CLASSICS

It is universally acknowledged that Tolstoy, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, was as much a master of the short story as he was of the full-length novel....

W. Somerset Maugham's semiautobiographical masterpiece unfolds in London and Paris at the end of the 19th century. The protagonist, Philip Carey, is a sensitive orphan who's burdened with a club...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Dracula by Bram Stoker'Alone with the dead! I dare not go out, for I can hear the low howl of the wolf through the...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster'I had got an idea that everyone here spent their lives in making little sacrifices for...

'My first intimation of the possibilities of fiction' Zadie SmithMore than a love story, A Room with a View is a penetrating social comedy and a brilliant study of contrasts...

An aged prophetess at Delphi, the most sacred oracle in ancient Greece, looks back over her strange life as the Pythia, the First Lady and voice of the god Apollo....

In Ulysses and Us, Declan Kiberd argues that James Joyce's Ulysses offers a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world....

Ten years ago James Shapiro won the Samuel Johnson Prize for his best-seller 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. Now, to mark the forthcoming 400th anniversary of...

William Golding's Lord of the Flies is a dystopian classic: 'exciting, relevant and thought-provoking' (Stephen King). When a group of schoolboys are stranded on a desert island, what could go...

These four last prose fictions by Samuel Beckett were originally published individually, and their composition spanned the final decade of his life. In Company a solitary hearer lying in blackness...

Written in Roussillon during World War Two, while Samuel Beckett was hiding from the Gestapo, Watt was first published in 1953. Beckett acknowledged that this comic novel unlike any other...

'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...

Christopher Martin, the sole survivor of a torpedoed destroyer, is stranded upon a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. Pitted against him are the sea, the sun, the night...

Mankind for has polluted the seas, lakes and rivers. The Iron Woman has come to take revenge.Lucy understands the Iron Woman's rage and she too wants to save the water...

Fifteen men on the dead man's chest . . . yo ho ho and a bottle of rum . . . When a terrifying stranger arrives at Jim Hawkin's father's...

He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.One of the masterpieces of classic literature, Wuthering Heights is a both the...