CLASSICS

The Penguin Classics edition of Jonathan Swift's savagely satirical A Modest Proposal and Other Writings is edited with an introduction and notes by Carol Fabricant.To ease poverty in Ireland by...

Restoration-era poet, playwright and novelist Aphra Behn was the first truly professional woman writer in English, and Oroonoko is her sophisticated and insightful condemnation of slavery. This Penguin Classics edition...

The Queen of Spades and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction showcasing Alexander Pushkin's application of Romantic sensibilities to uncompromising studies of human frailty. This Penguin Classics edition...

E.T.A. Hoffman's wildly original fictions are some of the most unusual examples of German Romanticism's dark passions, and the stories in Tales of Hoffman are selected and translated from the...

Victor Hugo's tale of injustice, heroism and love follows the fortunes of Jean Valjean, an escaped convict determined to put his criminal past behind him. But his attempts to become...

'The best modern prose translation of The Iliad' Robin Lane Fox, The TimesThe first of the world's great tragedies, The Iliad centres on the pivotal four days towards the end...

A work of tremendous influence that has inspired writers from his ancient Greek contemporaries to modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot, Homer's epic poem The Iliad is translated by Robert...

A slave who represented his masters in court and negotiations, Aesop relied on allegorical animal stories, collected here in The Complete Fables, to convey his key points. This Penguin Classics...

'Venus in Furs' describes the obsessions of Severin von Kusiemski, a European nobleman who desires to be enslaved to a woman. Severin finds his ideal of voluptuous cruelty in the...

The Steppe and Other Stories 1887-91 is a collection that reveals Anton Chekhov's evolution from a novice writer to a master of short narrative form. This Penguin Classics edition is...

The prize-winning translation of Miguel de Cervantes's mock-epic masterworkDon Quixote has become so entranced by reading romances of chivalry that he determines to become a knight errant and pursue bold...

The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories is a collection of stories that emerged from a profound spiritual crisis, during which Leo Tolstoy believed that he had encountered death...

The inspiration for such works as Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Jaroslav Hasek's black satire The Good Soldier Svejk is translated with an introduction by Cecil Parrott in Penguin Classics.Good-natured and garrulous,...

'The prince of philosophical novels' John UpdikeIn Candide, Voltaire threw down an audacious challenge to the philosophical views of the Enlightenment to create one of the most glorious satires of...

Gentle linen weaver Silas Marner is wrongly accused of a heinous theft, and he exiles himself from the world-until he finds redemption and spiritual rebirth through his unselfish love for...

Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. and his friends George and Harris decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them to a 'T'. But when they set...

This early novel, written in collaboration with a friend, is a fascinating curiosity which suggests that Wodehouse might have become a very different, experimental sort of writer, had he continued...

Many of these stores are now so famous from film and television adaptations that they need no introduction. Roald Dahl is well known as a master of the macabre and...

First published in 1956, this collection of articles covers Wodehouse's feelings on United States, his adopted homeland all collected into one edition. Features a collection of articles originally from Punch...

In the five novels by Ireland's greatest comic writer we can explore the full range of his invention, from the multi-layered madness of At Swim-Two-Birds to the piercing realism of...

Collected here are Gogol's finest tales - stories which combine the wide-eyed, credulous imagination of the peasant with the sardonic social criticism of the city dweller - allowing readers to...

Richard Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate and accomplished writers of America's post-war generation. Whether addressing the smothered desire of suburban housewives, the white-collar despair of...

On the day of his wedding, Edmond Dantes, master mariner, is arrested in Marseille on trumped-up charges and spirited away to the cellars of the Chateau d'If, an impregnable sea...

In The Time Machine an inventor travels to the remote future where he finds both love and terror. The protagonist of The Invisible Man struggles to come to terms with...

George Orwell was a novelist unlike any other, fiercely devoted to presenting the truth as he saw it. The three novels in this collection date from the 1930s, before his...

Included here are some of the well-loved Father Brown detective stories, surely among the best in the genre, and a range of poetry, serious and light-hearted - Chesterton wrote some...

At the turn of the twentieth century. When their father dies young, exhausted by the failure of his attempts at agriculture, it is left to the visionary Alexandra to guide...

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is Anne Bronte's second and most celebrated novel. Set in the dramatic northern landscape made familiar by the author's more famous sisters, it tells the...

When Catherine Sloper falls for Maurice Townsend, her father, a wealthy New York doctor, believes that Townsend is a fortune hunter after his daughter's inheritance. He forbids the marriage but...

The Arabian Nights - stories told by Queen Shahrazad over a thousand and one nights, to beguile the Sultan into deferring her execution - first began to appear in the...

This beautiful hardback collection features the world's most famous detective in his most classic adventures. We begin with A Study in Scarlet, the novel that introduces the most famous characters...

After a lonely boyhood, and the painful ordeal of his schooldays, Philip's yearning for adventure takes him to Germany and later Paris where he tries to make his mark as...

'Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout...

'Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth's witches, when his face will come before me, that face in...

The original American in Paris. This dark comedy, seen as one of the masterpieces of James's final period, has all the elements of great writing, brilliant plot and gorgeous setting-...

Social realism and fairy tale combine in Lucky Per, a bildungsroman about the ambitious son of a clergyman who rejects his faith and flees a restricted life in rural Jutland...

A brilliant and much admired novelist, Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) surpassed herself as a writer of short fiction: 'the supreme genius of her time', writes John Banville in his introduction; 'There...

Playful kittens and ruthless predators, beloved pets and witches' familiars - cats of all kinds come alive in these stories. Maeve Brennan and Alice Adams movingly explore what cats can...

In an interview, Updike once said, "If I had to give anybody one book of me, it would be the Olinger Stories." These stories were originally published in The New...

Russian Stories rounds up marvellous short stories by all the Russian heavyweights, including Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Babel and Nabokov, and continuing up to contemporary writers...

When it came to loving he knew which Daisy to pick! Wild parties, exquisite cocktails, fabulous wealth, raging jealousy and spectacular deaths... Sorry old sport, but Gatsby has a bigger...

Murder... Mystery... Walkies! If you go down to the moors today, you'll be sure of a big surprise! A desolate moor, a diabolical dog in need of a muzzle and...

This cupcake was off her head! This cupcake was off her head! What HAS happened to little Alice? Taking 'shrooms, hanging out with hookah smoking ne'er do wells and being...

To Say Nothing of the Dog... Skiff off, Nigel! Incompetence, embarrassment and general disaster - no it's not PMQs, it's a trip down the Thames! Three hapless fellows and a...

Change really BUGGED him! Poor old Gregor. One day he's depressed about his dreary travelling salesman gig, the next, he's roaching around the apartment and disgusting his family. All that's...

Whoops! Apocalypse... The Horror! The Horror! Kurtz might be the apple of every brutish imperialist's eye, but his God complex is getting wildly out of hand in the depths of...