Classic fiction Books 623 results

Jane Austen

During his reign, Lord Cobham was burnt alive, but I forget what for. In Jane Austen's breezy and entirely biased telling of English history, Mary, Queen of Scots is a scandalously wronged victim, Elizabeth I is a wicked villain and most historical facts and dates are cheerfully disregarded. It is accompanied here by other riotous early pieces in which young women steal money,...

Rabindranath. Tagore

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Rabindranath Tagore was one of the greatest authors of his generation. In these two short stories - 'The Broken Nest' and 'Dead or Alive' - he is at his devastating best, charting the slow, then fast, implosion of two perfect Bengali households. No-one understands each other; everything is misconstrued; all is lost. ...

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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...

Leo Tolstoy

'I'm not the sort of husband you dream of when you're walking alone along the avenue in the evening, am I? And it would be a disaster, wouldn't it?' How does love die? This question lies at the heart of Tolstoy's desperately sad novella. It tells the story of seventeen-year-old Masha who, despite their differences, falls passionately in love with an older man, and marries him. ...

Stefan Zweig

'... a human being, an intellectual human being who constantly bends the entire force of his mind on the ridiculous task of forcing a wooden king into the corner of a wooden board, and does it without going mad!' A group of passengers on a cruise ship challenge the world chess champion to a match. At first, they crumble, until they are helped by whispered advice from a stranger...

Stanislaw Lem

Journey into space with Polish scifi master Stanislaw Lem. The whimsical time-loops of Ijon Tichy's cosmic adventure 'The Seventh Voyage' are reminiscent of Douglas Adams, while the spectral whispers haunting Pirx the Pilot as he navigates his spaceship to Mars in 'Terminus', echo the author's masterpiece Solaris. Then 'The Mask' introduces a perfect robot assassin and asks, ca...

Audre. Lorde

'I am Black because I come from the earth's inside now take my word for jewel in the open light.' Impassioned and profound, the poems in Coal showcase Audre Lorde in all her dazzling elegance and multiplicity. Mournful, celebratory, politically conscious, this early collection is a testament to Lorde's beloved and hugely influential lyric voice, which faithfully captures the c...

Walter Benjamin

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books'Every sort of passion verges on chaos, I know, but what the collecting passion verges on is a chaos of memories.' From intimate musings on his book collection, to a dream-like trip through the bustling streets of Marseille, each of these essays offers a compelling journey into the mind of one of the twentieth century's mos...

Katherine. Mansfield

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksShe drew a long, soft breath, as though the paper daffodils between them were almost too sweet to bear Katherine Mansfield was a magician of the short story, whose work was described by Virginia Woolf as 'the only writing I have ever been jealous of'. These eight tales show her gift for transforming fleeting moments - a cha...

Mary Gaitskill

A writer engulfed by a new obsession, an occasional sex-worker, a runaway, a teenager entering the workplace- these four tales of desire and dislocation explore the rough edges of relationships and the inner lives of women negotiating their precarious place in the world. In these coolly compelling and quietly devastating stories, Gaitskill evokes with razor-sharp precision the ...

Dante

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksLay down all hope, you that go in by me . . . Through the gates of Hell, past whirling hurricanes, leering devils and rivers of blood, lies the ultimate evil: Satan himself. Masterfully translated by Dorothy L. Sayers, this first instalment of The Divine Comedy tells the captivating tale of Dante and Virgil's arduous journe...

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark claimed The Driver's Seat to be her best and creepiest novel. Once you have met her heroine Lise - heading for the holiday of a lifetime in an extraordinarily garish dress and with violence on her mind - you will understand why. ...

Kate Chopin

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksThere was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name Nuns, maidens, adventurers - with electricity, The Story of an Hour brings together stories of female freedom, as Kate Chopin asks the question: what will emancipation feel like for w...

Bohumil Hrabal

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...

Rumi

Rumi's verses have been a balm for readers' souls for over eight centuries. This exquisite selection brings together some of the Persian mystic's most profound, evocative and transcendent works. Exploring passion, heartbreak, friendship, faith and the myriad ways in which we move through the world, these strikingly modern poems are perfect for those looking for inspiration, gui...

Saadat Hasan Manto

Saadat Hasan Manto, the most widely read and translated writer in the Urdu language, captured the devastation and absurdity of the partition of India and Pakistan like no other. The Price of Freedom brings together ten of his best stories, focusing on human voices from the religious fracture that forever unhinged two newly independent nations. Powerful, piercing and deeply movi...

Gertrude Stein

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books'All Frenchmen know you have to become civilised between eighteen and twenty-three and that civilisation comes upon you by contact with an older woman, by revolution, by army discipline, by any escape or any subjection, and then you are civilised and life goes on normally in a latin way.' Gertrude Stein's Paris France, pub...

Gérard De Nerval

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksIn October Nights, Gerard de Nerval takes us on a gentle meander through nighttime Paris - a dreamlike journey towards getting lost. Also included in this volume is Sylvie, his haunting novella of love and memory, the 'masterpiece' that inspired Proust to write In Search of Lost Time. Together, these works by the French poe...

Daphne Du Maurier

DISCOVER THE DU MAURIER DARK ROMANCE COLLECTION 'Rebecca has woven its way into the fabric of our culture with all the troubling power of myth or dream. A stunning book' SARAH WATERS 'It's the book every writer wishes they'd written' CLARE MACKINTOSH 'The greatest psychological thriller of all time' ERIN KELLY *** He did not belong to me at all, he belonged to Rebecca. . . ...

George. Orwell

This is Orwell's memoir of his experiences during the Spanish Civil War - a groundbreaking work of dissident literature drawn from vivid personal experience. There are occasions where it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all... This is dissident literature drawn from vivid personal experience. Orwell volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War, was nea...

Charlotte Bronte

Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is now available in an affordable softcover edition, featuring striking hand-painted cover art from Laci Fowler and distinctive interior design elements, making it ideal for classic fiction lovers, readers in high-school or college literature courses, and fans of annual reading challenges and "Required Reading" lists. Considered one of the greates...

Jane Austen

Dive into a world of romance, village life, and even a little silliness in this stunning edition of Jane Austen's timeless novel, Emma. Self-satisfied Emma Woodhouse thinks she is above romance of any kind, but when she decides she is a great matchmaker and sets out to find a wealthy husband for her friend, the sweet yet pitiable Harriet Smith, she crosses paths with the charm...

Jo Ella Parsons

Indulging in the strangest eddies of literary love, this new anthology bids you enter a doom-laden yet irresistibly seductive corner of the Weird. "Love will have its sacrifices. No sacrifice without blood. Let us go to sleep now." A prophecy threatens a volcanic upheaval for a star-crossed pair. A forbidden rite binds a dark arts dabbler to a phantom bride. A barstool ch...

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A deep, complex examination of the crucial philosophical questions of human existence, from one of the world's most renowned novelists 'The mystery of human existence lies not in staying alive, but in finding something to live for' The murder of brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov changes the lives of his sons irrevocably: Mitya, the sensualist, whose bitter rivalry with his fa...

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson's immortal tale of personality and evil, now in a Clothbound ClassicA Penguin Classics HardcoverDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have become synonymous with the idea of a split personality. More than a morality tale, this dark psychological fantasy is also a product of its time, drawing on contemporary theories of class, evolution, criminality, and secret lives. A...

Elizabeth Gaskell

Hester, a teenage girl, is left in charge of a young child in a cold, gloomy manor house under the looming shadows of the Cumberland fells. She hears strange organ music playing, but everyone tells her it isn't happening. She is forbidden from visiting the mysterious East Wing. She is desperate to keep her young charge safe from some unknown disaster, one she feels sure is comi...

Ivan Turgenev

Turgenev's first major publication, Memoirs of a Hunter is a series of tales based largely on the author's own experiences while hunting on his mother's estate of Spasskoye, where he became aware of the iniquities of the system of serfdom and the privations and indignities suffered by the Russian peasantry. Told from the perspective of a dispassionate, observing narrator, the s...

Franz Kafka

Like George Orwell, Franz Kafka has given his name to a world of nightmare, but in Kafka's world, it is never completely clear just what the nightmare is. The Trial, where the rules are hidden from even the highest officials, and if there is any help to be had, it will come from unexpected sources, is a chilling, blackly amusing tale that maintains, to the very end, a relentles...

George Orwell

In 1943, there was an urgent need for Animal Farm. The Soviet Union had become Britain's ally in the war against Nazi Germany, and criticism of Stalin's brutal regime was either censored or discouraged. In any case, many intellectuals on the left still celebrated the Soviet Union, claiming that the terrors of its show trials, summary executions and secret police were either exa...

E. M. Forster

Miss Lucy Honeychurch is on a tour of Italy with her cousin and chaperone Miss Charlotte Bartlett when she encounters the young George Emerson, on a similar tour with his father. George finds himself drawn to the pretty, spirited Lucy, while Lucy is intrigued by George's rejection of "proper" behavior. Despite her attraction to George, Lucy later becomes engaged to Cecil Vyse, ...