Penguin Classics

This is a lightly revised edition of Mattingly's original translation, plus a new introduction, new notes, a chronology, and further reading by James Rives. The Agricola is both a portrait of Julius Agricola—the most famous governor of Roman Britain and Tacitus' well-loved and respected father-in-law—and the first detailed account of Britain that has come down to us. It offers fascinating...

This definitive three-volume Penguin Classics edition provides a complete and unmodernised text, presenting the History as it appeared to its early readers. Edward Gibbon's six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88) is among the most magnificent and ambitious narratives in European literature. Its subject is the fate of one of the world's greatest civilisations over...

When Dr Philip Raven, an intellectual working for the League of Nations, dies in 1930 he leaves behind a powerful legacy: an unpublished 'dream book'. Inspired by visions he has experienced for many years, it appears to be a book written far into the future: a history of humanity from the date of his death up to 2105. The Shape...

A much-loved classic from a giant of European science fiction. Stanislaw Lem is perhaps the most original and influential European science fiction writer of the twentieth century. His ornate, phantasmagorical writing probes the furthest reaches of the universe while remaining deeply and particularly human. The Cyberiad, one of Lem's most beloved works, follows the exploits of Trurl and Klapaucius—two ingenious...

The first English-language publication of one of the greatest Polish science fiction novels of all time. Is BER-66 a human or a machine? As he navigates the corridors and locked rooms of a strange bunker, he must solve the mysteries of murderous doppelgängers, a slow-motion city on the verge of destruction, and ultimately, the all-powerful Mechanism itself... Considered to be...

A darkly funny satire from the most acclaimed and popular Russian science-fiction writers. Astrophysicist Dmitri Malianov is on the precipice of a major discovery - a Nobel Prize-worthy breakthrough. Yet, home alone in his Leningrad apartment, his work is beginning to be stymied. Strange and improbable distractions are mounting around him - and he is not alone. Across the city,...

An outrageous adventure across the stars from the master of witty science fiction. Announced in a thunderclap out of another day's tedium, hapless New Yorker Tom Carmody learns that he is the winner of the Intergalactic Sweepstake. Accepting with a shrug, he is whipped across the universe to collect his prize. The catch? There's no way home. Enlisting the help...

New to Penguin Classics, the astonishing story of the Copernican Revolution, told through the words of the ground-breaking scientists who brought it about. 'How great, then, must be the incomprehensible space all the way to the furthest fixed stars? How wide and immense must be the depth of that fantastical sphere?' In the late fifteenth century, it was believed that...

A new selection of poetry from the generation-defining author of The Copenhagen Trilogy, translated for the first time into English. While Tove Ditlevsen is now famous around the world as an extraordinary prose writer, in Denmark she has also long been celebrated as a poet. She published her first collection in her early twenties, and continued writing and publishing poetry...

Alternate history meets Cold War thriller in a vintage Len Deighton escapade. XPD begins on 11 June, 1940 - where is Winston Churchill? A private aircraft takes off from a small town in central France, while Adolf Hitler, the would-be conqueror of Europe, prepares for a clandestine meeting near the Belgian border. For more than forty years, the events of...

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...

New to Penguin Modern Classics for Sontag's exploration of the most important artists of our time. Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag's third essay collection, brings together her most important critical writing from 1972 to 1980. In these provocative and hugely influential works, she explores some of the most controversial artists and thinkers of our time. This collection includes...

An action-packed Cold War thriller set in the deserts of North Africa. A Soviet space scientist defects to win academic freedom, but western intelligence has other plans for him and sends an unnamed spy—perhaps the same reluctant hero of The IPCRESS File—to look after him. But what follows is a blood-streaked trail across three continents... Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy reveals...

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...

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....

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...

An extraordinary collection of Nabokov's little-known published material from across his life - from student essays to his last interviews. The last major collection of Nabokov's published material, Think, Write, Speak brings together a treasure trove of previously uncollected texts from across the author's extraordinary career. Each phase of his wandering life is included, from a precocious essay written while...

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 latest title from the bestselling author John le Carré to come into Penguin Modern Classics. The Tailor of Panama follows Harry Pendel, the charismatic proprietor of Pendel and Braithwaite Limitada of Panama, through whose doors everyone who is anyone in Central America passes. Andrew Osnard, mysterious and fleshly, is a spy. His secret mission is two-pronged: to keep a...

The visionary history of the universe and human progress In this masterly synthesis, Arthur Koestler cuts through the sterile distinction between 'sciences' and 'humanities' to bring to life the whole history of cosmology from the Babylonians to Newton. He shows how the tragic split between science and religion arose and how, in particular, the modern world-view replaced the medieval world-view...

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...

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...

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...

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...

One of the great works of twentieth-century sociology, new to Penguin Modern Classics. Acclaimed on first publication and today considered one of the defining works of sociology, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is Erving Goffman's extraordinary analysis of the structure of our social interactions. Blurring the line between workaday life and theatrical performance, Goffman argues that our behaviour...

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;...

A celebration of one of the most curious and playful literary groups of the twentieth century. Brought together for the first time, here are 100 pieces of The Penguin Book of Oulipo writing, celebrating the literary group who revelled in maths problems, puzzles, trickery, wordplay and conundrums. Featuring writers including Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino, it includes poems,...

A stunning new series look for one of the greatest writers of the 20th century in Penguin Modern Classics. The Pearl is Steinbeck's flawless parable about wealth and the evil it can bring. When Kino, an Indian pearl-diver, finds the Pearl of the world he believes that his life will be magically transformed. He will marry Juana in church and...

The final masterwork that was nearly destroyed, from one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century. Dr Philip Wild, a man of brilliance, wit, fortune and tremendous bulk, is used to suffering humiliations at the hands of his wife, the younger, slender, and rudely promiscuous Flora. But in a novel, a 'maddening masterpiece' documenting her infidelities, written by one...

New to Penguin Classics, the international bestseller by one of Europe's pre-eminent literary figures. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is a masterful retelling of the ancient myths and fables we may only think we know. From the tale of Europa and the bull to the fall of Troy, Roberto Calasso weaves his way through the entire world of Greek...

The poignant story of an outsider falsely accused of murder from the celebrated author of the Maigret series. She was beautiful, full of vitality, and he was sixteen years older, a dusty, lonely bookseller whose only passion in life was collecting stamps. Jonas is used to his young wife disappearing. Everyone in the town knows that she goes off with...

Hoban's first book for adults mixes playful fantasy with an insightful meditation on fathers and sons. The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz begins with the note, "I have gone to look for a lion." In a world where lions have become extinct, the map-maker Jachin-Boaz nevertheless abandons his wife and son to find one, leaving just this message. However, his...

Larry McMurtry's hilarious and touching novel, in Penguin Modern Classics for the very first time. Sam the Lion runs the pool-hall, the picture house and the all-night café. Coach Popper whips his boys with towels and once took a shot at one when he disturbed his hunting. Billy wouldn't know better than to sweep his broom all the way to...

A searing coming-of-age tale by one of the greatest Spanish writers of the 20th century, set on the island of Mallorca during the Spanish Civil War. "This is an old and wicked island. An island of Phoenicians and merchants, of bloodsuckers and frauds." Ana María Matute's 1959 novel, Primera memoria (translated as The Island), is a stifling story of rebellious...

“To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom.” - André Gide Michel had been a blindfolded scholar until, newly married, he contracted tuberculosis. His will to recover brings self-discovery and the growing desire to rebel against his background of culture, decency, and morality. But the freedom from constraints...

In The House of Bernarda Alba, a tyrannical matriarch rules over her house and five daughters, cruelly crushing their hopes and needs. The other plays here also portray female characters whose desires are tragically and violently frustrated—a woman's longing for a child in Yerma, and a bride's yearning for her lover in Blood Wedding. All appeal for freedom and sexual...

New to Penguin Classics, this is the funny and deeply moving story of the apocalypse - as seen from one small village in England. Self-important and more or less friendless, retired teacher Edgar Hopkins lives for the thrill of winning poultry prizes. But his narrow world is shattered when he discovers that the moon is about to come crashing to...

Laing's radical approach to insanity offered a rich existential analysis of personal alienation and made him a cult figure in the 1960s. Yet his work was most significant for its humane attitude, which put the patient back at the centre of treatment. His groundbreaking exploration of the nature of madness, R.D. Laing's The Divided Self, illuminated the nature of mental...

The Complete Stories is a comprehensive collection of short fiction by Truman Capote, one of the masters of twentieth-century American literature. This definitive volume showcases Capote's talent for skilfully crafted narratives and rich characterisation, capturing a wide range of human emotions and experiences. Each story reflects his keen insight into the human condition and his ability to transform the mundane...

One of the most remarkable artists of our age. — Mario Vargas Llosa The Book of Sand was the last of Borges' major collections to be published. The stories are, in his words, 'variations on favourite themes... combining a plain and at times almost colloquial style with a fantastic plot'. It includes such marvellous tales as 'The Congress', 'Undr' and...

The last diary of Che Guevara, with entries going up until two days before his death—the final, blazing record of a true revolutionary. In 1967, Che Guevara left Cuba to lead the Bolivian Liberation Army. In the jungles of Bolivia, they attempted to initiate a revolution like that in Cuba, in which Che had played such a central role. The...

Brilliant ... a panorama of a remarkable talent ... McCullers's finest stories — The New York Times A classic work that has charmed generations of readers, this collection assembles Carson McCullers's best stories, including her beloved novella The Ballad of the Sad Café. A haunting tale of a human triangle that culminates in an astonishing brawl, the novella introduces readers...

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is, in fact, Gertrude Stein's own autobiography, seen through the eyes of her friend, Alice B. Toklas. With occasional glimpses into her early life, it describes her years in Paris until 1932. At 27 Rue de Fleurus, Gertrude Stein established a formidable literary and artistic salon, and this book provides a record of her...

Mailer's classic account of the 1967 anti-Vietnam War rally in Washington D.C., and one of the best 'nonfiction novels' ever written. October 21, 1967, Washington, D.C. 20,000 to 200,000 protesters are marching to end the war in Vietnam, while helicopters hover overhead and federal marshals and soldiers with fixed bayonets await them on the Pentagon steps. Among the marchers is...

The most glamorous, witty and revealing writings charting the last eleven years of Warhol's life. Andy Warhol kept these diaries faithfully from November 1976 right up to his final week, in February 1987. Written at the height of his fame and success, Warhol records the fun of an Academy Awards party, nights out at Studio 54, trips between London, Paris...

Borges' stories have a deceptively simple, almost laconic style. In maddeningly ingenious stories that play with the very form of the short story, Borges returns again and again to his themes- dreams, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gaucho knife-fighters, transparent tigers and the elusive nature of identity itself.

Set in the volatile Paris summer of 1938, The Age of Reason follows two days in the life of Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy teacher, and his circle in the cafes and bars of Montparnasse. Mathieu has so far managed to contain sex and personal freedom in conveniently separate compartments. But now he is in trouble, urgently trying to raise 4,000...

The Adventures of Augie March follows the life of Augie, a poor boy growing up in Chicago during the Great Depression. Described as a 'born recruit', he becomes entangled in a series of wild occupations, only to reject each one as too confining for his ambitions. His independence faces its greatest challenge when he meets the glamorous Thea, a huntress...

A powerfully tender portrait of a single mother in 1970s Tokyo. Wonderfully poetic ... extraordinary freshness ... a Virginia Woolf quality — Margaret Drabble Territory of Light is the radiant story of a young woman, living alone in Tokyo with her two-year-old daughter. Its twelve chapters follow the first year of the narrator's separation from her husband. The novel is...

Styles of Radical Will is Susan Sontag's second collection of groundbreaking essays, now available in Penguin Modern Classics. This collection features some of the most significant pieces of criticism from the twentieth century. Among them are the classics "The Aesthetics of Silence," offering a brilliant account of language, thought, and consciousness, and "Trip to Hanoi," penned during the Vietnam War....

The incredible eyewitness account of wartime resistance, now in paperback. Insistently asks the question—What would you do? Would you fight, or acquiesce, or collaborate? ... Karski was deeply patriotic and ludicrously brave ... an astonishing testament of survival - Ben Macintyre, author of Operation Mincemeat It is 1939. Jan Karski, a brilliant young Polish student, enjoys a life of parties...

The second book of the Hook, Line and Sinker series finds Bernard Samson on the run through Berlin, Vienna and Prague. Bernard Samson is a spy on the run. But in the murky streets of Berlin, he knows where to hide. Wanted for an act of treachery he has not committed, he must not only escape the grasp of London...

Spy Hook introduces us to Bernard Samson, a spy forced on the run from his own government in this nail-biting first instalment of the Hook, Line and Sinker series. Millions of pounds have gone missing, and the Department has sent agent Bernard Samson to Washington to track them down. But this mission is just the start of something far deeper...

A new translation of Calvino's influential last work Italo Calvino was due to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1985-86, but they were left unfinished at his death. The surviving drafts explore the concepts of Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude, and Visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth) in serious yet playful essays that reveal Calvino's debt to...

This collection brings together Orwell's longer, major essays and a selection of shorter pieces that include Shooting an Elephant, "My Country Right or Left", "Decline of an English Murder" and "A Hanging". Orwell unfolds his views on subjects ranging from a revaluation of Charles Dickens to a defence of English cooking, displaying a mastery of English plain prose style and...

Bellow is one of the giants of the twentieth-century novel. Read Seize the Day and see why San Francisco Examiner Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos. He is separated from his wife and children, at...

A startling, densely poetic portrait of 1970s Ghana as it emerges from colonial rule. Search Sweet Country follows the lives of an eclectic, interconnected group of Ghanaians living in and around the sprawling, chaotic city of Accra in the mid-1970s. Bringing the city to life in dizzying, lyrical prose, Laing weaves a story filled with bizarre and often melancholy characters:...

A fruity, foxy masterpiece, defender of our wilting faith in mankind - Sunday Times Horace Rumpole, the rascally, Wordsworth-quoting Old Bailey hack, should be enjoying his retirement. Soaking unhappily in the Florida sun with his wife, Hilda (She Who Must Be Obeyed), it is safely assumed by all that Rumpole's wig has been hung up for good. But when a...

Russell Hoban's masterpiece, a post-apocalyptic vision of humanity stripped back to its essentials. O what we ben! And what we come to... Wandering a desolate post-apocalyptic landscape, speaking a broken-down English lost after the end of civilisation, Riddley Walker sets out to find out what brought humanity here. This is his story.

A private meeting, chance encounters and a mysterious tour of Lisbon, in this brilliant homage to Tabucchi's country, culture and people. In the city of Lisbon, Requiem's narrator has an appointment to meet someone on a quay by the Tagus at twelve. Misunderstanding twelve to mean noon as opposed to midnight, he is left to wait. As the day unfolds...

New to PMC Ravelstein features Abe Ravelstein, a brilliant professor at a prominent midwestern university and a man who revels in training the movers and shakers of the political world. He has lived grandly and ferociously—and much beyond his means. His close friend Chick suggests he put forth a book expressing his convictions about the ideas which sustain humankind, or...

A major career-spanning collection from the inimitable Nobel Prize-winning poet. For the past fifty years, Louise Glück has been a major force in modern poetry, distinguished as much for the restless intelligence, wit, and intimacy of her poetic voice as for her development of a particular form—the book-length sequence of poems. This volume brings together the twelve collections Glück has...

The much-loved masterpiece from one of the key figures of twentieth-century Italian literature. In the sweltering summer of 1938, with Lisbon in the grip of Portugal's dictatorship of António Salazar, a journalist is coming to terms with the rise of fascism around him and its insidious impact on his work. Consumed by the passing of his wife and the child...

A mesmerizing novel about the magical and gritty world of Bucharest in the 1980s by a celebrated Eastern European writer. 'Gripping, impassioned, unexpected' - Los Angeles Times A dreamlike novel of memory and magic, Nostalgia turns the dark world of Communist Bucharest into a place of strange enchantments. Here, a man plays increasingly death-defying games of Russian Roulette, a child...

An omnibus of all four of the greatest science-fiction novels of H. G. Wells. In the space of less than four years, H. G. Wells (1866-1946) published four of the most influential, original, and hair-raising works of science-fiction. In a life of tireless experiment, travelling, and intellectual engagement, Wells was both a leading public figure and one of the great...

The second novel in the Great Plains trilogy, The Song of the Lark is a passionate portrait of the artist as a young woman. Thea Kronberg, a young girl from a small town in Colorado, has a great gift—her beautiful singing voice. Her talent takes her to the great opera houses of Europe, and through ambition and hard work, she...

A new translation of a twisting detective novel from the celebrated author of the Maigret series. The Strangers in the House follows Hector Loursat, a lawyer in the small town of Moulins, who has lived as a drunken recluse since his wife left him eighteen years ago. Unmoored from society and estranged from his daughter, he shuts himself away, numbed...

Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 3 is the concluding part of Javier Marías's acclaimed and evocative 'novel in parts'. Jacques Deza is back in London and once again working for the secret intelligence agency run by Bertram Tupra. Deza finds himself forced to watch Tupra's collection of incriminating videotapes of important public figures. The recordings document unconventional private lives—and horrific acts....

The Cold War plays out in the shadow of the Second World War as old loyalties collide. Sinister rumours link clandestine Arab arms dealing with a hero of the French resistance. Time to re-open the master file on Yesterday's Spy...

New to Penguin Modern Classics Why Read the Classics? is an elegant defence of the value of great literature by one of the finest authors of the last century. Beginning with an essay on the attributes that define a classic (number one - classics are those books that people always say they are 'rereading', not 'reading'), this is an absorbing...

Why Are We Artists? is a new anthology encompassing 100 years of manifestos by artists, filmmakers, and architects from across the globe. "Art is not a luxury. Art is a basic social need to which everyone has a right." This extraordinary collection features 100 artists' manifestos from around the world, spanning the past century. It brings together political activists, anti-colonialists,...

The True Heart is a love story set in Victorian England by one of the most original writers of the twentieth century. Leaving her orphanage at sixteen, Sukey Bond finds employment as a servant in the remote New Easter Farm, deep within the Essex Marshes. There she falls in love with simple, gentle Eric, the son of the rector's wife....

Another collection of stories about the irrepressible barrister Horace Rumpole comes to Penguin Modern Classics. The Trials of Rumpole sees Horace Rumpole, the irrepressible barrister fuelled by cigars, Tennyson, steak-and-kidney pud and the cooking claret from Pommeroy's wine bar, returning for further misadventures. Amid an unfortunate and temporary downturn in London crime, the Old Bailey hack sits in Chambers (he...

One of Kerouac's most enduring and touching works. The Subterraneans haunt the bars and clubs of San Francisco, surviving on a diet of booze and benzedrine, Proust and Verlaine. Living amongst them is Leo, an aspiring writer, and Mardou, half-Indian, half-Negro, beautiful and neurotic. Their bittersweet and ill-starred love affair sees Kerouac at his most evocative. Many regard this as...

A satirical and philosophical set of space adventure stories from one of the best-loved science fiction writers of the twentieth century. The Star Diaries, Stanislaw Lem's set of short stories written over a period of twenty years, all feature the adventures of space traveller Ijon Tichy. These tales recount him spinning in time-warps, spying on robots, encountering bizarre civilisations and...

The tale of a woman transformed by a Black healing community in 1970s America, publishing for the first time in Penguin Modern Classics. A book full of marvels - New Yorker The American Deep South, in the 1970s. Velma Henry, once a formidable political activist, has grown weary and disillusioned with the fight for civil rights. She wants to end...

The British Secret Service turns their attentions to a linguistic prodigy in the Congo in this espionage thriller, new to Penguin Modern Classics. At a top-secret meeting between Western financiers and Congolese warlords, an interpreter finds his conscience re-awakening. Bruno Salvador has worked on clandestine missions before. A highly skilled interpreter, he is no stranger to the Official Secrets Act....

The Making of the English Working Class is the revolutionary account of working-class culture and ideals, reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic to mark the 50th anniversary of its publication. This brilliant account of working-class society in its formative years, 1780 to 1832, revolutionised our understanding of English social history. E. P. Thompson shows how the working class took part...

A new translation of this haunting tale about the lengths to which people will go to escape from guilt, part of the Maigret series. A first ink drawing showed a hanged man swinging from a gallows on which perched an enormous crow. And hanging was the leitmotif of at least twenty other etchings and pen or pencil sketches. On the...

One of the most influential books of the 20th century comes into Modern Classics. When Betty Friedan produced The Feminine Mystique in 1963, she could not have realised how the discovery and debate of her contemporaries' general malaise would shake up society. Victims of a false belief system, these women were following strict social convention by loyally conforming to the...