CLASSICS

Ten young Florentines flee the Black Death of 1348 by escaping to a country villa overlooking the city. There they spend ten days telling each other one hundred stories. Their...

Aldous Huxley's lifelong concern with the dichotomy between passion and reason finds its fullest expression both thematically and formally in his masterpiece Point Counter Point. By presenting a vision of...

Dark and violent, Macbeth is also the most theatrically spectacular of Shakespeare's tragedies. Indeed, for 250 years - until early this century - it was performed with grand operatic additions...

'My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of...

'One of the greatest books I've ever read. Its heart is strange, but it is huge; let yours beat in response' MARY GAITSKILLPale Fire, a 999-line poem, is the final...

Throughout his long, hectic and astonishingly varied life, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) would jot down his passing thoughts on theatre programmes, visiting cards, draft manuscripts and even bills ......

In 1940 Steinbeck sailed in a sardine boat with his great friend the marine biologist, Ed Ricketts, to collect marine invertebrates from the beaches of the Gulf of California. The...

The volume collects together, for the first time ever, Orwell's writings on his experience of the Spanish Civil War - the chaos at the Front, the futile young deaths for...

A fascinating look at the history and grandeur of bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon is also a deeper contemplation on the nature of cowardice and bravery, sport and tragedy, and...

'Echo's Bones' was intended by Samuel Beckett to form the 'recessional' or end-piece of his early collection of interrelated stories, More Pricks Than Kicks, published in 1934. The story was...

The Unnamable - so named because he knows not who he may be - is from a nameless place. He speaks of previous selves ('all these Murphys, Molloys, and Malones...')...

Share and enjoy all of the Grimm Brothers' best works, now designed with a smaller format for easy portability.

This classic dictionary brings together over 500 nursery rhymes, songs, nonsense jingles, lullabies, and rhyming alphabets traditionally handed on to young children. All the items have been arranged alphabetically, from...

Beckett's first 'literary landmark' (St Petersburg Times) is a wonderfully savoury introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning author. Written in 1932, when the twenty-six-year-old Beckett was struggling to make ends meet,...

Written over three months in 1946, Mercier and Camier was Beckett's first post-war work, and his first novel in French. He came to regard it as a practice piece, and...

This is the last of three volumes of collected shorter prose to be published in the Faber edition of the works of Samuel Beckett - which already includes a volume...

Published in French in 1961, and in English in 1964, How It Is is a novel in three parts, written in short paragraphs, which tell (abruptly, cajolingly, bleakly) of a...

These four stories or 'nouvelles' date from 1945, though all were published much later, in French and subsequently in English. All make use of a first-person narrator, and relish its...

Rediscover the favourite childhood classic.***With a heartwarming introduction by Sophie Dahl***What little girl can turn a whole household upside down and breathe new life back into a strange, old manor?...

A pulsating, powerful tale of the blues, from one of the great American writers of the twentieth centuryIt is Chicago in the 1950s and Manfred Banks has the Dirty Bird...

What is history and how should it be written? This important new anthology, translated and edited by Professor John Marincola, contains all the seminal texts that relate to the writing...

Charles Ryder, a lonely student at Oxford, is captivated by the outrageous and exquisitely beautiful Sebastian Flyte. Invited to Brideshead, Sebastian's magnificent family home, Charles welcomes the attentions of its...

'One of the greatest books about growing up' James Wood, Guardian'You girls are my vocation . . . I am dedicated to you in my prime'Miss Jean Brodie is a...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'The Penguin English Library Edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte'She looked so like herself that I knew...

Painting a candid picture of a family in crisis, Something in Disguise is a haunting, heartfelt novel from the bestselling author of the Cazalet Chronicles, Elizabeth Jane Howard.May's second marriage...

A young man and woman meet by chance and fall instantly in love. But their families are bitter enemies, and in order to be together the two lovers must be...

The finest works of H P Lovecraft, renowned as one of the great horror writers of all time. A major figure in twentieth-century supernatural fiction, H P Lovecraft produced works...

'I have nothing to declare', Wilde once told an American customs official, 'except my genius'. A socialite, a wit, a man who flaunted convention and was unafraid to shock, Oscar...

Having assured the members of London's exclusive Reform Club that he will circumnavigate the world in 80 days, Fogg - stiff, repressed, English - starts by joining forces with an...