Classic fiction Books 624 results

Emily Brontë

'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

'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...

Nell Dunn

THE BESTSELLLING CLASSIC OF SIXTIES LONDON 'Touching, truthful and fresh - a tour de force' MARGARET DRABBLE 'Hilarious, heartbreaking' PARIS REVIEW 'Her art is ignited by voice' ALI SMITH, GUARDIAN 'Exuberantly alive' SUNDAY TIMES To think when I was a kid I planned to conquer the world and if anyone saw me now they'd say, 'She's had a rough night, poor cow.' Joy - twenty-o...

Oscar Wilde

A complete collection of enchanting fairy tales from the acclaimed poet and playwright Oscar Wilde Celebrated as the writer of The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde is equally beloved for his fairy tales, written 'partly for children and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy'. With warmth, tenderness and q...

Gillian Freeman

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

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

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

"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 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...

Homer

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...

Jonathan Swift

Chiltern Publishing was formed in 2018 with a vision to create the most beautiful classics. Using a perfect mix of tradition and the very latest in printing techniques, 19th Century quality has met 21st Century technology. With wonderfully detailed covers, sparkling gilt edges, creamy pages, and stitched binding they are the most beautiful classics ever published. Gulliver's Tr...

Edgar Allan Poe

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...

James Baldwin

'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...

Laurie Lee

In one of the great English war memoirs, we learn what it is to cross the Pyrenees through freezing snow to fight fascism in Spain; to narrowly escape execution by your own side; to kill a man with a borrowed rifle and feel nothing but shame. Moving and shrapnel-sharp, A Moment of War recalls the defeat of idealism; 'that flush of youth which never doubts self-survival, that id...

Arthur Schnitzler

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'...

Yasunari Kawabata

Kikuji has been invited to a tea ceremony by a mistress of his dead father, only to find that the mistress' rival and successor is also present. He falls for her, with devastating consequences. By 1949 Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, felt that the tradition of the tea ceremony had been degraded. In this delicate novella he use...

Anne Serre

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

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

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

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!' ...

Karen Blixen

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'As for me I have one ambition only: to invent stories, very beautiful stories' Gothic, expansive and truly spellbinding, Karen Blixen's short stories offer incisive psychological portraits and imaginative visions of war, longing and tender love. Here, an orphan boy creates an elaborate fantasy of a life of grandeur, a feu...

Carson Mccullers

On a military base in 1930s Georgia, Private Ellgee Williams catches sight of his captain's wife in the nude and becomes obsessed with her. But Captain Penderton - unhappily married to the unfaithful Leonora - in turn erotically fixates on Williams. Spare, muscular and sensual, with the dramatic vision of a Greek myth, Carson McCullers' novella is a timeless work about the alie...

Nikolai Leskov

'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

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

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

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...

H. P. Lovecraft

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books'Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has befallen no man before' After five years of 'strange amnesia', Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee remains haunted by madness and memories that cannot be real. Desperate for answers he travels to Western Australia, joining an archaeological excavation in...

Epictetus

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books'I must die. But must I die bawling?' What does it mean to live a virtuous life? How can we rise above pain and anguish? In these teachings from Book 1 of his Discourses, ancient philosopher Epictetus outlines a practical approach to Stoicism that has inspired thinkers for centuries, from Marcus Aurelius to Theodore Rooseve...

Romain Gary

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books'Why should I bother to invent things? My life has been far more exciting and wonderful than any fairy-tale' In the heart of the English countryside, surrounded by irritatingly polite relatives and hopeless sycophants, Lady L. is celebrating her eightieth birthday. But as the guests disperse, she feels the undeniable pull o...

Sally Carson / Sylvia Carson

"Crooked Cross describes, through the eyes of one ordinary family, the Nazis' growth in power between December 1932 and August 1933. It is extraordinarily prescient, anticipating all the horrors they were about to inflict on the world, and in this respect it joins a small group of novels, PB no. 39 Manja and PB no. 136 The Oppermanns among them, which were written to try to ale...