Series: Penguin Archive

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...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books The Time Machine is the great, gleeful anarchist novel of the 1890s. It is both a thrilling adventure story and a satire on religion, evolution and human hopes. With this book, Wells invented an entirely new genre and did it better than any of his imitators. An immediate bestseller, it has...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'He stretched out his two long, lank arms, that looked like spider's claws, and seemed to embrace with them the expanse before him.' His inheritance squandered and engagement severed, Guido di Cortese stalks the desolate Genoese coast. A monstrous creature, shipwrecked by a ferocious storm, offers him unimaginable wealth to exchange...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Luminous and intensely lyrical, Dylan Thomas' works have captivated generations of readers, inspiring artists like The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Igor Stravinsky, and Phoebe Bridgers. This selection includes some of his best poetry, celebrating both inner and outer landscapes in the face of mortality, decay, human weakness, and beckoning readers to rage,...

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...

Why I am a Stoic 90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Plagued by ill-health, violently sick at sea, irritated by renovation costs — Seneca is never less than sympathetically human. In these letters written 2000 years ago, the ancient philosopher speaks to the reader today with lucidity and warmth. Whether advising on how to live a good...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'I'm not the sort of husband you dream of when you're walking alone along the avenue in the evening, am I? And it would be a disaster, wouldn't it?' How does love die? This question lies at the heart of Tolstoy's desperately sad novella. It tells the story of seventeen-year-old Masha...

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 I am a ridiculous man. They call me mad now. That would be a promotion in rank. A delusional man whose strange dream changes his life; a self-justifying husband who causes his wife's suicide; a witness to a young girl's ruin; a writer who stretches out on a gravestone and listens...