Philosophy in the Bedroom accounts the lascivious education of a privileged young lady at the dawn of womanhood.
Shakespearean comedy has as much to do with the structure and movement of the drama as with the wit of its dialogue or the humour of its characters. In these four comedies there is a near-tragic crisis at which disaster or happiness may ensue, but t…
Elizabeth Gaskell's remarkable first novel, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life portrays a love that defies the rigid boundaries of class with tragic consequences. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by MacDonal…
An epic story of lust, cruelty, and sensuality, this historical novel is set in Carthage in the days following the First Punic War with Rome.
It is the year 2000 - and full employment, material abundance and social harmony can be found everywhere. This is the America to which Julian West, a young Bostonian, awakens after more than a century of sleep. West's initial sense of wonder, his gr…
A study of America's national government, egalitarian ideals, and character offers reflections on the effect of majority rule on the rights of individuals and provides insight into the rewards and responsibilities of a democratic government, in a ne…
With their penetrating psychological insight and their emphasis on human dignity, respect and forgiveness, Dostoyevsky's early short stories contain the seeds of the themes that came to his major novels. Poor Folk, the author's first great literary…
Pliny's Natural History is an astonishingly ambitious work that ranges from astronomy to art and from geography to zoology. Mingling acute observation with often wild speculation, it offers a fascinating view of the world as it was understood in the…
Michel de Montaigne was one of the most influential figures of the Renaissance, singlehandedly responsible for popularising the essay as a literary form. This Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Essays is translated from the French and edited w…
A continuous text made up of extracts from Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal and a selection of her brother's poems. Dorothy Wordsworth kept her Journal 'because I shall give William pleasure by it'. In doing so, she never dreamt that she was giving futu…
'I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.' With The Way of All Flesh, Samuel…
A haunting study of guilt and lost love in Penguin Classics, Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge is edited with an introduction and notes by Keith Wilson.In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guin…
Insolent and defiant, the Chants de Maldoror, by the self-styled Comte de Lautreamont (1846-70), depicts a sinister and sadistic world of unrestrained savagery and brutality. One of the earliest and most astonishing examples of surrealist writing, i…
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories is a collection of stories that emerged from a profound spiritual crisis, during which Leo Tolstoy believed that he had encountered death itself. This Penguin Classics edition is translated with an introduc…
Through their sheer range, daring innovation, flawed but eloquent characters and intriguing plots, the plays of Euripides have shocked and stimulated audiences since the fifth century BC. Phoenician Women portrays the rival sons of King Oedipus and…
The plays of Euripides have stimulated audiences since the fifth century BC. This volume, containing Phoenician Women, Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, Orestes, and Rhesuscompletes the new editions of Euripides in Penguin Classics.
Telling the tragic tale of a socially advantageous but emotionally ruinous match, Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest is translated from the German by Hugh Rorrison with an introduction by Helen Chambers in Penguin Classics.Unworldly young Effi Briest is…
Songs and Sonnets (1557), the first printed anthology of English poetry, was immensely influential in Tudor England, and inspired major Elizabethan writers including Shakespeare. Collected by pioneering publisher Richard Tottel, it brought poems of…
Japanese no theatre or the drama of 'perfected art' flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries largely through the genius of the dramatist Zeami. An intricate fusion of music, dance, mask, costume and language, the dramas address many subj…
A phenomenonally precicious schoolboy, Rimbaud was still a teenager when he became notorious as Europe's most shocking and exhilarating poet. During his brief 5-year reign as the enfant terrible of French literature he produced an extraordinary body…
First released in 1704, offers a detailed report on a storm that hit Britain, leaving thousands dead and homes and businesses destroyed for miles in every direction.
The Portable Poe compiles Poe's greatest writings: tales of fantasy, terror, death, revenge, murder, and mystery, including "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue,"…
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings is a collection that displays the full force of Edgar Allen Poe's mastery of both Gothic horror and the short story form. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by Dav…
One of the most important civil rights leaders in American history, Cesar Chavez was a firm believer in the principles of non-violence, and effectively employed peaceful tactics to further his cause. Through his efforts, he helped achieve dignity, f…
One of the most celebrated works of classic literature for children, The Wind in the Willows follows Mole, Rat, Toad and Badger from one adventure to the next - in gipsy caravans, stolen sports cars, to prison and back to the Wild Wood. A story of a…
Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters is a story of romance, scandal and intrigue within the confines of a watchful, gossiping English village during the early nineteenth century. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction and no…
IN THE SOUTH SEAS records Stevenson's travels with his wife Fanny and their family in the Marquesas, the Paumotus and the Gilbert Islands during 1888-9. Originally drafted in journal form while Stevenson travelled, it was then ambitiously rewrittent…
These three works of fiction - two by Mary Wollstonecraft, the radical author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and one by her daughter Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein - are powerfully emotive stories that combine passion with forceful…
Edith Wharton's novels of manners seem to grow in stature as time passes. Here she draws a beautiful social climber, Undine Sprague, who is a monster of selfishness and honestly doesn't know it. Although the worlds she wants to conquer have vanished…
Virginia and Alice Madden are 'odd women', growing old alone in Victorian England with no prospect of finding love. Forced into poverty by the sudden death of their father, they lead lives of quiet desperation in a genteel boarding house in London.…
"The Portable Hawthorne" includes writings from each major stage in the career of Nathaniel Hawthorne: a number of his most intriguing early tales, all of "The Scarlet Letter", excerpts from his three subsequently published romances - "The House of…
Widely considered the greatest work by the foremost Brazilian author of the twentieth century, The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray comes to Penguin Classics in a new translation by the dean of Portuguese-language translators, Gregory Rabassa. It…
First published in 1892, this stirring novel by the great writer and activist Frances Harper tells the story of the young daughter of a wealthy Mississippi planter who travels to the North to attend school, only to be sold into slavery in the South…
Roderick is combative, often violent, but capable of great affection and generosity. His father had been disinherited and has left Scotland leaving his son penniless. After a brief apprenticeship to a surgeon, the innocent Roderick travels to London…
Composed in the twelfth century in north-eastern Iran, Attar's great mystical poem is among the most significant of all works of Persian literature. A marvellous, allegorical rendering of the Islamic doctrine of Sufism - an esoteric system concerned…
Recounting the final days of Arthur, this thirteenth-century French version of the Camelot legend, written by an unknown author, is set in a world of fading chivalric glory. It depicts the Round Table diminished in strength after the Quest for the H…
The four works collected in this volume reveal the fascinating preoccupations of the German Romantic movement, which revelled in the inexplicable, the uncanny and the unknown and, especially, the mysterious world of the fairy tale. Goethe's richly i…
This is a call to mindfulness, dedicated to easing suffering.The story of Shakyamuni Buddha's epic journey to enlightenment is perhaps the most important narrative in the Buddhist tradition. Tenzin Choegyel's The Life of the Buddha, composed in the…
Shaw believed that theatre audiences of the 1890s deserved more than the hollow spectacle and sham he saw displayed on the London stage. But he also recognized that people wanted to be entertained while educated, and to see purpose mixed with pleasu…
The Cid, Corneille's masterpiece set in medieval Spain, was the first great work of French classical drama; Cinna, written three years later in 1641, is a tense political drama, while The Theatrical Illusion, an earlier work, is reminiscent of Shake…
Mulk Raj Anand's extraordinarily powerful story of an Untouchable in India's caste system, with a new introduction by Ramachandra Guha, author of GandhiBakha is a proud and attractive young man, yet none the less he is an Untouchable - an outcast in…
Presents a collection of stories, essays, poems, and speeches by the Sioux writer, teacher, and activist.
First published in July 1850, shortly after Wordsworth's death, The Prelude was the culmination of over fifty years of creative work. The great Romantic poem of human consciousness, it takes as its theme 'the growth of a poet's mind': leading the re…
The Country of Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett's masterpiece, established her among the consummate stylists of nineteenth-century American fiction. Composed in a series of beautiful web-like sketches, the novel is narrated by a young woman writer wh…
The Life of Henry Brulard is the autobiography of one of France's greatest writers. In this book, written with such frankness that it remained unpublishable for more than a century after its composition, the author of The Charterhouse of Parma and T…
In 1834, Charlotte Bronte and her brother Branwell created the imaginary kingdom of Angria in a series of tiny handmade books. Continuing their saga some years later, the five 'novelettes' in this volume were written by Charlotte when she was in her…
One of Socrates' Athenian disciples in his youth, Xenophon (c. 498-354 bc) fought as a mercenary commander in Cyrus the Younger's campaign to seize the Persian throne, and later wrote a wide range of works on history, politics and philosophy. These…
Orphaned at an early age, raised by his aunt and uncle, and apprenticed for seven years to a draper, Artie Kipps is stunned to discover upon reading a newspaper advertisement that he is the grandson of a wealthy gentleman - and the inheritor of his…
The first annual omnibus edition in the new Penguin Inspector Maigret series, comprising four titles from the series so far: Pietr the Latvian, The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, The Carter of La Providence and The Grand Banks Cafe. Additional materia…
Taking the legends surrounding King Arthur and weaving in new psychological elements of personal desire and courtly manner, Chretien de Troyes fashioned a new form of medieval Romance. The Knight of the Cart is the first telling of the adulterous re…
A new translation of Voltaire's Treatise on Toleration, one of the most important essays on religious tolerance and freedom of thought A powerful, impassioned case for the values of freedom of conscience and religious tolerance, Treatise on Tolerati…
