CLASSICS

Part of the Penguin Orange Collection, a limited-run series of twelve influential and beloved American classics in a bold series design offering a modern take on the iconic Penguin paperbackWinner...

'Look, my lord! See heaven itself declares against your impious intentions!' The Castle of Otranto (1764) is the first supernatural English novel and one of the most influential works of...

'One death, in exchange for thousands of lives - it's simple arithmetic!'A new translation of Dostoevsky's epic masterpiece, Crime and Punishment (1866). The impoverished student Raskolnikov decides to free himself...

This is a biography of a book: the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays printed in 1623 and known as the First Folio. It begins with the story of its...

'There was a rumour, too, that he was a devil-worshipper, or something of that sort, and also that he had the evil eye...' Arthur Conan Doyle was the greatest genre...

Love... it means too much to me, far more than you can understand.At its simplest, Anna Karenina is a love story. It is a portrait of a beautiful and intelligent...

'Thus she was decapitated, and this was the end to which she was brought by her unbridled lusts.'For over two centuries after Boccaccio's groundbreaking Decameron, the Italian novella exercised a...

Vast in its scope, incomparably dense in its imagery, Parzival ranks alongside Dante's Divine Comedy as one of the foremost narrative works to emerge from medieval Europe. Written in the...

In The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes we read the last twelve stories Conan Doyle was to write about Holmes and Watson. They reflect the disillusioned world of the 1920s in...

By the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window-shutters, I beheld the wretch-the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up...

Then they took the flowers of the oak, and the flowers of the broom, and the flowers of the meadowsweet, and from those they conjured up the fairest and most...

Something pushed out from the body there on the floor, and stretched forth a slimy, wavering tentacle...Perhaps no figure better embodies the transition from the Gothic tradition to modern horror...

"Pray, pray be composed," cried Elinor, "and do not betray what you feel to every body present. Perhaps he has not observed you yet."For Elinor Dashwood, sensible and sensitive, and...

'If life could write, it would write like Tolstoy.' Isaac BabelTolstoy's epic masterpiece intertwines the lives of private and public individuals during the time of the Napoleonic wars and the...

'I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.'Becky Sharp is sharp, calculating, and determined to succeed. Craving wealth and a position in society,...

'The Queen and the bat had been talking a good deal that afternoon...'The Victorian fascination with fairyland vivified the literature of the period, and led to some of the most...

Woolf described this work on the title-page of the first draft as 'the life of anybody'. "The Waves" (1931) traces the lives and interactions of seven friends in an exploratory...

'Only the earth is immortal...the earth we love enough to commit murder for her.'Zola's novel of peasant life, the fifteenth in the Rougon-Macquart series, is generally regarded as one of...

'Abbe Faujas has arrived!'The arrival of Abbe Faujas in the provincial town of Plassans has profound consequences for the community, and for the family of Francois Mouret in particular. Faujas...

'no one pitied him as he would have liked to be pitied'As Ivan Ilyich lies dying he begins to re-evaluate his life, searching for meaning that will make sense of...

'a Casement violently opened just over my Head, and a Woman gave three frightful Skreetches, and then cry'd, Oh! Death, Death, Death!'Purporting to be an eye-witness account, the Journal of...

'The irresistible power of money, a lever that can lift the world. Love and money are the only things.'Aristide Rougon, known as Saccard, is a failed property speculator determined to...

'Wilde did not converse - he told tales.' Oscar Wilde was already famous as a brilliant wit and raconteur when he first began to publish his short stories in the...

Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Karamazov Brothers (1880) is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered; his...

"He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had...

'I regret to see that my book has turned out un fiasco solenne'James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with...

'Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road...

Drawing directly on her own unhappy experiences, Anne Bronte's first-person narrative describes the almost unbelievable pressures endured by nineteenth-century governesses - the isolation, the frustration, and the insensitive and sometimes...

'Lord Orville did me the honour to hand me to the coach, talking all the way of the honour I had done him! O these fashionable people!'Frances Burney's first and...

In 1872 the mistress of a neighbouring landowner threw herself under a train at a station near Tolstoy's home. This gave Tolstoy the starting point he needed for composing what...

A young, inexperienced governess is charged with the care of Miles and Flora, two small children abandoned by their uncle at his grand country house. She sees the figure of...

Ulysses, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, has had a profound influence on modern fiction. In a series of episodes covering the course of a single day,...

'I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of.' Virginia WoolfVirginia Woolf was not the only writer to admire Mansfield's work: Thomas Hardy, D....

`the ideal reading...for the hours after midnight'Thus Henry James described the style of supernatural tale of which Sheridan Le Fanu was a master. Known in nineteenth-century Dublin as `The Invisible...

Did possessing and killing amount to the same thing deep within the dark recesses of the human beast? La Bete humaine (1890), is one of Zola's most violent and explicit...

The seventh novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, L'Assommoir (1877) is the story of a woman's struggle for happiness in working-class Paris. It was a contemporary bestseller, outraged conservative critics, and...

Nana opens in 1867, the year of the World Fair, when Paris, thronged by a cosmopolitan elite, was la Ville Lumiere, a perfect victim for Zola's scathing denunciation of hypocrisy...

'As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the...

Written by an eccentric Anglican curate, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) brought the terrors of the Gothic novel to a new fever pitch of intensity. Its tormented villain seeks a victim...