Penguin Classics: General Fiction

Sci-fi meets the Old West in this obscene and hilarious novel from Naked Lunch author and Beat icon William S. Burroughs. This surreal fable, set in America's Old West, features a cast of notorious characters: The Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his opponent; The Priest, who goes into gunfights giving his adversaries the last rites;...

One of the towering figures of the black literary tradition. - Henry Louis Gates, Jr The night's over for Ulysses Galen. It started going bad for the big Greek when a knife was drawn, then there was an axe, then he was being chased and shot at. Now Galen is lying dead in the middle of a Harlem street. But...

Jody Tiflin has the urge for rebellion, but he also wants to be loved. In The Red Pony, Jody begins to learn about adulthood—its pain, its responsibilities, and its problems—through his acceptance of his father's gifts. First, he is given a red pony, and later he is promised the colt of a bay mare. Yet both of these gifts bring...

Dark, dreamlike love stories with a twist from the author of There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby. In these dark, dreamlike love stories with a twist, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya tells of strange encounters in claustrophobic communal apartments, ill-fated holiday romances, office trysts, schoolgirl crushes, tentative courtships, rampant infidelity, tender devotion and terrifying madness. By turns...

The Ruined Map is a hardboiled detective story that combines the narrative suspense of Chandler with the psychological suspense of Dostoevsky. Mr Nemuro, a respected salesman, disappeared over half a year ago, but only now does his alluring yet alcoholic wife hire a private eye. The nameless detective has but two clues: a photo and a matchbook. With these, he...

The Secret Pilgrim is the final novel featuring Smiley, John le Carré's most enduring character, and it is a gripping feat of narrative brilliance. The Cold War is over, and Ned has been demoted to the training academy. He asks his old mentor, George Smiley, to address his passing-out class. There are no laundered reminiscences; Smiley speaks the truth—perhaps the...

The Shooting Party is a masterpiece of historical fiction and the inspiration behind Downton Abbey. It is 1913—a breath away from the Great War—and Edwardian England is about to vanish into history. An assorted group of men and women gather at Sir Randolph Nettleby's estate for a shooting party. Opulent, adulterous, moving assuredly through the rituals of eating and slaughter,...

A richly compelling tale of folklore and witchcraft from this modern master, new to Penguin Modern Classics. Jacob, a Jewish slave held in a mountain village after escaping a massacre by Cossacks, will be killed if he tries to escape. The one saving grace is his love for his master's daughter, Wanda. They begin a secret affair, trying to avoid...

A new translation of Simenon's visceral, critically acclaimed classic. And always the dirty snow, the heaps of snow that look rotten, with black patches and embedded garbage. The white powder that occasionally peels off from the crust of the sky in little clumps, like plaster from a ceiling, is unable to cover the filth. Most people struggle to get by...

Fans of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House will enjoy this disquieting tale of people awaiting the end of the world in a large, isolated house. Mrs Halloran has inherited the great Halloran house on the death of her son, much to the disgust of her daughter-in-law, the delight of her wicked granddaughter, and the confusion of the rest...

A shimmering collection of stories from the author of The Copenhagen Trilogy, translated into English for the first time. A newly married woman longs, irrationally, for a silk umbrella; a husband chases away his wife's beloved cat; a betrayed mother impulsively sacks her housekeeper. Underneath the surface of these precisely observed tales of love, marriage and family life in mid-century...

The Waves is Woolf's innovative modernist novel. Tracing the lives of a group of friends, this novel follows their development from childhood to middle age. While social events, individual achievements, and disappointments form its narrative, the novel is most remarkable for the rich poetic language that expresses the inner life of its characters—their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness...

New to Penguin Modern Classics, the seminal work of gay literature that sparked a notorious legal trial. The Well of Loneliness tells the story of tomboyish Stephen, who hunts, wears trousers and cuts her hair short - and who gradually comes to realise that she is attracted to women. Charting her romantic and professional adventures during the First World War...

The Winter of Our Discontent, Steinbeck's last great novel, focuses on the theme of success and what motivates men towards it. Reflecting back on his New England family's past fortune, and his father's loss of the family wealth, the hero, Ethan Allen Hawley, characterises success in every era and in all its forms as robbery, murder, even a kind of...

New to Penguin Modern Classics One of the premier Japanese novels in the twentieth century, The Woman in the Dunes combines the essence of myth, suspense, and the existential novel. In a remote seaside village, Niki Jumpei, a teacher and amateur entomologist, is held captive with a young woman at the bottom of a vast sand pit where they are...

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald explores the life of Amory Blaine, a young man rebelling against his staid, Midwestern upbringing with an ambition to acquire the patina of Eastern sophistication. In his quest for sexual and intellectual enlightenment, Amory progresses through a series of relationships, ultimately finding himself cast out into the real world.

A compulsive novel from one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. A recently divorced actor and a no less lonely woman meet by chance in a New York diner. The city—its bars, its cheap motels, and its rented rooms—becomes the cinematic setting of the couple's escalating and mysterious relationship. A move against desperation and drift, their affair...

Gertrude Stein, as a college student at Radcliffe and a medical student at Johns Hopkins Medical School, was a privileged woman. Yet, she was surrounded by women who were trapped by poverty, class, and race into lives that offered little choice. Her portraits of Anna and Lena are examples of realistic depictions of immigrant women who had no occupational choice...

A stunning new series look for one of the greatest writers of the 20th century in Penguin Modern Classics. Steinbeck's first major critical and commercial success, Tortilla Flat is also his funniest novel. Danny is a paisano, descended from the original Spanish settlers who arrived in Monterey, California, centuries before. He values friendship above money and possessions, so that when...

This novel is an extraordinarily poignant evocation of a lost happiness that lives on in the memory. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever. In this, her most autobiographical novel, Virginia Woolf captures the intensity of childhood longing and delight, and the shifting...

A haunting portrayal of addiction and a troubled young woman. She understands Karma, she says- "What I do, I reap" Her name means sadness, yet Tristessa, a prostitute and morphine addict, lives without cares in her shabby room with a menagerie of pets and an altar to the Virgin Mary. Based on Jack Kerouac's own real-life love affair in Mexico...

Shocking, banned and the subject of obscenity trials, Miller's first novel is a Penguin Modern Classic for the first time. One of the most scandalous and influential books of the 20th century, Tropic of Cancer redefined the novel. Set in Paris in the 1930s, it features a starving American writer who lives a bohemian life among prostitutes, pimps, and artists....

One of Henry Miller's most scandalous books, Tropic of Capricorn is now in Penguin Modern Classics for the first time. A story of sexual and spiritual awakening, Tropic of Capricorn shocked readers as much as Henry Miller's first novel, Tropic of Cancer. A mixture of fiction and autobiography, it is the story of Henry V. Miller, who works for the...

Places Russell Hoban where he has got to be - among the greatest, timeless novelists — The Times Born to swim thousands of miles in the ocean, the giant sea turtles are now trapped in a tank of golden-green water at London Zoo. But not for much longer. Two lonely people, a bookseller and a children's illustrator, have begun thinking...

A classic novel exploring loneliness and the nature of connection, from the bestselling author of Bad Behaviour. Dorothy Never—fat—lives alone in New York, spending her days alone ever since the downfall of her guru, the Ayn Rand-like Anna Granite. Justine Shade—thin—finds herself only able to connect with people who will hurt her and is writing an article about Anna Granite,...

Under the Jaguar Sun, available for the first time in Penguin Modern Classics, takes readers on a mesmerising journey through three distinct tales that explore the senses and their profound connections to human experience. In the first story, a couple embarks on an epicurean journey across Mexico, tantalised by the idea of a particular ingredient that evokes ancient rituals of...

It is the Day of the Dead. The fiesta is in full swing. In the shadow of Popocatepeti, ragged children beg for coins to buy skulls made of chocolate, and ugly pariah dogs roam the streets. Geoffrey Firmin, HM ex-consul, is drowning himself in liquor and Mescal, while his ex-wife and half-brother look on, powerless to help him. As the...

The Bright Young Things of 1920s Mayfair, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercise their inventive minds and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade, whether it is promiscuity, dancing, cocktail parties or sports cars. A vivid assortment of characters, among them the struggling writer Adam Fenwick-Symes and the glamorous, aristocratic Nina Blount, hunt fast and furiously...

A devastating semi-autobiographical novel and the first volume of Kerouac's memoir cycle. Gerard Duluoz was born in 1917, 'a sickly little kid with a rheumatic heart'. Based on Jack Kerouac's memories of the beloved older brother who died when he was a boy, Visions of Gerard is unique among his novels for its dreamlike evocation of the sensations of childhood...

A tragic tale of a young woman's descent into isolation and despair, inspired by Jean Rhys's own experiences. First published in 1934, Voyage in the Dark is the story of an unhappy love affair, a portrait of a hypocritical society, and an exploration of exile and breakdown; all written in Jean Rhys's hauntingly simple and beautiful style. Eighteen, on her...

Launching a major new paperback series - Penguin English Library The Penguin English Library Edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain 'I'm unfavourable to killin' a man as long as you can git around it; it ain't good sense, it ain't good morals. Ain't I right?' The original Great American Novel, an incomparable adventure story and a...

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. Arguably America's most influential short story writer, Edgar Allan Poe's tales of suspense never fail to spook and amaze. Gathered in this selection are his very best horror stories, including the gothic tour de force...

This is the novel Dickens regarded as his favourite child and is considered his most autobiographical. As David recounts his experience from childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist, Dickens draws openly and revealingly on his own life. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters are Rosa Dartle, Dora, Steerforth, and the 'umble Uriah Heep, along...

Published in 1962, this is an emotionally intense novel of love, hatred, race, and liberal America in the 1960s. Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, Another Country tells the story of the suicide of jazz-musician Rufus Scott and the friends who search for an understanding of his life and death, discovering uncomfortable truths about themselves along the way.

A spellbinding selection of short stories in the original Italian alongside their English translations. This new dual-language edition of ten stories selected from The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories celebrates some of the very best twentieth-century literature from Italy. Each story appears in the original Italian alongside an expert English translation, providing unique cultural insight and literary inspiration for...

Published alongside other works on the 150th anniversary of Joseph Conrad's death, Heart of Darkness has long been regarded as a literary classic and a powerful indictment of the evils of imperialism. The novella reflects the savage repressions carried out in the Congo by the Belgians, representing one of the largest acts of genocide committed up to that time. Conrad's...

During an eventful season at Bath, young, naive Catherine Morland experiences the joys of fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: flirtatious Isabella, who shares Catherine's love of Gothic romance and horror, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father's mysterious house, Northanger Abbey. There, her imagination influenced by novels...

The story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse only to be taken in by a den of thieves, shocked readers when it was first published. Dickens's tale of childhood innocence beset by evil depicts the dark criminal underworld of a London peopled by vivid and memorable characters - the arch-villain Fagin, the artful Dodger, the menacing...

At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank. What happens when they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane Austen's last completed novel. Set...

A beautifully designed clothbound edition of Shirley Jackson's chilling tale of power and fear. Hunting for evidence of the occult, Dr Montague invites three participants to Hill House: Theodora, his lovely assistant; Luke, set to inherit the estate; and Eleanor, a fragile young woman with a troubled past. As The House takes hold, Jackson plumbs the depths of the human...

The feminist cult classic about a smart, sensitive, yet deeply troubled young woman fighting to live on her own terms. Ellen is a single artist living alone on New York's Upper West Side in the 1970s. She is beset by old boyfriends, paint pigment choices, and, occasionally, by 'radiances'—episodes of joyous, reckless unreality. Under the influence of 'radiances,' she becomes...

Jean Rhys's late, literary masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea was inspired by Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. After their marriage, the rumours begin, poisoning her husband...

Jane Austen: The Complete Works collects the complete works of Jane Austen in clothbound classics, brought together for the first time in a Coralie Bickford-Smith-designed box set. Sense and Sensibility | Pride and Prejudice | Mansfield Park | Emma | Northanger Abbey | Persuasion | Love and Freindship Few novelists have conveyed the subtleties and nuances of their own social...

The Penguin English Library Edition of A Room with a View by E. M. Forster "But you do," he went on, not waiting for contradiction. "You love the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves you, and no other word expresses it ..." Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her until she visits Florence with...

Penguin Classics relaunch Mary Barton, the daughter of disillusioned trade unionist, rejects her working-class lover Jem Wilson in the hope of marrying Henry Carson, the mill owner's son, and making a better life for herself and her father. But when Henry is shot down in the street and Jem becomes the main suspect, Mary finds herself painfully torn between the...

When an unbridled schoolmistress with advanced ideas is in her prime, the classroom can take on a new identity, and no one can predict what will happen. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie introduces Jean Brodie, a teacher whose unconventional ideas put her at odds with the other members of staff at the Marcia Blaine School in Edinburgh. She endeavours...

Part of the Penguin Classics' fresh new editions of Tolstoy's major works - including Antony Briggs' stunning new translation of War and Peace. In 1851, at the age of twenty-two, Tolstoy joined the Russian army and travelled to the Caucasus as a soldier. The four years that followed were among the most significant in his life, and deeply influenced the...

When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D'Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her 'cousin' Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope...

Written in 1908, A Room with a View is one of E.M. Forster's earliest and most celebrated works. Forster's social comedy is a witty observation of the English middle classes as they holiday abroad in Florence. One of these tourists is Lucy Honeychurch, a young girl whose heart is awakened by her experiences in Italy.

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne is the author's most famous adventure, now available in a beautiful clothbound edition. One night at the Reform Club, Phileas Fogg makes a bold wager with his companions, claiming that he can travel across the globe in just eighty days. Breaking away from the well-established routine of his daily life, he...

Vladimir Nabokov's shocking masterpiece, now in a beautifully designed clothbound edition. Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or...

Reissued in Black Classics to coincide with the new translation of two other magnificent Bulgakov titles. The devil comes to Moscow wearing a fancy suit. With his disorderly band of accomplices—including a demonic, gun-toting tomcat—he immediately begins to create havoc. Disappearances, destruction, and death spread through the city like wildfire, and Margarita discovers that her lover has vanished in the...

Set in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a dingy haberdasher's shop in the passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, this powerful novel tells how the heroine and her lover, Laurent, kill her husband, Camille, but are subsequently haunted by visions of the dead man and prevented from enjoying the fruits of their crime. Published in 1867, this is Zola's most important work...

The first complete new translation for 25 years of the acknowledged masterpiece of Japanese literature. Lady Murasaki's great 11th century novel is a beautifully crafted story of love, betrayal, and death at the Imperial Court. At the core of this epic is Prince Genji, the son of an emperor, whose passionate character, love affairs, and shifting political fortunes offer an...

The deliciously dark and funny story of Merricat, tomboy teenager, beloved sister - and possible mass murderer. Eighteen-year-old Merricat may, or may not be, a mass murderer. Six years ago, everyone in the Blackwood family was poisoned by sugar laced with arsenic - everyone, that is, apart from Merricat and her elder sister, Constance. They live in peaceful, ordered isolation,...

The new paperback series - Penguin English Library '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 love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than...

Launching a major new paperback series - Penguin English Library The Penguin English Library Edition of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë 'The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself' Passionate, poetic and revolutionary, Jane Eyre is a novel of naked emotional power. Its story of a defiant, fiercely intelligent woman who...

At the age of forty-one, Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) underwent a profound spiritual crisis, from which he emerged believing that he had encountered death itself. These seven compelling stories explore, in very different ways, his subsequent preoccupation with mortality. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a devastating account of a man fighting his inevitable end, and asks the existential question —...

The Outsider, Albert Camus' existentialist masterpiece, is now available in a wonderful new Clothbound Classics edition. In The Outsider, his classic existentialist novel, Camus explores the alienation of an individual who refuses to conform to social norms. Meursault, his anti-hero, will not lie. When his mother dies, he refuses to show his emotions simply to satisfy the expectations of others....

A truly great book ... an utterly gripping thriller — Justin Cartwright, Sunday Telegraph Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists, the Persickes; the retired judge, Fromm; and the unassuming couple, Otto and Anna...

The portrayal of Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and youth, his quest for identity through art and his gradual emancipation from the claims of family, religion and Ireland itself, is also an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce and a universal testament to the artist's 'eternal imagination'.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 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...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books She 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...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books What would happen if a doctor implanted the pituitary gland and testicles of a man into the body of a stray dog? In Mikhail Bulgakov's topsy-turvy world, the dog starts to walk on two legs, drink, smoke, thieve, chase women, and recite every swear word in Russian. The perfect candidate for...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Arrested in Cologne for remarking that the Führer looked sweaty, nineteen-year-old Sanna has fled to Frankfurt. But her troubles are far from over. Her best friend Gerti has fallen for a Jewish boy, her brother writes books that have been blacklisted, and her own aunt could turn her in to the...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 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...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 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...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books How light and alive she was! Like a bird caught in a net . . . A Lost Lady by Willa Cather tells the story of Marian Forrester, a captivating woman who enchants everyone around her—her husband, an elderly railroad pioneer; the small town of Sweet Water; and Niel Herbert, her...

Orwell's chillingly resonant allegorical fable, in a stunning new cover look for his great works. 'All animals are equal - but some are more equal than others' When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But gradually...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Best known for his existentialist novel The Outsider, set in French-occupied Algeria, Albert Camus was profoundly influenced by the landscapes, towns and traditions of his youth. Selected here are some of his finest personal essays about Algeria and its environs, including the luminous 'Nuptials at Tipasa', one of his earliest works...

Beauty by Andy Warhol is one of 90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. 'People should fall in love with their eyes closed. Just close your eyes. Don't look.' From Warhol's romantic relationships to his thoughts on interior design, these candid, highly entertaining musings—on love, sex, beauty, work, and space—give an intimate glimpse into the mind of one...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books My delight in playing turned to a lust for playing, my lust for playing into a compulsion to play, a mania, a frenetic fury that filled not only my waking hours but also came to invade my sleep. I could think of nothing but chess, I thought only in chess moves...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Closely 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 affair. Poignant, humorous,...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books '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...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Edgar Allan Poe's short stories have lost none of their power to horrify. He remains a destabilisingly terse sketcher 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...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 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 labour pains. Acerbic, pithy and vibrant, Dorothy Parker's writings capture the dizzying decadence of...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Of all the sleep a man can have, the fisherman's sleep is the sweetest. It is the greatest of luxuries - sleep and fishing. Through tender, vivid, and often humorous recollections - from magical fishing trips to the rivers and ponds of Bustehrad to his charismatic father's eccentric business ventures -...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books But how sweet a fruit the 'suppose' must be, that people will sup and sup on it! A juicy fruit, like a lychee but without the pit, sparkling and light green - a fruit that hides the tart within the sweet. In this haunting collection of stories, a young man's obsession...

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...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 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...