems to be on its knees. Corrado, a teacher,...

The History of Mr Polly tells the story of Mr Polly, an ordinary middle-aged man exhausted by his wife's nagging and his monotonous job as the owner of a regional gentleman's outfitters. Confronted with the looming threat of bankruptcy, Mr Polly decides that the only escape from his frustrating existence is to burn down his shop and take his own...

The Europeans is part of a series of new editions of Henry James's most famous novels and short stories. It is one of a series of new editions of Henry James's most famous short stories and novels.

One of the most startling literary debuts of all time, now in Penguin Black Classics. As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair begins between a sixteen-year-old boy and a young woman married to a soldier at the front. They meet secretly in her flat on the outskirts of Paris, in cornfields and on river...

J.-K. Huysmans's gaudy, shocking, and largely autobiographical novel, The Damned (La-Bas) was quickly condemned and just as quickly achieved cult status. It follows Durtal, a shy, censorious man, who is writing a biography of Gilles de Rais, the fifteenth-century nobleman, child-murderer, and supposed model for "Bluebeard." Bored and disgusted by the vulgarity of everyday life, Durtal seeks spiritual solace by...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. Dispatch the maimed, the old, the weak, destroy the very world itself, for what is the point of life if the promise of fulfilment lies elsewhere? On the windswept coast of rural Suffolk, a deranged scientist...

A provocative and astute portrayal of a world caught by the lure of progress. Published in 1886, The Bostonians begins with the arrival in Boston of Basil Ransom, a young Mississippi lawyer in search of a career. Through his cousin, Olive Chancellor, Ransom comes to meet Verena, the beautiful daughter of a charlatan faith-healer and showman. When they hear Verena...

The Italian Renaissance man's handbook, defining the virtues essential for a man of the Court. In The Book of the Courtier (1528), Baldesar Castiglione, a diplomat and Papal Nuncio to Rome, sets out to define the essential virtues for those at Court. In a lively series of imaginary conversations between the real-life courtiers to the Duke of Urbino, his speakers...

The Awakening and Selected Stories by Kate Chopin is a groundbreaking depiction of a woman who dares to defy the expectations of society in the pursuit of her desire. When The Awakening was first published in 1899, charges of sordidness and immorality seemed to consign it into obscurity and irreparably damage its author's reputation. However, a century after her death,...

The Annals of Imperial Rome 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, and the wars, poisonings, scandals, conspiracies, and murders...

First time in Black Classics for this famous Victorian retelling of the stories of Shakespeare's plays - sells 8-10,000/year in its PPC edition. As children, Charles and Mary Lamb took great delight in exploring their benefactor's extensive library; as adults, they began writing children's books together that also appealed to all generations. In Tales from Shakespeare, they wished to bring...

Two terrifying modern classics by cult horror favourite Thomas Ligotti, in time for their 30th and 25th anniversaries. Two terrifying classics by "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction" (The Washington Post) Thomas Ligotti's debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second, Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction. Influenced by the...

Sketches from a Hunter's Album, Turgenev's first major prose work, is a series of twenty-five sketches that capture the observations and anecdotes of the author during his travels through Russia, fuelled by his passion for hunting. His album is filled with moving insights into the lives of those he encounters—peasants and landowners, doctors and bailiffs, neglected wives and bereft mothers....

Penguin Classics relaunch Exclusive to Penguin Classics – the definitive text of Shaw's powerful historical drama about Joan of Arc, which led him to win the Nobel Prize for Literature – part of the official Bernard Shaw Library. A Penguin Classic With Saint Joan, which distils many of the ideas Shaw had been exploring in earlier works on politics, religion,...

Ruth is the story of Ruth Hilton, an orphaned young seamstress who captures the attention of a gentleman, Henry Bellingham, who is captivated by her simplicity and beauty. When she loses her job and home, he offers her comfort and shelter, only to cruelly desert her soon after. Nearly dead with grief and shame, Ruth is given the chance of...

Rousseau's final work and meditation After a period of forced exile and solitary wandering brought about by his radical views on religion and politics, Jean-Jacques Rousseau returned to Paris in 1770. Here, in the last two years of his life, he wrote his final work, the Reveries. In this eloquent masterpiece, the great political thinker describes his sense of isolation...

The first of the great Greek tragedians, Aeschylus wrote a large number of plays, of which seven survive. Of the four included in this volume, The Persians is unique in Greek tragedy in having as its subject matter a recent historical event, the defeat of the Persians at the famous battle of Salamis. The other three, Prometheus, The Suppliants and...

Petersburg by Andrei Bely is a vivid, memorable, and striking story set at the heart of the 1905 Russian revolution. This colourful evocation of Russia's capital during the short, turbulent period of the first socialist revolution is considered Bely's masterpiece. The story follows Nikolai Ableukhov's journey as he is caught up in the revolutionary politics of those seminal days. Exploring...

Part of the authoritative and acclaimed Penguin Shakespeare series, now rejacketed in the celebrated Penguin Classics livery. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, must solve a riddle in order to marry the daughter of the King of Antioch, or be put to death. But when the answer reveals a horrific secret, the young man faces his greatest dilemma. Danger and adventure follow...

For the great Roman orator and statesman Cicero, the good life was at once a life of contentment and one of moral virtue, and the two were inescapably intertwined. This volume brings together a wide range of his reflections upon the importance of moral integrity in the search for happiness. In essays that are articulate, meditative, and inspirational, Cicero presents...

New edition of one of the most powerful of the Icelandic prose sagas Written in the thirteenth century, Njal's Saga is a story that explores perennial human problems—from failed marriages to divided loyalties, from the law's inability to curb human passions to the terrible consequences when decent men and women are swept up in a tide of violence beyond their...

The beloved Australian classic, published in a stunning Penguin Clothbound Classics edition for the first time. My Brilliant Career, Miles Franklin's debut novel, follows the vivacious and rebellious sixteen-year-old Sybylla Melvyn—closely modelled on Franklin herself—as she fights to break free of restrictive bush life. Growing up on her parents' outback farm, Sybylla is desperate to read, write, sing, and achieve...

The Penguin English Library edition of the classic gothic novel that inspired Sarah Perry's new novel Melmoth The Penguin English Library Edition of Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin 'My hour is come ... the clock of eternity is about to strike, but its knell must be unheard by mortal ears!' This violent, profound, baroque, and blackly humorous novel is...

A seminal work of science fiction—an unnerving vision of the consequences of unchecked overpopulation. The planet's population has exploded. The 35 million inhabitants of New York City run their TVs off pedal power, riot for water, trample for lentil 'steaks', and sweat beneath a sweltering sun. Amid it all, a city cop tries to catch a gangster's killer and vie...

A Russian heir to Charles Dickens, Leskov is one of the great, underrated voices of nineteenth-century Russia. An outsider from the literary establishment of his day, Nikolai Leskov is one of the most unique voices of nineteenth-century Russia, combining a profound religious spirit with a fascination for idiosyncratic characters, lurid crimes, comic absurdity and the joy of pure story. This...

The searing debut novel by Chester Himes, written with youthful panache and a bellyful of anger (Observer). Robert 'Bob' Jones—crew leader, shipyard worker, educated, employed—is finding life impossible. Though he has recently been promoted to supervisor at the Los Angeles shipyard where he works, he is disrespected and resented by white colleagues; and despite his relationship with the high-class Alice,...

A fascinating collection of medieval Arabic travel writing, translated into English by Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone. In 922 AD, an Arab envoy from Baghdad named Ibn Fadlan encountered a party of Viking traders on the upper reaches of the Volga River. In his subsequent report on his mission, he gave a meticulous and astonishingly objective description of Viking customs,...

Part of the authoritative and acclaimed Penguin Shakespeare series, now rejacketed in the celebrated Penguin Classics livery. Henry VI Part Two tells the story of Henry VI, who is tricked into marrying Margaret, the lover of the Earl of Suffolk. Suffolk hopes to rule the kingdom through her influence. There is one great obstacle in Suffolk's path, however—the noble Lord...

Elizabeth Gaskell's chilling Gothic tales blend the real and the supernatural to eerie, compelling effect. Disappearances, inspired by local legends of mysterious vanishings, mixes gossip and fact; Lois the Witch, a novella based on an account of the Salem witch hunts, shows how sexual desire and jealousy lead to hysteria; while in The Old Nurse's Story a mysterious child roams...

When the young nobleman Harold Transome returns to England from the colonies with a self-made fortune, he scandalises the town of Treby Magna with his decision to stand for Parliament as a Radical. But after the idealistic Felix Holt also returns to the town, the difference between Harold's opportunistic values and Holt's profound beliefs becomes apparent. Forthright, brusque and driven...

A major new translation of Goethe's Faust, Part Two - one of the greatest dramatic-poetic works in all of German literature - by award-winning poet and translator David Constantine. In this sequel to Faust, Mephistopheles takes Faust on a journey through ancient Greek mythology, conjuring for him the insurpassably beautiful Helen of Troy, as well as the classical gods. Faust...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. Good b.o means good "box office." You can smell it from a mile away The legendary sixties New York pop artist Andy Warhol presents hilarious and insightful vignettes and aphorisms on the topics of love, fame,...

Byron's exotic poem on the love life and adventures of Don Juan. Byron's exuberant masterpiece tells of the adventures of Don Juan, beginning with his illicit love affair at the age of sixteen in his native Spain and his subsequent exile to Italy. Following a dramatic shipwreck, his exploits take him to Greece, where he is sold as a slave,...

In this newly translated classic of spiritual literature, Bernanos considers what it really means to be humble, charitable, and loving. This quiet, imaginative novel is a study of faith in an increasingly hostile world. Through intimate journal entries, the author reveals the private life and struggles of a young, withdrawn, devout, and sickly priest in northern France. Though his beliefs...

Between the Acts is Virginia Woolf's final novel, now featured in Penguin Black Classics. Outwardly, it is a novel about life in a country house where a pageant is to be held in the grounds. However, it is also a striking evocation of the English experience in the months leading up to the Second World War. Through dialogue, humour, and...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas, and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to...

Aspects of the Novel is a collection of literary lectures by E.M. Forster, published in 1927. For the purposes of his study, Forster defines the novel as "any fictitious prose work over 50,000 words." Forster's wit and lively, informed originality have made this study of the novel a classic. Avoiding the chronological approach of what he calls "pseudoscholarship," Forster freely...

A new translation of one of the most popular satires on the Russian Revolution and on Soviet society - first time in Penguin Classics. This is Bulgakov's semi-autobiographical story of a writer who fails to sell his novel and fails to commit suicide. When his play is taken up by the theatre, literary success beckons, but he has reckoned without...

This collection of Chekhov's finest early writing reveals a young writer mastering the art of the short story. The Steppe, which established his reputation, is the unforgettable tale of a boy's journey to a new school in Kiev, travelling through majestic landscapes towards an unknown destiny. Gusev depicts an ocean voyage, where the sea takes on a terrifying, primeval power;...

The greatest classic of Vietnamese literature in a stunning new verse translation. "This manuscript is ancient, priceless, bamboo-rolled, perfumed with musty spices. Sit comfortably by this good light, that you may learn the hard-won lesson that these characters contain." The Song of Kieu is the greatest classic of Vietnamese literature. It tells the story of the beautiful Vuong Thoy Kieu,...

First time in Black Classics Nonsense is the breath of my nostrils, wrote Edward Lear (1812-88), and this collection demonstrates the wonderfully varied ways in which he pursued his philosophy of life. He created an extraordinary world filled with bizarre creatures - from the Dong with a luminous nose to the Pobble who has no toes - who misbehave with...

The plays in this volume all contain Aristophanes' trademark bawdy comedy and dazzling verbal agility. In The Birds, two frustrated Athenians join the birds to build the utopian city of 'Much Cuckoo in the Clouds'. The Knights is a venomous satire on Cleon, a prominent Athenian demagogue, while The Assembly Women deals with the battle of the sexes as the...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas, and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. The hour should be evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. In such conditions, Virginia Woolf takes to London's streets in...

The poems of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) are among the most haunting and tender in Indian and world literature, expressing a profound and passionate human yearning. His ceaselessly inventive works deal with such subjects as the interplay between God and the world, the eternal and transient, and with the paradox of an endlessly changing universe that is in tune with unchanging...

On Love and Barley by Matsuo Basho presents the work of one of the greatest Japanese poets, a master of haiku. Known not only for his literary genius, Basho was also a Buddhist monk and a lifelong traveller. His poems embody 'karumi', or lightness of touch, and embrace the Zen ideal of oneness with creation. Each verse beautifully evokes aspects...

One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each offers a new translation of the most widely known and popular collection of Japanese poetry. The best-loved and most widely read of all Japanese poetry collections, the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu contains 100 short poems on nature, the seasons, travel, and, above all, love. Dating back to the seventh century, these elegant, precisely observed waka...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics — irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas, and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Thirteen ingeniously crafted stories make up Vladimir Nabokov's baker's dozen. In some of these stories, shadowy people pass through, cooped up by life, with nowhere to escape. In others, elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness, which...

In Youth is Pleasure is a gay classic coming-of-age novel and an unforgettable slice of British interwar upper-middle-class life. Orvil Pym does not fit in. A waifish, eccentric, sensitive fifteen-year-old, he hates school and longs to be alone. Spending his Summer holidays in a genteel Surrey hotel with his mysterious father and two brothers who don't understand him, he explores...