Classic fiction Books 733 results

William Shakespeare

Ladybird

With a foreword by Lev Rosen, author of the Evander Mills series and You've Goth My Heart. 'All that glisters is not gold.' Rediscover Shakespeare's tale of bitterness and retribution. Bitterness begets blood. Bassiano is in love with the gorgeous heiress Portia! Alas, he's too poor to pass the suitors' test set by her father. Fortunately, Bassiano's best friend, Antonio, s...

Virgil

Penguin

Crafted during the reign of Augustus Caesar at the outset of the Roman Empire, Virgil's Aeneid is a tale of thrilling adventure, extreme adversity, doomed romance, fateful battles, and profound loss. Through its stirring account of human struggle, meddling gods, and conflicting destinies, the poem brings to life the triumphs and trials that led to one of the most powerful socie...

Mary Shelley / Siv Jansson / Keith C / Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Wordsworth Classics

Frankenstein is the classic gothic horror novel which has thrilled and engrossed readers for two centuries. Written by Mary Shelley, it is a story which she intended would 'curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart.' The tale is a superb blend of science fiction, mystery and thriller. Victor Frankenstein driven by the mad dream of creating his own creature, experim...

Robert Plunket

Penguin

A Madame Bovary for the heyday of gay New York, Love Junkie is a riotously funny, razor-sharp tale about wanting it all 'He was a charismatic porn star who sold his dirty underwear. I was an upper-middle-class housewife from Bronxville' Mimi Smithers, bored aesthete manquée, lives with her husband Boyce in the New York suburbs, where dreams of dazzling social success elude he...

Caroline Blackwood

Abacus

Caroline Blackwood's masterpiece, shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize - a gothic family drama in miniature In her gloomy mausoleum of a home, the terrifying matriarch Great Granny Webster spends her days sitting bolt upright in a Victorian chair, entirely alone except for her one-eyed maid - and her orphaned great-granddaughter, sent to stay for the sea air. She presides ove...

A. A. Milne

Phoenix

Winnie the Pooh is a classic children's book by A.A. Milne that follows the adventures of a honey-loving bear named Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends, including Piglet, Eeyore, Rabbit, Owl, and Christopher Robin, in the fictional Hundred Acre Wood. The stories often center around Pooh's playful attempts to find honey, his simple nature, and the heart-warming friendships between t...

Emily Brontë

Ladybird

'Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!' Emily Brontë's novel of impossible desires, violence and transgression is a masterpiece of intense, unsettling power. It begins in a snowstorm, when Lockwood, the new tenant of...

Dylan. Thomas

Ladybird

'A tour de force of oral poetry' Guardian'I could get drunk just on the sound of the words' Sylvia PlathA definitive new edition of Dylan Thomas's beloved radio playIt is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent... In the Welsh seaside town of Llareggub, night is moving in the streets. Its inhabitants are lost in the land of d...

Gillian Freeman

Dead Ink

Outsider Classics is Dead Ink's resurrection ground for the strange, the silenced, and the outcasts. This series exhumes lost literary voices that were ahead of their time to restore them to the cult status they always deserved. From forgotten masterpieces to once-censored provocations, each title is a reaction against the canon curated for readers who want to stray into the ma...

Flannery O'connor

Faber & Faber

The American South. A turbulent world, fraught with the Civil Rights struggle and toxic religious tensions. Against the backdrop of mountainous sunsets and backwater shacks, deserted highways and small-town gas stations, people forge their own lives. We encounter murderers, escaped convicts, dysfunctional families, conmen, fanatics, farmhands, Bible salesmen, troubled children,...

Lao Tzu

Phoenix

Chiltern creates the most beautiful editions of the World's finest literature. Your favorite classic titles in a way you have never seen them before: the tactile layers, fine details and beautiful colors of these remarkable covers make these books feel extra special and look striking on any shelf. Tao Te Ching, a classic Chinese text from the 4th Century, is the foundational w...

Edgar Allan Poe

Wordsworth Classics

"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a gothic short story by Edgar Allan Poe that explores themes of madness, isolation, and decay. The narrator visits the gloomy, crumbling mansion of his childhood friend, Roderick Usher, who is suffering from a mysterious illness alongside his equally strange sister, Madeline. As strange and terrifying events unfold, the line between reality a...

Johanna Spyri

Chiltern Publishing

Chiltern creates the most beautiful editions of the World's finest literature. Your favorite classic titles in a way you have never seen them before: the tactile layers, fine details and beautiful colors of these remarkable covers make these books feel extra special and look striking on any shelf. One of the best-selling books of all time, Heidi is not only a defining work of S...

Daphne Du Maurier

Abacus

'This novel catches fire' NEW YORK TIMES DISCOVER THIS THRILLING STORY OF DESIRE AND AMBITION FROM THE AUTHOR OF REBECCA She set men's hearts on fire and scandalized a country. In Regency London, the only way for a woman to succeed is to beat men at their own game. So when Mary Anne Clarke seeks an escape from her squalid surroundings in Bowling Inn Alley, she ventures...

Daphne Du Maurier

Abacus

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF REBECCA 'Wickedly readable . . . every woman instinctively wants to read her' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 'A tale of dramatic longings . . . unexpected and fun' MARGARET DRABBLE *** It was Charles who called us the parasites . . . No one would choose the Delaneys as their ideal guests. Vain Maria, capricious Niall and self-sacrificin...

Homer

Phoenix

A stunning gift edition of the age-old tale of Odysseus and his journey. This epic poem by Homer, believed to have been written between the eighth and ninth centuries BC, continues to be essential reading for young and old alike. The Odyssey follows the Greek hero Odysseus on a ten-year journey back to his home in Ithaca after fighting in the Trojan War. The challenges he encou...

Edgar Allan Poe

Penguin Classics

Edgar Allen Poe's short stories have lost none of their power to horrify. He remains a destabilizingly terse sketcher out of ideas, a writer who allows the reader to fill in the many ghastly blanks in his narratives of violence, retribution and animalism. It is hard to recommend Hop-Frog wholeheartedly (its original subtitle was: Or, The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs) as it is s...

Margaret Cavendish

Penguin Classics

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'I had rather die in the adventure of noble achievements, than live in obscure and sluggish security' In 1666, Margaret Cavendish had a vision: there was a crack in reality at the North Pole leading to a utopian parallel universe, where gender roles, scientific orthodoxy and political norms had been razed to the ground. ...

James Baldwin

Penguin Classics

'It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate' Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', The Fire Next Time is an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice, drawn from Baldwin's early life in Harlem and his exper...

Arthur Schnitzler

Penguin Classics

Following the death of his sister, middle-aged Dr Graesler leaves his winter home in Lanzarote for a health resort in Germany, where he practised medicine for many years. There he meets the Schleheim family, and is particularly drawn to their daughter Sabine. But a simple, stilted courtship soon unravels a web of hushed-up suicide and illicit sexual liaisons. Arthur Schnitzler'...

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Penguin Classics

I am a ridiculous man. They call me mad now. That would be a promotion in rank A delusional man whose strange dream changes his life; a self-justifying husband who causes his wife's suicide; a witness to a young girl's ruin; a writer who stretches out on a gravestone and listens to the gossip of the dead ... the narrators of these four confessional tales show how little we und...

Anne Serre

Penguin

A Leopard-Skin Hat may be Anne Serre's most moving novel yet. A masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance, it is the story of an intense friendship between the Narrator and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders. A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, an...

Dorothy Parker

Ladybird

What can you say, when a man asks you to dance with him? I most certainly will not dance with you. I'll see you in hell first. Why, thank you, I'd like to awfully, but I'm having labor pains. Acerbic, pithy and vibrant, Dorothy Parker's writings capture the dizzying decadence of Jazz Age New York. Though Parker refuses to be swept along- she gleefully deconstructs its hypocrisy...

Franz Kafka

Penguin

The whole town got involved with the hunger-artist; from day to day of his starving, people's participation grew; everyone wanted to see the hunger-artist at least once a day; on the later days there were season-ticket holders who sat for days on end in front of his little cage Reading these stories by the master of the absurd is like entering a dreamworld in which nothing, and...

W. B Yeats

Ladybird

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'Under bare Ben Bulben's headIn Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.An ancestor was rector thereLong years ago, a church stands near, By the road an ancient cross.No marble, no conventional phrase;On limestone quarried near the spotBy his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eyeOn life, on death.Horseman, pass by!' ...

Nikolai Leskov

Penguin

'I decided that my trip had evidently been in vain, since nothing of interest could possibly occur on this visit. I was mistaken.' Condemned to sleeplessness by the chatter permeating his guesthouse room, a forlorn traveller turns his ear to the riotous tale spun by the garrulous, meddlesome, inane and utterly unprincipled Marya Mart novna next door. Her exuberant deformations...

Chester B. Himes

Ladybird

Best known for his hardboiled Harlem Detective series, Chester Himes was also a superb literary writer, beginning his creative life by writing short stories in the 1930s while serving jail time for armed robbery. Selected here are some of his best stories - from a satirical tale about a student bet that purportedly disproves the existence of racism in Los Angeles to a chilling ...

Roald Dahl

Ladybird

No author perfected the twist in the tale better than Roald Dahl. His stories - many of which were filmed as Tales of the Unexpected - take us into a world that is shocking, cruelly funny and always has a sinister edge. What if plants could feel pain? What kind of father would bet his daughter in a wager? And what is the secret behind that delicious lamb dinner...? ...

Wang Xiaobo

Ladybird

Razor-sharp, pugnacious and blackly funny, Wang Xiaobo's essays established him as one of China's most popular - and subversive - writers. From the political power of silence to the irrepressible spirit of a pig he met while working in a commune, these reflections on life and literature in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution provide a rare glimpse of a fearless satirical geni...

Bohumil Hrabal

Ladybird

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksClosely Watched Trains tells the story of Milos Hrma, a young railroad apprentice coming of age in wartime Czechoslovakia. Milos is overwhelmed with worries - about his virginity, his love for the conductor, and ongoing scandals in the stationmaster's office - besides which the idea of fighting the Germans seems a simple af...