Series: Penguin Archive

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira is part of 90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. It is 1837 and a brilliant German artist sets out to cross the mountains between Chile and Argentina. Perhaps nobody before him has been able to paint the sights that unfold—vast chasms, surreal plants and animals......

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Ecce Homo No, I don't hate being black. I'm just tired of saying it's beautiful. No, I don't hate myself. I'm just tired of people bruising their knuckles on my jaw. A novella with the force of a screaming trumpet flare, Dambudzo Marechera's seminal literary debut explores a body and spirit...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Of all the sleep a man can have, the fisherman's sleep is the sweetest. It is the greatest of luxuries - sleep and fishing. Through tender, vivid, and often humorous recollections - from magical fishing trips to the rivers and ponds of Bustehrad to his charismatic father's eccentric business ventures -...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books On a military base in 1930s Georgia, Private Ellgee Williams catches sight of his captain's wife in the nude and becomes obsessed with her. But Captain Penderton—unhappily married to the unfaithful Leonora—in turn erotically fixates on Williams. Spare, muscular and sensual, with the dramatic vision of a Greek myth, Carson McCullers'...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books My dear friend, he said, life is strange and strange things happen in life It is a hot July Sunday in Lisbon and our narrator has an appointment to meet someone by the quayside. But when his guest does not arrive, he spends the day wandering the deserted city, encountering some...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books As for me I have one ambition only- to invent stories, very beautiful stories Gothic, expansive and truly spellbinding, Karen Blixen's short stories offer incisive psychological portraits and imaginative visions of war, longing and tender love. Here, an orphan boy creates an elaborate fantasy of a life of grandeur, a feudal...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Muriel Spark claimed The Driver's Seat to be her best and creepiest novel. Once you have met her heroine Lise—heading for the holiday of a lifetime in an extraordinarily garish dress and with violence on her mind—you will understand why.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books The Umbrella evokes the delicate interplay of emotion and subtle storytelling. In the words of the author: "Then she would feel exposed and cry, as if her life and happiness were ruined for all time, even though she could still hide it from those she only came in contact with by...

Tristessa is a strange fever-dream of morphine sickness and belly-deep sadness. Or, in the words of Allen Ginsberg: 'a narrative meditation studying a hen, a rooster, a dove, a cat, a chihuahua dog, family meat, and a ravishing, ravished junky lady, first in their crowded bedroom, then out to drunken streets, taco stands, and pads at dawn in Mexico City...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books It's terribly important that I get in touch with a gentleman who may have stopped in here to buy flowers this morning. Terribly important. Sometimes, the person you think you love isn't who they seem. And sometimes, you can be your own deception. Spanning Shirley Jackson's entire career, these devilish tales...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Edgar Allan Poe's short stories have lost none of their power to horrify. He remains a destabilisingly terse sketcher of ideas, a writer who allows the reader to fill in the many ghastly blanks in his narratives of violence, retribution and animalism. It is hard to recommend Hop-Frog wholeheartedly (its original...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Wu Cheng'en's 16th-century novel Journey to the West is widely regarded as one of the most important Chinese novels ever written. Here, in Julia Lovell's witty and charismatic translation, we meet one of its heroes - Sun Wukong, or Monkey King, whose powers include shape-shifting, immortality, and being incredibly rude. Though...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books A young writer leaves the city to complete her manuscript in a small coastal town but finds herself writing about the lives of its inhabitants instead — their occupation with memory and tradition, their vibrant female friendships, and the idyll of the landscape that informs their sense of togetherness. A classic...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Priests with shotguns, scheming lovers, and a necrophiliac gravedigger haunt the fables of Emilia Pardo Bazán, the formidable Spanish aristocrat, intellectual, and feminist. These stories paint a rich and variegated image of Old Spain — sometimes tender, often provocative, always entertaining. But if you decide to visit, beware the Lady Bandit,...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Best known for his hardboiled Harlem Detective series, Chester Himes was also a superb literary writer, beginning his creative life by writing short stories in the 1930s while serving jail time for armed robbery. Selected here are some of his best stories—from a satirical tale about a student bet that purportedly...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books How light and alive she was! Like a bird caught in a net . . . A Lost Lady by Willa Cather tells the story of Marian Forrester, a captivating woman who enchants everyone around her—her husband, an elderly railroad pioneer; the small town of Sweet Water; and Niel Herbert, her...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books In one of the great English war memoirs, we learn what it is to cross the Pyrenees through freezing snow to fight fascism in Spain; to narrowly escape execution by your own side; to kill a man with a borrowed rifle and feel nothing but shame. Moving and shrapnel-sharp, A Moment...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Closely Watched Trains tells the story of Milos Hrma, a young railroad apprentice coming of age in wartime Czechoslovakia. Milos is overwhelmed with worries—about his virginity, his love for the conductor, and ongoing scandals in the stationmaster's office—besides which the idea of fighting the Germans seems a simple affair. Poignant, humorous,...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books What can you say, when a man asks you to dance with him? I most certainly will not dance with you. I'll see you in hell first. Why, thank you, I'd like to awfully, but I'm having labour pains. Acerbic, pithy and vibrant, Dorothy Parker's writings capture the dizzying decadence of...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books May I remember always when, Your glance in secrecy met mine, And in my face your love was like A visibly reflected sign. May I remember always when, Your chiding eyes were like my death, And your sweet lips restored my life, Like Jesus's reviving breath. May I remember always when,...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books I decided that my trip had evidently been in vain, since nothing of interest could possibly occur on this visit. I was mistaken. Condemned to sleeplessness by the chatter permeating his guesthouse room, a forlorn traveller turns his ear to the riotous tale spun by the garrulous, meddlesome, inane and utterly...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books We are the ones we have been waiting for These poems of radical love, urgency, and global consciousness reach across borders to break open the silence of oppression and the taboo, liberating both body and soul. Lively and enigmatic, Passion is June Jordan's most accomplished and animated collection. Her virtuosic, resolute...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books I walked in a daze of illusions toward my future. Deeply felt and told with an intrepid spirit, Tales from the Heart are the intimate, formative stories from the childhood of the legendary Caribbean writer, Maryse Condé. These affecting vignettes follow Condé's early encounters with love, grief, and friendship, as she...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. Trotty Veck, an elderly porter, has read so many newspaper reports about crime and immorality that he believes the working classes are irredeemable. But, on New Year's Eve, summoned to the church tower by a mysterious chiming, Trotty witnesses his own death and is taken on a ghostly journey that will...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books What does love fear? Limitation. Johannes stealthily pursues Cordelia through the streets of Copenhagen, and through an intricate, manipulative courtship contrives to possess her. Motivated not by love or sex but by sensation and experiment, he seeks to make the object of his desire desire him - and then to retreat....

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books I went down, I climbed back up into the light of the jaguar sun - into the sea of the green sap of the leaves. The world spun, I plunged down, my throat cut by the knife of the king-priest... The solar energy coursed along dense networks of blood and chlorophyll;...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Every sort of passion verges on chaos, I know, but what the collecting passion verges on is a chaos of memories. From intimate musings on his book collection to a dream-like trip through the bustling streets of Marseille, each of these essays offers a compelling journey into the mind of one...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books This small group of stories by D. H. Lawrence shows him in a number of moods. The hope is that in such a limited number of pages, the reader will come away with a compressed, rich sense of Lawrence's wonderful prose style, precision of language, and expansive vision of the human...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books The body was cold as ice; the heart had long ceased to beat—yet there were no other signs of death. The phantoms and ghouls of Japanese folklore in Some Japanese Ghosts are driven back into the world of the living. Mysterious brides melt into mist, paintings come alive, and man-eating goblins...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Composed in Iceland in the 13th Century, The Prose Edda is the most renowned of all works of Scandinavian literature, taking readers on a voyage through an enthralling world of gods, giants, dwarfs and monsters. From the beginning of the universe to the dreaded Twilight of the Gods, this is the...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me . . . In this glittering new selection of Fitzgerald's short stories, we meet Anson Hunter, The Rich Boy, whose opulent, haunting world paints a vivid portrait of the American elite. Absolution offers a poignant glimpse...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Following the death of his sister, middle-aged Dr Graesler leaves his winter home in Lanzarote for a health resort in Germany, where he practised medicine for many years. There he meets the Schleheim family, and is particularly drawn to their daughter Sabine. But a simple, stilted courtship soon unravels a web...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Arrested in Cologne for remarking that the Führer looked sweaty, nineteen-year-old Sanna has fled to Frankfurt. But her troubles are far from over. Her best friend Gerti has fallen for a Jewish boy, her brother writes books that have been blacklisted, and her own aunt could turn her in to the...

Beauty by Andy Warhol is one of 90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. 'People should fall in love with their eyes closed. Just close your eyes. Don't look.' From Warhol's romantic relationships to his thoughts on interior design, these candid, highly entertaining musings—on love, sex, beauty, work, and space—give an intimate glimpse into the mind of one...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Why should I bother to invent things? My life has been far more exciting and wonderful than any fairy-tale In the heart of the English countryside, surrounded by irritatingly polite relatives and hopeless sycophants, Lady L. is celebrating her eightieth birthday. But as the guests disperse, she feels the undeniable pull...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Beware the self-righteous man of faith, the wicked-eyed child, the jealous lover. For this is Salem, in 1691, where rumours fly on the wind and witchcraft is abroad. Lois the Witch, cursed in childhood, is a stranger in a strange land - and the devil will work his mischief on Lois's...

Sailing to Byzantium by W B Yeats is a part of the collection celebrating 90 classic titles marking 90 years of Penguin Books. Under bare Ben Bulben's head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid. An ancestor was rector there Long years ago, a church stands near, By the road an ancient cross. No marble, no conventional phrase; On limestone quarried...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Maigret moved slowly, edging his bulky frame through the throng in Rue Saint-Antoine, which burst into life every morning, the sunshine streaming down from a clear sky onto the little barrows piled high with fruit and vegetables. In these three tales of deception, set in and around Paris, Simenon's celebrated detective...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Sunflower Sutra features poetry by Allen Ginsberg, whose work fomented a social and political revolution. Renowned for its rawness and spontaneity, Ginsberg's poetry changed the course of the American lyric. His verses explore themes of sex, death, and America, delivering a blend of profane and prophetic insights. The humour of his...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'When I decide to escape I shall want nobody's assistance.' In this thrilling collection, we meet Arsène Lupin, a brilliant, alluring master of disguise – or, as some would have it, a notorious criminal. We follow him on a series of high-stakes adventures, from ingenious heists of invaluable paintings to daring...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Known as Ireland's Chekhov, Frank O'Connor was a master of the modern short story, with an eye for capturing the spaces between our selves and our surroundings. The Genius brings together some of his very best stories, often told from the perspective of young children and forming a revealing portrait of...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books The Maverick Pig by Wang Xiaobo is razor-sharp, pugnacious and blackly funny. Wang Xiaobo's essays have established him as one of China's most popular—and subversive—writers. These writings range from the political power of silence to the irrepressible spirit of a pig he met while working in a commune. These reflections on...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Saadat Hasan Manto, the most widely read and translated writer in the Urdu language, captured the devastation and absurdity of the partition of India and Pakistan like no other. The Price of Freedom brings together ten of his best stories, focusing on human voices from the religious fracture that forever unhinged...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Journey into space with Polish sci-fi master Stanislaw Lem. The whimsical time-loops of Ijon Tichy's cosmic adventure The Seventh Voyage are reminiscent of Douglas Adams. Meanwhile, the spectral whispers haunting Pirx the Pilot as he navigates his spaceship to Mars in Terminus, echo the author's masterpiece Solaris. Then The Mask introduces...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books There are many great English ghost stories, but they appear flimsy and emotionally spectral compared to the works of M. R. James. This selection gives the reader a flavour of his strange gifts. Often, the ghost is barely glimpsed and yet somehow sticks with the reader for years, making ordinary rooms...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. Nuns, maidens, adventurers — with electricity, The Story of an Hour collects stories of female freedom, as Kate Chopin asks the question: what...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books I must die. But must I die bawling? What does it mean to live a virtuous life? How can we rise above pain and anguish? In these teachings from Book 1 of his Discourses, ancient philosopher Epictetus outlines a practical approach to Stoicism that has inspired thinkers for centuries, from Marcus...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books I am Black because I come from the earth's inside now take my word for jewel in the open light. Impassioned and profound, the poems in Coal showcase Audre Lorde in all her dazzling elegance and multiplicity. Mournful, celebratory, and politically conscious, this early collection is a testament to Lorde's beloved...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Fabien tonight was wandering over the vast splendour of a sea of clouds, but below him lay eternity. Inspired by his career as an aviator, Saint-Exupéry's soaring novel follows the journeys of three pilots delivering mail overnight. The author's beautiful, weightless prose is as haunting as his own disappearance in flight,...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books In October Nights, Gerard de Nerval takes us on a gentle meander through nighttime Paris - a dreamlike journey towards getting lost. Also included in this volume is Sylvie, his haunting novella of love and memory, the 'masterpiece' that inspired Proust to write In Search of Lost Time. Together, these works...

The Emperor's New Clothes is part of a collection of 90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. Many years ago, there lived an Emperor who was so terribly fond of beautiful new clothes that he spent all his money on dressing elegantly... Jewels in storytelling, these magical fairytales by Hans Christian Andersen were inspired by his own life...

Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata is one of 90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. Kikuji has been invited to a tea ceremony by a mistress of his dead father, only to find that the mistress' rival and successor is also present. He falls for her, with devastating consequences. By 1949, Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese author to...

To Read and Dream by Christina Rossetti is part of a special collection celebrating 90 classic titles over 90 years of Penguin Books. Christina Rossetti, one of the finest poets of the Victorian age, is renowned for the directness, clarity, and unmatched lyricism of her works. This selection of her poetry brings together some of her finest verses, love lyrics,...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Baron Bagge, a cavalry officer during the First World War, receives orders from his unhinged commander to ride into Russian machine guns. But instead of meeting certain death, he and his brigade pass, unscathed, into a peaceful, otherworldly country where festivities are in full swing... Alexander Lernet-Holenia, championed in his lifetime...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Now you slip away in sleep. Your boat is sea-mist, dreaming, by the shore. Spain's most beloved poet, Federico García Lorca, brilliantly captures the beauty and brutality of the twentieth century. His creative imagination transcends his own experiences—be it from the perspective of an ant, a gypsy nun, or Socrates—to meditate...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books I had rather die in the adventure of noble achievements, than live in obscure and sluggish security In 1666, Margaret Cavendish had a vision—there was a crack in reality at the North Pole leading to a utopian parallel universe, where gender roles, scientific orthodoxy, and political norms had been razed to...

A Lady in Kyoto by Sei Shonagon is one of 90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. All moonlight is moving, wherever it may be... Japanese gentlewoman Sei Shonagon invites us to look behind the painted screens in the Emperor's palace and discover a lost world, where games of poetry are the highest form of wit. Lovers send...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books But how sweet a fruit the 'suppose' must be, that people will sup and sup on it! A juicy fruit, like a lychee but without the pit, sparkling and light green - a fruit that hides the tart within the sweet. In this haunting collection of stories, a young man's obsession...

Rescue by Czeslaw Milosz is a part of the collection of 90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. This volume brings together two of Milosz's most celebrated works. Rescue, penned in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, stands alongside A Treatise on Poetry, a monumental history of Poland told through four cantos. These works represent the keen insights of...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books A writer engulfed by a new obsession, an occasional sex-worker, a runaway, and a teenager entering the workplace—these four tales of desire and dislocation explore the rough edges of relationships and the inner lives of women negotiating their precarious place in the world. In these coolly compelling and quietly devastating stories,...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Rabindranath Tagore was one of the greatest authors of his generation. In these two short stories - The Broken Nest and Dead or Alive - he is at his devastating best, charting the slow, then fast, implosion of two perfect Bengali households. No-one understands each other; everything is misconstrued; all is...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books The disenchanted, the disadvantaged and the disinherited seem, at times of deep crisis, to summon up some sort of genius that enables them to perceive and capture the appropriate weapons to carve out their destiny. Wielding his galvanising and idiosyncratic voice, this collection of electrifying and, at times, consoling speeches and...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', The Fire Next Time is an excoriating condemnation of the...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books And this is fantasy, the flutter, the rapture of fantasy! A bashful dragon, a lost wood-sprite, the prophet Elijah, and the Devil disguised as a middle-aged woman appear in these playful, exuberant stories by Vladimir Nabokov. So do a vengeful husband, a barber confronting his torturer, and the author himself, as...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century' - Colm Tóibín A housewife's life is shattered by a sudden epiphany. A simple tale of killing cockroaches fragments into multiple narratives, each uncovering new truths. In this selection of haunting short stories, Lispector reveals the permeable boundaries between past and present,...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books No author perfected the twist in the tale better than Roald Dahl. His stories—many of which were filmed as Tales of the Unexpected—take us into a world that is shocking, cruelly funny, and always has a sinister edge. What if plants could feel pain? What kind of father would bet his...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Lay down all hope, you that go in by me . . . Through the gates of Hell, past whirling hurricanes, leering devils and rivers of blood, lies the ultimate evil - Satan himself. Masterfully translated by Dorothy L. Sayers, this first instalment of The Divine Comedy tells the captivating tale...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books The bones were still warm; but they were picked clean. They had even eaten their own dead. This spine-chilling collection from Dracula creator Bram Stoker showcases five haunting tales, including the newly discovered Gibbet Hill. From Dracula's Guest, thought by many to be the original excised opening of Dracula itself, to...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Yes, as my swift days near their goal, 'Tis all that I implore; In life and death, a chainless soul, With courage to endure. In this new selection of Emily Brontë's heart-rending poems, we uncover a soul unafraid to confront mortality, tragedy and the wild cruelty - and beauty - of...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books The whole town got involved with the hunger-artist; from day to day of his starving, people's participation grew; everyone wanted to see the hunger-artist at least once a day; on the later days there were season-ticket holders who sat for days on end in front of his little cage. Reading these...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Waking, I cry "Oh, is this your - buried treasure? The light in the heart." In these exquisite stories from the genius of English modernism, everyday objects acquire profound significance - a lump of buried green glass leads to a lifetime of obsession; a mark on the wall prompts a questioning...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books My delight in playing turned to a lust for playing, my lust for playing into a compulsion to play, a mania, a frenetic fury that filled not only my waking hours but also came to invade my sleep. I could think of nothing but chess, I thought only in chess moves...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Few artists' letters are as self-revelatory as Vincent van Gogh's. From the humanistic inspiration behind The Potato Eaters to his long-time obsession with painting the vision that eventually became The Starry Night, the letters in this selection paint an intense personal narrative of his artistic development and creative process across the...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Of course, very few people go through the gate and abandon the beautiful phenomenon of the outside world for the interior reality that they intuit... A visitor to a zoo discovers he can understand the animals talking, a young man turns into a mountain, and a bird guides a boy to...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books No thinking person can or does genuinely keep out of politics, in an age like the present one. Unfailingly wise and often startlingly prophetic, George Orwell's essays are masterpieces of plain English prose. This stirring new collection brings together his most cherished pieces with lesser-known gems, ranging over everything from tree...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books All Frenchmen know you have to become civilised between eighteen and twenty-three and that civilisation comes upon you by contact with an older woman, by revolution, by army discipline, by any escape or any subjection, and then you are civilised and life goes on normally in a latin way. Gertrude Stein's...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books On the fields of Troy, war is raging. At its centre is Achilles—godlike, swift-footed, the greatest champion of the Greeks. But when his pride is wounded and he refuses to fight, the thread of fate begins to spin... From frenzied rampages to intimate moments of grief, this selection from Homer's Iliad...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books She drew a long, soft breath, as though the paper daffodils between them were almost too sweet to bear. Katherine Mansfield was a magician of the short story, whose work was described by Virginia Woolf as 'the only writing I have ever been jealous of'. These eight tales show her gift...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books During his reign, Lord Cobham was burnt alive, but I forget what for. In Jane Austen's breezy and entirely biased telling of English history, The History of England by a Partial, Prejudiced and Ignorant Historian, Mary, Queen of Scots is a scandalously wronged victim, Elizabeth I is a wicked villain, and...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Best known for his existentialist novel The Outsider, set in French-occupied Algeria, Albert Camus was profoundly influenced by the landscapes, towns and traditions of his youth. Selected here are some of his finest personal essays about Algeria and its environs, including the luminous 'Nuptials at Tipasa', one of his earliest works...