CLASSICS

'The most truthful translation ever, conveying as many nuances and whispers as are possible from the original' The TimesAfter a century of civil strife in Rome and Italy, Virgil wrote...

A man at his desk is interrupted by the appearance of a woodland elf in his room; the piano maestro Bachmann ends his career; a barber shaves the face of...

He did not ask things to have a meaning or to tell a story. To be was the only storyA semi-autobiographical novel from the author of The Green Fool and...

Professor Timofey Pnin, late of Tsarist Russia, is now precariously perched at the heart of an American campus. Battling with American life and language, Pnin must face great hazards in...

The American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. His last poem, Pale Fire, is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor,...

A masterpiece of transgressive, surrealist erotica, George Bataille's Story of the Eye was the Fifty Shades of Grey of its era. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is translated by Joachim...

James Baldwin's electrifying first novel.'I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal with my father.'Drawing on James Baldwin's own boyhood in a religious community in...

In 'The Decay of Lying' Oscar Wilde uses his decadent ideology in an attempt to reverse and therefore reject his audiences' 'normal' conceptualizations of nature, art and morality. Wilde's views...

'The man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul' John DrydenAntonio, a Venetian merchant, wishes to help his friend get money to...

'In Persuasion, Jane Austen is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed' Virginia WoolfJane Austen's moving late novel of missed...

His innovative thriller, as shocking now as when it was first published, the Penguin Classics edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and...

George Eliot's tale of a solitary miser gradually redeemed by the joy of fatherhood, Silas Marner is edited with an introduction and notes by David Carroll in Penguin Classics.Wrongly accused...

'The very best story of diablerie which I have read for many years' Arthur Conan DoyleA masterpiece of the horror genre, Dracula also probes identity, sanity and the dark corners...

The Portable Poe compiles Poe's greatest writings: tales of fantasy, terror, death, revenge, murder, and mystery, including "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The...

'He too began to chase the great pierrot through the corridors of the chateau...'A novel of desperate yearning and vanished adolescence, the story of Meaulnes and his restless search for...

Sisterhood Classics - classic female writers, iconic female characters, superb female designers.After losing her parents, young Mary Lennox is sent from India to live in her uncle's gloomy mansion on...

A new collection of Albert Camus' most brilliant speeches and lectures'Freedom is dangerous, as hard to live as it is exalting...'This definitive new collection of Albert Camus' public speeches and...

'It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism - the real motives for...

The complete text of James Joyce's dream masterpiece, one of the great works of twentieth-century literature. This copyright edition incorporates Joyce's own alterations and corrections to the first printing in...

Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's first novel, is the story of Hazel Motes who, released from the armed services, returns to the evangelical Deep South. There he begins a private battle...

This is the complete collection of stories from one of the most original and powerful American writers of the twentieth century. Including A Good Man is Hard to Find and...

These ten classic stories are masterful depictions of the underside of life, deep in the American South. On receiving an early copy, Evelyn Waugh remarked 'If these stories are in...

The first of Roussel's two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a...

Your sister might be the kindred soul who knows you best, or the most alien being in your household; she might enrage you or inspire you; she might be your...

Edgar Poe was born the son of itinerant actors on January 19th, 1809 in Boston, Massachusets. Abandoned by his father and the later death of his mother, he was taken...

This is a book to be read by a blazing fire on a winter's night, with the curtains drawn close and the doors securely locked. The unquiet souls of the...

First published in 1932, Journey to the End of the Night was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece and a turning point in French literature. Told in the first person by...

A Village Romeo and Juliet is a bitter-sweet tragedy telling the tale of two young lovers kept apart by a family feud. Inspired by the story of two real-life sweethearts...

As the young Zinaida and her sweetheart, the student Nemovetsky, stroll through the idyllic Russian countryside, their memories, dreams and thoughts about life and the future mingle in the evening...

As James Joyce was working on Finnegans Wake, he asked his friend T.S. Eliot to shepherd an early extract, simply known as 'Work in Progress' into print. This celebrated episode,...

To celebrate the centenary of the publication of Ulysses, the most important literary work of the twentieth century, eighteen artists, writers and thinkers respond to an episode each of the...

To celebrate the centenary of the publication of Ulysses, the most important literary work of the twentieth century, eighteen artists, writers and thinkers respond to an episode each of the...

Horrific, horrendous, unspeakable, The Whitechapel Murderer, Jack the Ripper, stalked the streets of East London in 1888, slaughtering prostitutes and bewildering the police who were hunting him. They never succeeded...

'Dostoyevsky's finest masterpiece' John BayleyDostoyevsky's great novel of damnation and redemption evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur. It tells the story of...

Now the subject of a major new film from director Baz Luhrmann (Romeo+Juliet, Moulin Rouge!), starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, The Great Gatsby is F. Scott Fitzgerald's brilliant fable...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World''The best-loved book by our best-loved novelist' IndependentWith its 'light and bright and sparkling' dialogue, its romantic denouement and its lively...

'Wuthering Heights is commonly thought of as "romantic", but try rereading it without being astonished by the extremes of physical and psychological violence' Jeanette WintersonEmily Bronte's novel of impossible desires,...

'A triumph of execution ... one of the best narratives of the "double life" of a Victorian gentleman' Peter AckroydOscar Wilde's alluring novel of decadence and sin was a succes...

Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz) and George Cattermole, with a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex.This vivid historical and political novel by Dickens...

A sharp and poignant snapshot of the crises of youth - from the acclaimed author of The Catcher in the Rye'Everything everybody does is so - I don't know -...

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MATTHEW PEARLEdgar Allan Poe invented detective fiction with these three mesmerising stories of a young eccentric named C. Auguste Dupin: 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue',...

Now a major film directed by Armando Iannucci, starring Dev Patel, Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, Peter Capaldi and Ben Whishaw'The greatest achievement of the greatest of all novelists' Leo TolstoyIn...

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot is an immaculate portrait of innocence tainted by the brutal reality of human greed. This Penguin Classics edition is translated from the Russian by David McDuff,...