Penguin Black Classics

A new translation of one of the literary wonders of the medieval world and the greatest source of knowledge of Viking lore in existence. Compiled by an unknown scribe in Iceland around 1270, and based on sources dating back centuries earlier, these mythological and heroic poems tell of gods and mortals from an ancient era—the giant-slaying Thor, the doomed Völsung...

Beginning with Dante's liberation from Hell, Purgatory relates his ascent, accompanied by Virgil, of the Mount of Purgatory — a mountain of nine levels, formed from rock forced upwards when God threw Satan into the depths of the earth. As he travels through the first seven levels, Dante observes the sinners who are waiting for their release into Paradise, and...

Keats' poetic genius was first seen in 1816 when he published the first of a series of great works. He was variously hailed as an important poetical figure, the natural heir to the Romantic throne and, like Shelley before him, criticised for his politics. In his short life, he proved to be one of the greatest and most original thinkers...

For more than two thousand years, The Art of War by Sun Tzu has provided military leaders with essential advice on battlefield tactics, managing troops and terrain, and employing cunning and deception. An elemental part of Chinese culture, it has also become a touchstone for the Western struggle for survival and success, whether in battle, in business, or in relationships....

The Analects are a collection of Confucius's sayings brought together by his pupils shortly after his death in 497 BC. Together, they express a philosophy, or a moral code, by which Confucius, one of the most humane thinkers of all time, believed everyone should live. Upholding the ideals of wisdom, self-knowledge, courage, and love of one's fellow man, he argued...

Pensees are the unfinished notes which the French mathematician and physicist, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), jotted down in preparation for a reasoned defence of Christian belief. They display a vision of humanity's weakness and the futility of worldly life. Whether his subject is the human heart or the famous wager of faith, Pascal writes with a blend of lucidity and eloquence....

After Inferno and Purgatorio, here is the last cantica (part) of the Divine Comedy, in a new translation by acclaimed translator Robin Kirkpatrick. Having plunged to the uttermost depths of Hell and climbed the Mount of Purgatory in parts one and two of the Divine Comedy, Dante ascends to Heaven in this third and final part, continuing his soul's search...

A collection of poems exemplifying Romantic aesthetic ideals, whose unique beauty lies in their revolutionary exploration of the 'overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility', Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads is edited with a note on the text by Michael Schmidt in Penguin Classics. Published in 1798, Lyrical Ballads is a dazzling collaboration containing twenty-three poems by...

Cranford, Gaskell's best-known work, is set in a small rural town inhabited largely by women. This is a community that runs on cooperation and gossip, at the very heart of which are the daughters of the former rector: Miss Deborah Jenkyns and her sister Miss Matty. However, domestic peace is constantly threatened by financial disaster, imagined burglaries, tragic accidents, and...

No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion, Amelia, however, longs only for caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their way through the tawdry glamour of Regency society, battles—military and domestic—are fought,...

Published alongside other Conrad's works, on the 150th anniversary of his birth. In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agent communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven around an attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894, masterminded by Verloc, a Russian spy working for the police and ostensibly a member of an...

The Professor is the hero of Charlotte Brontë's first novel, where he escapes a dreary clerkship in industrial Yorkshire by taking a job as a teacher in Belgium. There, however, his entanglement with the sensuous but manipulative Zoraide Reuter complicates his affections for a penniless girl who is both teacher and pupil in Reuter's school. This landmark story is part...

The comic masterpiece that catapulted the 24-year-old Dickens to fame. The Pickwick Papers began as a literary spoof centred around sketches of stock sporting fops by caricaturist Robert Seymour. Following the success of Sketches by Boz, Dickens was recruited to compose the words which would accompany the illustrations. Dickens quickly made the project his own and created some of his...

This was the most popular novel of Radcliffe's time, and Radcliffe's portrayal of her heroine's inner life raised the Gothic romance to a new level. The atmosphere of fear and the gripping plot continue to thrill today. This is the story of the orphaned Emily St Aubert, who finds herself separated from the man she loves and confined within the...

Brought up at Dorlcote Mill, Maggie Tulliver worships her brother Tom and is desperate to win the approval of her parents. However, her passionate, wayward nature and her fierce intelligence bring her into constant conflict with her family. As she reaches adulthood, the clash between their expectations and her desires is painfully played out as she finds herself torn between...

In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the community of Casterbridge. However, behind his success always lurks the shameful secret of his past and a personality prone...

New edition of this classic novel, edited by Philip Horne and Ruth Yeazell. This story of the alliance between Italian aristocracy and American millionaires is "a work unique among all James's novels—it is his only novel in which things come out right for his characters... he had finally resolved the questions, curious and passionate, that had kept him at his...

A new edition of the least well-known of Charlotte Brontë's novels, but one of the most fascinating, for its engagement with the 'woman question' and the vivid depiction of Yorkshire during the Napoleonic Wars. Struggling manufacturer Robert Moore has introduced labour-saving machinery to his Yorkshire mill, arousing a ferment of unemployment and discontent among his workers. Robert considers marriage to...

Sentimental Education begins with the hero, Frederic Moreau, leaving Paris and returning to the provinces and his mother. Part love story, part historical novel and satire, it tells of how Moreau is driven by passion for an unattainable older woman. His 'sentimental education' turns out to be more of an anxious quest than a happy one, echoing Flaubert's own life...

A playful mock 'biography' of a chameleonic historical figure, written for Virginia Woolf's intimate friend Vita Sackville-West. Orlando has always been an outsider... His longing for passion, adventure and fulfilment takes him out of his own time. Chasing a dream through the centuries, he bounds from Elizabethan England and imperial Turkey to the modern world. Will he find happiness with...

When Arthur Clennam returns to England after many years abroad, he takes a kindly interest in Amy Dorrit, his mother's seamstress, and in the affairs of Amy's father, William Dorrit, a man of shabby grandeur, long imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea. As Arthur soon discovers, the dark shadow of the prison stretches far beyond its walls to affect the...

The classic dystopian novel from Sweden, written at the midpoint between Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Leo Kall is a zealous, middle-ranking scientist in the totalitarian World State who has just made a thrilling discovery—a new drug, Kallocain, that will force anyone who takes it to tell the truth. At last, criminality will be dragged out into the open,...

Definitive text in paperback Ivanhoe (1819) was the first of Scott's novels to adopt a purely English subject and was also his first attempt to combine history and romance, which later influenced Victorian medievalism. Set at the time of the Norman Conquest, Ivanhoe returns from the Crusades to claim his inheritance and the love of Rowena, becoming involved in the...

Dombey and Son is both a firm and a family, and the ambiguous connection between public and private life lies at the heart of Dickens' novel. Paul Dombey is a man who runs his domestic affairs as he runs his business: calculatingly, callously, coldly, and commercially. Through his dysfunctional relationships with his son, his two wives, and his neglected daughter...

Author, dramatist, and satirist, Nikolay Gogol (1809-1852) deeply influenced later Russian literature with his powerful depictions of a society dominated by petty bureaucracy and base corruption. This volume includes both his most admired short fiction and his most famous drama. A biting and frequently hilarious political satire, The Government Inspector has been popular since its first performance and was regarded...

A new translation by Helen Constantine of de Laclos's great novel of moral and emotional depravity. Published in 1782, just years before the French Revolution, Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a disturbing and ultimately damning portrayal of a decadent society. At its centre are two aristocrats, former lovers, who embark on a sophisticated game of seduction and manipulation to bring amusement...

A Dog's Heart by Mikhail Bulgakov is now available in a new translation, fresh to Penguin Classics. This is Bulgakov's surreal tale of a Moscow doctor who befriends a stray dog and performs on it a human transplant—with disastrous consequences.

Tolstoy's controversial treatise on the purpose of Art During his decades of world fame as a novelist, Tolstoy also wrote prolifically in a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice and religion. These works culminated in What is Art?, published in 1898. Impassioned and iconoclastic, this powerfully influential work both criticises the elitist nature of art...

George Orwell's terrifying vision of a totalitarian future, annotated for students and with a new introduction by D. J. Taylor. Ever since its publication in 1948, George Orwell's terrifying vision of a totalitarian regime where Big Brother controls its citizens like 'a boot stamping on a human face' has become a touchstone for human freedom, and one of the most...

New translation of a book that has sold over 100,000 in its previous version. A new translation of the idiosyncratic diary of a 10th-century court lady in Heian Japan. Along with the Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book is one of the major Japanese classics.

On Suicide (1897) by Emile Durkheim is a groundbreaking book in the field of sociology. Traditionally, suicide was thought to be a matter of purely individual despair, but Durkheim recognised that the phenomenon had a social dimension. He believed that if anything can explain how individuals relate to society, then it is suicide. Why does it happen? What goes wrong?...

A new edition of James's chilling novella, edited by David Bromwich. 'The apparition had reached the landing half-way up and was therefore on the spot nearest the window where, at the sight of me, it stopped short.' The Turn of the Screw tells the story of a young governess sent to a country house to take charge of two orphans....

The heroic Greek dramas that have moved theatre-goers and readers since the fifth century B.C. Towering over the rest of Greek tragedy, the three plays that tell the story of the fated Theban royal family—Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus—are among the most enduring and timeless dramas ever written. Robert Fagles's authoritative and acclaimed translation conveys all of...

The Koran, now presented in a masterful and fully revised translation, is universally regarded by Muslims as the infallible Word of God. This sacred text was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad by the Angel Gabriel nearly fourteen hundred years ago. Its 114 chapters, or surahs, offer a profound narrative central to Muslim belief, encompassing a vast array of themes and...

In Republic, Plato constructs a visionary dialogue that delves deep into the nature of justice, the just man, and the just society. Set in ancient Athens, the narrative follows Socrates as he engages in profound conversations with a diverse group of characters, including Plato's own brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus. Through a series of intense debates and philosophical inquiries, Socrates seeks...

An anthology of some of the greatest poetry in the English language. Poetry and music have been associated with each other from the very beginning. The Penguin Book of English Song draws together a great variety of English poetry (including Irish, Scots and Welsh writers) that has reached a wider audience through the magic of music. Richard Stokes's rich anthology...

A major new anthology of Percy Bysshe Shelley's work, edited by Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy. Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the leading English Romantics and is critically regarded among the finest lyric poets in the English language. His major works include the long visionary poems Prometheus Unbound and Adonais, an elegy on the death of John Keats. His...

New to Classics, a wide-ranging survey of the Jewish mystical tradition. The Torah is both hidden and revealed. There is a secret meaning to the holy Torah that is not written down explicitly or explained in it. This selection offers a comprehensive survey of the Kabbalah, the body of writings in the Jewish mystical tradition. It features texts from a...

Kipling's reputation as the unofficial Laureate of the British Empire has obscured the true nature and scope of his poetic achievement. His poems range from exhilarating celebrations of British expansion overseas, through vivid character sketches of soldiers and seamen, to enchanting poems for children, political invective, and artistic manifestos. Here, Kipling's poems are presented in chronological order to reveal the...

One of the greatest philosophical works of all time, in a new translation for the twenty-first century. Widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophical works of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a succinct yet wide-ranging exploration of language and logic, science and mysticism, which has inspired generations of thinkers, artists and poets. In a series...

The definitive portrait of the real Socrates Rich in drama and humour, they include the controversial Ion, a debate on poetic inspiration; Laches, in which Socrates seeks to define bravery; and Euthydemus, which considers the relationship between philosophy and politics. Together, these dialogues provide a definitive portrait of the real Socrates and raise issues still keenly debated by philosophers, forming...

A chilling new collection of Henry James's short stories exploring the uncanny, edited by Susie Boyt. In The Turn of the Screw, one of the most famous ghost stories of all time, a governess becomes obsessed with the belief that malevolent forces are stalking the children in her care. But are the children really in danger - and if so,...

The Story of the Stone (c. 1760), also known by the title of The Dream of the Red Chamber, is the great novel of manners in Chinese literature. Divided into five volumes, of which The Warning Voice is the third, it charts the glory and decline of the illustrious Jia family—a story which closely accords with the fortunes of the...

The earliest of the four Hindu religious scriptures known as the Vedas, and the first extensive composition to survive in any Indo-European language, The Rig Veda (c. 1200–900 BC) is a collection of over 1,000 individual Sanskrit hymns. A work of intricate beauty, it provides a unique insight into early Indian mythology, religion, and culture. This selection of 108 of...

The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works contains The Cloud of Unknowing, The Mystical Theology of Saint Denis, The Book of Privy Counselling, and An Epistle on Prayer. Against a tradition of devotional writings which focused on knowing God through Christ's Passion and his humanity, these texts describe a transcendent God who exists beyond human knowledge and human language. These...

A selection of ground-breaking short stories, from the author of Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf tested the boundaries of fiction in these short stories, developing a new language of sensation, feeling and thought, and recreating in words the 'swarm and confusion of life'. Defying categorisation, the stories range from the more traditional narrative style of Solid Objects through the fragile impressionism...

A prodigiously brilliant thinker who sharply challenged the beliefs of his age, the political and social radical John Stuart Mill was the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century. Regarded as one of the sacred texts of liberalism, his great work On Liberty argues lucidly that any democracy risks becoming a 'tyranny of opinion' in which minority views are...

Gaius Plinius Secundus, known as Pliny the Elder, was born in AD 21. He served both as a cavalry officer in Germania and as a procurator, and he combined this public service with a deep interest in science. Natural History is Pliny's sole surviving work, and in it, he records the sum total of Roman scientific knowledge in the first...

A savage indictment of British society at the turn of the century, from the author of Mrs. Dalloway. The Years is the story of three generations of the Pargiter family - their intimacies and estrangements, anxieties and triumphs - mapped out against the bustling rhythms of London's streets during the first decades of the twentieth century. A work of fluid...

New to Penguin Classics In 1933 Robert Byron began a journey through the Middle East via Beirut, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Teheran to Oxiana—the country of the Oxus, the ancient name for the river Amu Darya which forms part of the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. The Road to Oxiana offers not only a wonderful record of his adventures,...

A beautiful, skilfully crafted work of chivalric romance. Written by an unknown author in the twelfth century, this powerful tale of murder and revenge reaches back to the earliest epochs of German antiquity, transforming centuries-old legend into a masterpiece of chivalric drama. Siegfried, a great prince of the Netherlands, wins the hand of the beautiful princess Kriemhild of Burgundy by...

A new collection of Rudyard Kipling's short stories, selected and edited by Jan Montefiore. Rudyard Kipling is one of the most magical storytellers in the English language. This new selection brings together the best of his short writings, following the development of his work over fifty years. They take us from the harsh, cruel, vividly realised world of the 'Indian'...

A collection of Bacon's vibrant, intelligent essays covering subjects ranging from ambition to the vicissitude of things. One of the major political figures of his time, Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) served in the court of Elizabeth I and ultimately became Lord Chancellor under James I in 1617. A scholar, wit, lawyer and statesman, he wrote widely on politics, philosophy, and...

Two terrifying modern classics by cult horror favourite Thomas Ligotti, in time for their 30th and 25th anniversaries. Two terrifying classics by "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction" (The Washington Post) Thomas Ligotti's debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second, Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction. Influenced by the...

This work is far more than an eloquent piece of occasional writing. For Burke is one of the foremost conservative British political thinkers: in his support for piecemeal reform rather than revolutionary change, in his sceptical belief in expediency and practical wisdom rather than abstract theorising, and in his defence of property, religion and traditional institutions. On all these topics,...

Night and Day is new to Modern Classics. Katharine Hilbery is beautiful and privileged but uncertain of her future. She must choose between becoming engaged to the oddly prosaic poet William, and her dangerous attraction to the lower-class Ralph. As she struggles to decide, the lives of two other women—women’s rights activist Mary Datchet and Katharine’s mother, struggling to weave...

This new translation, the first to be based on the latest critical edition of Ibsen's works, offers the best version available in English. Four of Ibsen's most important plays in superb modern translations, part of the new Penguin Ibsen series. With her assertion that she is 'first and foremost a human being', Nora Helmer sent shockwaves throughout Europe when she...

The Story of the Stone (c. 1760), also known as The Dream of the Red Chamber, is one of the greatest novels of Chinese literature. The fifth part of Cao Xueqin's magnificent saga, "The Dreamer Awakes", was carefully edited and completed by Gao E some decades later. It continues the story of the changing fortunes of the Jia dynasty, focusing...

A superb translation of one of the greatest nineteenth-century poems—the libretto to Wagner's Ring cycle. The scale and grandeur of Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung has no precedent and no successor. It preoccupied Wagner for much of his adult life and revolutionised the nature of opera, the orchestra, the demands on singers, and on the audience itself. The four...

First time in Black Classics Nonsense is the breath of my nostrils, wrote Edward Lear (1812-88), and this collection demonstrates the wonderfully varied ways in which he pursued his philosophy of life. He created an extraordinary world filled with bizarre creatures - from the Dong with a luminous nose to the Pobble who has no toes - who misbehave with...

A collection of political speeches from the greatest orator of Rome Amid the corruption and power struggles of the collapse of the Roman Republic, Cicero (106-43BC) produced some of the most stirring and eloquent speeches in history. A statesman and lawyer, he was one of the only outsiders to penetrate the aristocratic circles that controlled the Roman state, and became...

Greek Tragedy brings together the masterpieces of classical tragedy in one volume, making it the ideal single-volume introduction for theatre-goers, actors, general readers, and students of Classics, English Literature, and Drama. Agememnon is the first part of Aeschylus's Orestian trilogy, where the leader of the Greek army returns from the Trojan War only to be murdered by his treacherous wife,...

The Story of the Stone (c.1760) is one of the greatest novels of Chinese literature. The first part of the story, The Golden Days, begins the tale of Bao-yu, a gentle young boy who prefers girls to Confucian studies, and his two cousins: Bao-chai, his parents' choice of a wife for him, and the ethereal beauty Dai-yu. Through the changing...

Mad, lascivious, sadistic and ridiculous, the provincial schoolteacher Peredonov torments his students and has hallucinatory fantasies about acts of savagery and degradation, yet to everyone else he is an upstanding member of society. A dark classic of Russia's silver age, this blackly funny novel recounts a schoolteacher's descent into sadism, arson and murder. As he pursues the idea of marrying...

Composed for recitation at festivals, these 33 songs were written in honour of the gods and goddesses of the ancient Greek pantheon. They recount the key episodes in the lives of the gods and dramatise the moments when they first appear before mortals. Together, they offer a vivid picture of the Greek view of the relationship between the divine and...

Fairy tales, ghost stories, detective fiction and comedies of manners - the stories collected in this volume made Oscar Wilde's name as a writer of fiction, showing breathtaking dexterity in a wide range of literary styles. Victorian moral justice is comically inverted in Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and The Canterville Ghost, and society's materialism comes under sharp, humorous criticism in...

One of the great figures of English Romanticism, Coleridge's poems show diversity and imaginative genius. One of the major figures of English Romanticism, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) created works of remarkable diversity and imaginative genius. The period of his creative friendship with William Wordsworth inspired some of Coleridge's best-known poems, from the nightmarish vision of the Rime of the Ancient...

This poem has been called 'the Qu'ran of the Persian language'. Begun in 1262 AD, Masnavi-ye Ma'navi, or 'spiritual couplets', is thought to be the longest single-authored 'mystical' poem ever written. As the spiritual masterpiece of the Persian Sufi tradition, it teaches how to progress to the ultimate goal of the Sufi path - union with God. Jalaloddin Rumi was...

A new edition of the finest poems by Tennyson Tennyson's poetry epitomises the Victorian age, for which he became a spokesman. His finest poems are often steeped in a sensuous melancholy, as in Maud, or are chivalric, heroic and allegorical, as in The Lady of Shalott and Morte d'Arthur.

A selection of Baudelaire's explicit and unsettling poems The poems of Charles Baudelaire are filled with explicit and unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity everyday subjects ignored by French literary conventions of his time. Tableaux parisiens portrays the brutal life of Paris's thieves, drunkards, and prostitutes amid the debris of factories and poorhouses. In love poems such as Le Beau Navire,...

A unique new selection, bringing together Akutagawa's undisputed masterpieces and several less well-known tales, never before translated into English. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) is one of Japan's foremost stylists—a modernist master whose short stories are marked by highly original imagery, cynicism, beauty, and wild humour. Rashomon and In a Bamboo Grove inspired Kurosawa's magnificent film and depict a past in which...

Two of Virginia Woolf's most striking essays are published together in a new Black Classics edition. A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics. It ranges in its themes from Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë to the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (imaginary) sister, and the effects...

Writing in the eleventh century, Khayyam was one of the most accomplished masters of the new and increasingly popular ruba'i, or two-line stanza, that had been adopted by poets to help them shake off the artifice of conventional court poetry and express their personal feelings with wit and clarity. Khayyam ranges in his stanzas through the most fundamental aspects of...

Penguin Classics relaunch The Moonstone, a priceless yellow diamond, is looted from an Indian temple and maliciously bequeathed to Rachel Verinder. On her eighteenth birthday, her friend and suitor Franklin Blake brings the gift to her. That very night, it is stolen again. No one is above suspicion, as the idiosyncratic Sergeant Cuff and Franklin piece together a puzzling series...

Miraculously preserved on clay tablets deciphered only in the 19th century, the cycle of poems collected around the character of Gilgamesh, the great King of Uruk, tells of his long and arduous journey to the Spring of Youth, of his encounters with monsters and gods, and of his friendship with Enkidu, the wild man from the hills. Also included in...

'The most moving lines literature has achieved' – Jorge Luis Borges. In The Divine Comedy & Paradise, having plunged to the uttermost depths of Hell and climbed the Mount of Purgatory, Dante ascends to Heaven, continuing his soul's search for God, guided by his beloved Beatrice. As he progresses through the spheres of Paradise, he grows in understanding, until he...

Part of the authoritative and acclaimed Penguin Shakespeare series, now rejacketed in the celebrated Penguin Classics livery. Two sets of identical twins, separated at sea as children, find themselves in the same city for the first time as adults. Soon, their friends mistake the twins for one another and bewilderment abounds, as the wife of one man declares the other...

The Bhagavad Gita is a new translation of one of the central texts of Sanskrit, offering a fresh perspective on its timeless teachings. This early epic poem recounts the conversation between Arjuna, the warrior, and his charioteer Krishna, the manifestation of God. In the moments before a great battle, the dialogue sets out the important lessons Arjuna must learn to...

A generous selection from the most charismatic and infamous of the Romantic poets. Described as 'Mad, bad and dangerous to know' by one of his lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb, Lord Byron was the quintessential Romantic. Flamboyant, charismatic and brilliant, he remains almost as notorious for his life—as a political revolutionary, sexual adventurer and traveller—as he does for his literary work....

New translation of Dante's masterpiece by acclaimed Robin Kirkpatrick In Purgatorio Dante, having described his journey into Hell, narrates his ascent of Mount Purgatory with Virgil, as he encounters penitents who toil through physical agonies, starvation and flames to assuage their earthly vices. Only by learning from them can he achieve his final enlightened transition to the lost Earthly Paradise...