CLASSICS

The Penguin English Library Edition of A Room with a View by E. M. Forster'"But you do," he went on, not waiting for contradiction. "You love the boy body and...

Classic master of natural history writing W. H. Hudson forms an important link between nineteenth-century Romanticism and the twentiethcentury ecological movement. His most famous novel, Green Mansions, now resplendent in...

A macabre evocation of obsessive love beyond the grave; a nobleman possessed by the soul of a servant girl; a man's mysterious phobia of the letter 'U'; and the unexpected...

In the field of supernatural and fantastic literature, certain names come readily to mind - E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft - but the name of Fitz-James O'Brien has...

First published in 1939, a few years before his most influential works in theatre and philosophy, The Wall was Sartre's first and only collection of short fiction. The title piece...

Set in an unspecified island kingdom, A Regicide tells the story of the statistician Boris who, after the electoral victory of the Church party in the country's elections, decides to...

Based, like the earlier Impressions of Africa, on uniquely eccentric principles of composition, this book invites the reader to enter a world which in its innocence and extravagance is unlike...

"Simplicius Simplicissimus" - the towering achievement of H.J.C. von Grimmelshausen, the earliest novelist in the German language - charts the adventures of its hero, Simplicius, through the horrors of battle,...

When the knight Huldbrand finds shelter at an old fisherman's cottage outside a haunted forest, he encounters and falls in love with his host's adopted daughter, the mysterious Undine. As...

'Martin Salander', one of the Gottfried Keller's most famous novels, traces the progress of an impoverished idealist towards becoming a self-sufficient, deeply humane individual, offering at the same time a...

"True History", Lucian's best-known and most entertaining work, is a parody of the tall stories of fantastic journeys narrated by famous poets and historians. With his trademark wit and humour,...

Mary Innes's classic prose translation of one of the supreme masterpieces of Latin literature, Ovid's Metamorphosis. Ovid drew on Greek mythology, Latin folklore and legend from ever further afield to...

Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights has been called the most beautiful, most profoundly violent love story of all time. At its center are Catherine and Heathcliff, and the self-contained world of...

La Vita Nuova (1292-94) has many aspects. Dante's libello, or "little book," is most obviously a book about love. In a sequence of thirty-one poems, the author recounts his love...

The Picture of Dorian Gray altered the way Victorians understood the world they inhabited. It heralded the end of a repressive Victorianism, and after its publication, literature had-in the words...

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple," declares Algernon early in Act One of The Importance of Being Earnest, and were it either, modern literature would be "a complete...