Penguin Classics: General Fiction

Tales from the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio is bawdy and moving, hilarious and reflective. These stories offer the very best of Boccaccio's Decameron in a brilliant, playful new translation. This hugely enjoyable volume collects the best stories of Boccaccio's masterwork in a fresh, accessible new translation by Peter Hainsworth. It includes such celebrated, thought-provoking tales as Isabella and the Pot...

'The best one', as Clarice herself described it – her great mystical masterpiece. In the mistaken belief that he has killed his wife, Martim flees the city and arrives, in a state of both fear and wonder, at a remote ranch. There, he will have to remake himself, emerging from the beast-like state in which his crime has plunged him,...

The paperback publication of the second volume of our new, substantially complete translation of one of the best-known and most influential classics of world literature. Every night for three years, the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with a different virgin, executing her the next morning. To end this brutal pattern and to save her own life, the vizier's daughter, Shahrazad, begins...

In his introduction, Ronald Blythe places the novel in the context of Henry James's literary career and discusses his depiction of women and themes of money and change. Making her debut in London society, Nanda Brookenham is being groomed for the marriage market. Thrust suddenly into the superficial and immoral circle that surrounds her mother, the innocent but independent-minded young...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. She felt a cozy solidarity with the big company of the voluntary dead. Wise-cracking and heartbreaking, these tales of women on the edge by the legendary wit Dorothy Parker show the darkness beneath the surface of...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. The End 'They didn't seem to take much interest in my private parts which to tell the truth were nothing to write home about, I didn't take much interest in them myself.' From the master of...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. The Finger explores a myriad of bizarre and compelling vignettes. "He felt a sudden deep pity for the finger joint that lay there on the dresser, a few drops of blood gathering around the white bone."...

Part of a series of new editions of D.H. Lawrence's most famous novels, stories and poems. These three novellas display D. H. Lawrence's brilliant and insightful evocation of human relationships - both tender and cruel - and the devastating results of war. In The Fox, two young women living on a small farm during the First World War find their...

A masterful tale of murder and intrigue in a small French town, from the celebrated author of the Maigret series. Nobody mentioned the victims, or the terror that had gripped the town. For the last twenty days, it had rained, and between the usual quiet conversations and card games, only the trickle of water and the air of cold fear...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. On sea, on land, at the edges of the colonial experience, Joseph Conrad's short stories offer a glimpse of the violence, the kindness, and the mystery at humanity's heart. The Lagoon tells of love and its...

Laurence Sterne's great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorise it. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate hero Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter, the amours and military obsessions of Uncle Toby, and a host of other characters. The Life and Opinions...

The Penguin Book of Christmas Stories is the ultimate festive anthology, featuring the best Christmas stories of all time, selected from around the world. Now available in a beautiful clothbound edition, this collection offers a rich array of festive tales. Discover Truman Capote making whisky-soaked fruitcake in Alabama, Laurie Lee sliding across a frozen pond in Gloucestershire, and Shirley Jackson...

The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories is Jhumpa Lahiri's rich and varied selection of the greatest Italian writing of the twentieth century, now available as a Penguin Classics paperback. This landmark collection brings together forty writers, reflecting over a hundred years of Italy's vibrant and diverse short story tradition, from the birth of the modern nation to the end...

A powerful, poignant novel about three half-sisters in post-war Japan, from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Snow Country. With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two half-sisters—born to the same father but different mothers—struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age....

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. It's an improbable city, Bologna – like one you might walk through after you have died. A dreamlike meditation on memory, food, paintings, a fond uncle and the improbable beauty of Bologna, from the visionary thinker...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. The Skeleton's Holiday by Leonora Carrington features dreamlike, carnivalesque fables by one of the leading lights of the Surrealist movement. These tales are masterpieces of invention and grand-guignol humour. "Ring for your maid, and when she...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics—irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas, and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. With warmth, tenderness, and quiet wit, Oscar Wilde's fables and fairy tales have moved and delighted for generations. In far-off kingdoms and ocean realms, in the company of giants and nightingales, Wilde speaks of heartbreak and redemption,...

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...

A chilling collection of Henry James's finest ghost stories, now in a wonderful Clothbound Classics edition. 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, from whom?...

A gripping new translation of Simenon's cinematic tale of greed, guilt and the cruel workings of fate. The Venice Train tells the story of Justin Calmar, who experiences some painful, nerve-racking weeks. At the office or at home, in the middle of a meal, he suddenly finds his forehead bathed in sweat and a tightness in his chest. At those...

A remarkably powerful yet simple tale of the struggle and triumph of innocence reviled, which Balzac considered his remarkable tour de force. In 1842, eight years before his death, Balzac described Ursule Mirouet as the masterpiece of all the studies of human society that he had written; he regarded the book as a remarkable tour de force. An essentially simple...

The epic 1968 Malian novel that scandalised a generation, by the first African winner of the Prix Renaudot. Envisioned as a criticism of and insider's guide to African history, this dark, pugnacious epic, spanning the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, recounts the fate of the imaginary empire of Nakem. With its acerbic pen portraits of the dynasty of devious, asp-wielding...

A problem of space first of all, then a problem of order One of the most singular and extravagant imaginations of the twentieth century, the novelist and essayist Georges Perec was a true original who delighted in wordplay, puzzles, taxonomies and seeing the extraordinary in the everyday. In these virtuoso writings about books and language, he discusses different ways of...

Little Clothbound Classics - irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Sam Selvon is now widely considered to be one of the greatest chroniclers of the West Indian emigrant experience. His evocation of voice, of place, of longing, defined for many the experience of a generation. Describing...

Comic Sagas and Tales brings together the finest comic stories from medieval Iceland. With feuding families and moments of grotesque violence, the sagas see such classic mythological figures as murdered fathers, disguised beggars, corrupt chieftains, and avenging sons do battle with axes, words, and cunning. Icelandic literary culture was one of the richest and most important in the medieval world....

A deliciously deranged thriller about supernatural vengeance and postwar guilt, by one of Austria's most celebrated writers. Alexander Jessiersky, Austrian aristocrat and shipping magnate, finds the Nazis distasteful. However, in war and in business, distaste can lead to negligence. When Jessiersky's board of directors sends his mysterious neighbour, Count Luna, to a concentration camp on trumped-up charges in order to...

Great Japanese Stories offers a captivating selection of short stories presented in their original Japanese with accompanying English translations. This new dual-language edition, featuring ten stories selected from The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, celebrates some of the finest twentieth-century literature from Japan. The stories appear in their original Japanese alongside expert English translations, providing unique cultural insights and...

The bestselling classic about three generations of a deaf family in modern America, by the author of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Two young deaf people, Abel and Janice, leave their punitive school and begin their life as a married couple 'Outside' — in the unwelcoming world of the hearing. A misunderstanding about the payment plan on a...

A story of the Jews in Eastern Europe in the 19th century through the eyes of a gentile peasant girl, from one of the greatest writers of Holocaust fiction. The teenage Katerina flees her abusive home in a poor, Christian village in the 1880s, finding work and shelter in the home of a Jewish family. In the warmth of their...

A beautiful boxed set of six of Dickens's greatest works for the Dickens anniversary year. 2012 is the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of one of our greatest and most important novelists, Charles Dickens. To celebrate, we're publishing six of his works in this exclusive and sumptuous boxed set of lavish, clothbound editions, designed by Penguin's own award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith....

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics — irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas, and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Often described as the father of the modern short story, there is perhaps no other writer more closely associated with the form than Guy de Maupassant. Included here is his most famous story, Boule de...

A breakneck comic tour-de-force set in 1980s Hollywood, about one man's quest to get his hands on a box of bawdy love letters. Elliot Weiner is a historian with a passion for Morris dancing and Warren Harding, 'the shallowest President in history'. After Weiner receives a research grant to write a book on Harding's tumultuous life, he gets wind of...

Novels, Tales, Journeys by Alexander Pushkin features the renowned author's masterpieces in prose, translated by the award-winning Pevear and Volokhonsky. The father of Russian literature, Pushkin, is beloved not only for his poetry but also for his brilliant stories, which range from dramatic narratives of love, obsession, and betrayal to lively comic tales, and from satirical epistolary tales to imaginative...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics — irresistible, mini editions of short works by the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. In this haunting collection, the phantoms and ghouls of Japanese folklore stalk the page. Of Ghosts and Goblins by Lafcadio Hearn, a master storyteller, draws on traditional Japanese folklore, infused with memories of his own haunted childhood in...

Selected Short Fiction by Charles Dickens presents a collection of witty and amusing short pieces where Dickens is liberated from the more formal and sustained demands of the novel. Here, he experiments with a diverse range of fictional techniques. In his tales of the supernatural, Dickens creates frighteningly believable, spine-tingling stories of prophetic dreams and visions, along with more fantastical...

One of the greatest French novelists, Balzac was also an accomplished writer of shorter fiction. This volume includes twelve of his finest short stories, many of which feature characters from his epic series of novels, the Comédie Humaine. Compelling tales of acute social and psychological insight, they fully demonstrate the mastery of suspense and revelation that were the hallmarks of...

The four greatest novels by the Brontë sisters, in a stunning box set designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith. Jane Eyre | Wuthering Heights | The Tenant of Wildfell Hall | Villette 2016, the bicentennial of Charlotte's birth, will be the big anniversary year for the Brontë sisters. To celebrate, we're publishing their four greatest works in this boxed set of lavish,...

A superb translation by Michael Hofmann of some of Kafka's most frightening, strange and visionary short fiction. After Franz Kafka's death, in perhaps the most important of all acts of literary disobedience, his executor refused to agree to Kafka's wish that his great mass of unpublished fiction be destroyed. This fiction included not only The Castle and The Trial but...

A bold mix of realism, allegory, adventure, and progressive politics, this collection features Jack London's most profound and moving literary works. The Call of the Wild, London's elemental masterpiece about a dog learning to survive in the wilderness, sees pampered pet Buck snatched from his home and set to work as a sled-dog during the Klondike Gold Rush. White Fang,...

A selection of short stories from the American master, new to the Penguin English Library. One of the most popular American writers of the twentieth century, O. Henry's comic eye and unique, playful approach to the rough material of life's realities are unmatched. These stories, which range from the cattle-lands of Texas to the bars of New York, highlight the...

The first novel from one of Italy's most innovative writers of the 20th century. 'The seething cauldron of life, the infinite stratification of reality, the inextricable tangle of knowledge are what Gadda wants to depict.' – Italo Calvino At the height of Fascist rule in Italy, and following the death of his mother, Carlo Emilio Gadda began work on his...

A richly varied anthology showcases a teeming, strange, magical world, about to be brought to an end by the catastrophe of 1914. The quarter century or so before the outbreak of the First World War saw an extraordinary boom in the popularity and quality of short stories in Britain. Fuelled by a large new magazine readership and vigorous competition to...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas, and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. The small incidents of life become moments of inner revelation in the luminous writing of Clarice Lispector. A woman contemplating a vase of roses after a nervous breakdown; a tangled mother-daughter relationship; a man's abandonment of...

A gripping new translation of the iconic short story collection featuring Simenon's celebrated literary detective. The truth was, Maigret knew nothing! Maigret felt. Maigret was sure he was right, would have bet his life on it. But in vain he'd turned the problem over a hundred times in his head, in vain he'd had every taxi driver in Paris questioned....

A major celebration of the French short story, spanning three centuries. The short story has a rich tradition in French literature. This feast of an anthology celebrates its most famous practitioners, as well as newly translated writers ready for rediscovery. The first volume spans 400 years, taking the reader from the sixteenth century to the 'golden age' of the fin...

A major celebration of the French short story across the twentieth century. The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: 2 takes the reader through the tumultuous twentieth century in the company of writers including Simone de Beauvoir and Maryse Condé, Patrick Modiano and Virginie Despentes, covering world wars, revolutions, and the horrors of the motorway service station. Along the way,...

A revelatory and richly varied collection of Korea's greatest short stories. This eclectic, moving and wonderfully enjoyable collection is the essential introduction to Korean literature. Journeying through Korea's dramatic twentieth century, from the Japanese occupation and colonial era to the devastating war between North and South and the rapid, disorienting urbanisation of later decades, The Penguin Book of Korean Short...

A richly varied anthology of Spanish short stories, curated by celebrated translator Margaret Jull Costa. This exciting new collection celebrates the Spanish short story, from its modern origins in the nineteenth century to the remarkable work being written today. Featuring over fifty stories selected by revered translator Margaret Jull Costa, it blends hidden gems and old favourites, surprising new voices...

A beautiful boxed set of four of Thomas Hardy's greatest works Set in Hardy's fictional realm of Wessex, these four charming novels have been brought together in a stunning clothbound set, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. From the moving and poetic story of Tess of the D'Urbervilles to the intensely dramatic tale of The Mayor of Casterbridge, this collection...

The Gothic novel, which flourished from about 1765 until 1825, revels in the horrible and the supernatural, in suspense and exotic settings. This volume, with its erudite introduction by Mario Praz, presents three of the most celebrated Gothic novels: The Castle of Otranto, published pseudonymously in 1765, is one of the first of the genre and the most truly Gothic...

From the author of The Lonely Londoners, a short story collection of life in mid-century Trinidad and London, told with Selvon's unique wit and poetic sensibility. With equal humour, sorrow and joy, the master storyteller brings together two worlds and turns his pen to life in Trinidad and London. Sharing tales of gossip and rivalry between village washerwomen, toiling canecutters...

Potent and vividly emotional, Simone de Beauvoir's captivating novel questions freedom and individual responsibility in the face of brutality. 'These carefree faces, on which we allowed our smiles to spread, were for others the mask of tragedy.' Jean Blomart, patriot leader against the German forces of occupation, waits throughout an endless night for his wounded lover, Hélène, to die. Told...

A collection of Conrad's most enduring work, edited by Pulitzer Prize finalist Michael Gorra. A great novelist of the sea, a poet of the tropics, a critic of empire and analyst of globalization, a harbinger of the modern spy novel, an unparalleled observer of the moments in which people are stripped of their illusions—Joseph Conrad is one of the greatest...

One of the masterworks of Japanese literature, ranking with The Tale of Genji, in a groundbreaking new edition. From the acclaimed translator of The Tale of Genji, a groundbreaking rendering of Japan's great martial epic. The fourteenth-century The Tale of the Heike is Japan's Iliad—a moving depiction of the late twelfth-century wars between the Heike and Genji clans. No work...

A Little Clothbound Classic bringing together Hans Christian Andersen's most cherished Christmas tales in one timeless edition. Step into the enchanting world of Hans Christian Andersen with this collection of timeless Christmas tales, capturing both the magic and melancholy of the season. This selection brings together Andersen's most beloved works, from the magical journey of The Snow Queen to the...

New to Penguin Clothbound Classics, Joyce's seminal story collection about ordinary Dublin lives Dubliners, Joyce's first major work, written when he was only twenty-five, brought his city to the world for the first time. His stories are rooted in the rich detail of Dublin life, portraying ordinary, often defeated lives with unflinching realism. He writes of social decline, sexual desire...

Orlando by Virginia Woolf is a pioneering novel about a time-traveling sixteenth-century nobleman who wakes up in the body of a woman. This edition includes a new foreword by Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. "A brilliant book that teaches you so much about identity and love—all these fundamental questions that we ask ourselves."...

A hauntingly beautiful, unforgettable Norwegian classic, ripe for discovery. In the blue dusk of a spring evening, a man is drawn to a lonely, beautiful stranger across a station platform. She follows him home, and over one heady night of wine and cigarettes, recounts to him the devastating story of her life... First published in 1947, Nothing Grows by Moonlight...

The Defense is Vladimir Nabokov's early novel about a chess-playing genius, reissued in Modern Classics as part of the Nabokov relaunch. This dazzling story features the coarse, strange yet oddly endearing chess-playing genius Luzhin. Discovering his prodigious gift in boyhood and rising to the rank of International Grandmaster, Luzhin develops a lyrical passion for chess that renders the real world...

A brand new imprint from Penguin Classics Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will always be out of his reach... Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby—young, handsome, fabulously rich—always seems...

An epic novel of postwar, nuclear-age Japan, by the author of Territory of Light. Mitch and Yonko haven't spoken in a year. As children, they were inseparable, raised together in an orphanage outside Tokyo—but ever since the sudden death of Mitch's brother, they've been mourning in their private ways, worlds apart. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, they...

Six new delightful and collectible hardback editions from Penguin Classics, publishing to celebrate Jane Austen's 250th anniversary. I never have been in love; it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall. Beautiful, clever, rich - and single - Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either...

Six new delightful and collectible hardback editions from Penguin Classics, publishing to celebrate Jane Austen's 250th anniversary. We have all been more or less to blame ... every one of us, excepting Fanny Taken from the poverty of her parents' home in Portsmouth, Fanny Price is brought up with her rich cousins at Mansfield Park, acutely aware of her humble...

Six new delightful and collectible hardback editions from Penguin Classics, publishing to celebrate Jane Austen's 250th anniversary. ‘To look almost pretty, is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life, than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.’ During an eventful season at Bath, young, naive Catherine...

Jane Austen's witty exploration of the perils of mistaking fiction for reality, now in a collectible Deluxe Edition celebrating the 250th anniversary of the author's birth. A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition During an eventful season at Bath, young, naive Catherine Morland experiences fashionable society for the first time, both its pleasures and its pitfalls. She is delighted with her new...

Six new delightful and collectible hardback editions from Penguin Classics, publishing to celebrate Jane Austen's 250th anniversary. Her attachment and regrets had, for a long time, clouded every enjoyment of youth; and an early loss of bloom and spirits had been their lasting effect. Persuasion, Jane Austen's last novel, is a moving, masterly and elegiac love story tinged with the...

Six new delightful and collectible hardback editions from Penguin Classics, publishing to celebrate Jane Austen's 250th anniversary. Pride and Prejudice begins with the line: 'No sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression...

Pride and Prejudice, Austen's most popular novel, tells the unforgettable story of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. Now available in a collectible Deluxe Edition, this release celebrates the 250th anniversary of the author's birth. Generations of readers have fallen in love with Jane Austen's beloved classic Pride and Prejudice. The sparkling Elizabeth Bennet, the taciturn Fitzwilliam Darcy, and an array...

Six new delightful and collectible hardback editions from Penguin Classics, publishing to celebrate Jane Austen's 250th anniversary. "The more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!" Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with...

Emily Bronte's classic novel with cover artwork from Emerald Fennell's major new film starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi '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...

For the centennial of its publication, a new edition of one of the most iconic of American novels, including four of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short stories about wealth and class from his collection All the Sad Young Men and an introduction by Min Jin Lee, the New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko. One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels...

Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, leaves the easy life of the Happy Valley, accompanied by his sister Nekayah, her attendant Pekuah, and the much-travelled philosopher Imlac. Their journey takes them to Egypt, where they study the various conditions of men's lives, before returning home in a 'conclusion in which nothing is concluded'. Johnson's tale is not only a satire on optimism,...

Blind Owl is a new English translation of one of the most important, controversial Iranian novels of the twentieth century. Winner of the 2023 Lois Roth Persian Translation Award. A Penguin Classic. Written by one of the greatest Iranian writers of the twentieth century, Blind Owl tells a two-part story of an isolated narrator with a fragile relationship with time...

Herman Melville's profound and timeless inquiry into one man's obsession, in a gorgeous new clothbound edition. Part of Penguin's beautiful hardcover Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. In part, Moby-Dick is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an...

Lucy Graham is a beautiful but impoverished governess when she meets the wealthy widower Sir Michael Audley, who, instantly besotted, makes her his wife. Their life at Audley Court is happy and uneventful until the arrival of Sir Michael's nephew Robert with his friend George Talboys, who has recently returned from making his fortune in Australia. When George suddenly vanishes...

A complete collection of Oscar Wilde's dazzling fairytales. 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 quiet wit, these fables have...

A fascinating and witty collection of stories, giving great insight into sixteenth-century France. In the early 1500s, five men and five women find themselves trapped by floods and compelled to take refuge in an abbey high in the Pyrenees. When told they must wait days for a bridge to be repaired, they are inspired—by recalling Boccaccio's Decameron—to pass the time...

From one of Denmark's most revered authors, a startlingly original novel about a migrant's fate, told across several generations of women. This is the story of a young woman who is spirited away to St. Petersburg from Copenhagen by a lovestruck admirer. When she dies after the Russian Revolution, her ashes are carried back to Denmark, igniting a chain reaction...

The spellbinding debut novel that launched the career of one of the greatest Italian writers of the twentieth century. Elisa—orphaned as a child, raised by a 'fallen woman', fed by fairy tales—has lived in an outlandish imaginary world for years. When her guardian dies, she feels compelled to confront her family's tortured and dramatic past, weaving the tale of her...

One of the greatest works of twentieth-century European literature, in the definitive English translation. It is summertime in the Swiss Alps. Hans Castorp, an ordinary young man, has arrived at an exclusive sanitorium for a brief visit to his convalescent cousin. Once there, time will lose its familiar contours, as Hans himself falls ill and loses himself in a landscape...