CLASSICS

'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...

'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...

'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...

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...

'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...

'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,...

'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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

"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...

'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...

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...

'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...

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...

'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...

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...

'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...

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...

Giambattista Basile was a seventeenth-century Italian poet whom the Grimms credit with recording the first national collection of fairy tales. The Tale of Tales opens with Princess Zoza, unable to...

Having fled Japanese-occupied Korea for the gleaming promise of the United States with nothing but four dollars and a suitcase full of Shakespeare to his name, Chungpa Han arrives in...

The first, shortest, and most approachable of James Joyce's novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrays the Dublin upbringing of Stephen Dedalus, from his youthful days...

Part of a new six-volume series of the best in classic horror, selected by award-winning director Guillermo del Toro. Howard Phillips Lovecraft's unique contribution to American literature was a melding...

Perhaps no fairy tale is as widely known as 'Beauty and the Beast' - and perhaps no fairy tale exists in as many variations. Nearly every culture tells the story...

Perhaps the greatest short story collection in the English language, James Joyce's Dubliners is both a vivid and unflinching portrait of "dear dirty Dublin" at the turn of the twentieth...

A rare discovery in the world of fairy tales - now for the first time in English. With this volume, the holy trinity of fairy tales - the Brothers Grimm,...

The first complete new translation for 25 years of the acknowledged masterpiece of Japanese literature. Lady Murasaki's great 11th century novel is a beautifully crafted story of love, betrayal and...

The complete stories of a 20th century master of fictionAffairs, obsessions, ardors, fantasy, myth, legends, dreams, fear, pity, and violence-this magnificent collection of stories illuminates all corners of the human...

'May you not rest, as long as I am living. You said I killed you - haunt me, then'Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors,...

This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific...

Robert Fagles's latest achievement completes the magnificent triptych of Western epics. A sweeping story of arms and heroism, The Aeneid follows the adventures of Aeneas, who flees the ashes of...

Now a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with an introduction by Elizabeth Kostova and cover art by Ghost World creator Daniel Clowes, Mary Shelley's timeless gothic novel presents the epic battle...

Literature's grandest evocation of life's journey, at once an ageless human story and an individual test of moral endurance, Homer's ancient Greek epic The Odyssey is translated by Robert Fagles...