'Can I bear to leave these blue hills?' A generous selection from three of the greatest and most enjoyable of Chinese poets Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Lit
'Yes, we did many things, then - allBeautiful ...'Lyrical, powerful poems about love, sexuality, sun-soaked Greece and the gods. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday
'Oh, good God,' he kept saying with great relish. 'Good God...''Gooseberries' is accompanied here by 'The Kiss' and 'The Two Volodyas' - three exquisite depictions of love and loss in nineteenth-centu
'An ass, clothed in the skin of a lion...'Aesop's animal fables are some of the earliest stories ever told, thought to have been composed by a slave in Greek antiquity and giving glimpses of a world t
'What is the life of a human being - a drop of dew, a flash of lightning? This is so sad, so sad.' Autobiographical stories from one of Japan's masters of modernist story-telling.Introducing Little Bl
'He was not blind to the fact that murder, like the religions of the Pagan world, requires a victim as well as a priest...'This selection includes three of Wilde's brilliant short stories, all reflect
'The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.'Marx and Engels's revolutionary summons to the working classes - one of the most important and influential political theories ever formulated.
'It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met...'Moonlight, sake, spring blossom, idle moments, a
'Better mad with the crowd than sane all alone'In these witty, Machiavellian aphorisms, unlikely Spanish priest Baltasar Graci+Ýn shows us how to exploit friends and enemies alike to thrive in a world
'The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.'Written with barely controlled fury after she was confined to her room for 'nerves' and forbi
'Hate is not conquered by hate: hate is conquered by love. This is a law eternal.'Captivating aphorisms illustrating the Buddhist dhamma, or moral system.Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books fo
'Drunk or sober, king or soldier, none will be excluded'Sensual, profound, delighted, wise, Hafez's poems have enchanted their readers for more than 600 years. One of the greatest figures of world lit
'One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class.' Poet,
An extraordinary novel of love and ambition set in late Victorian London.'Marriage rarely means happiness, either for man or woman; if it be not too grievous to be borne, one must thank the fates and
The exhilarating, life-affirming call to spiritual arms from world-renowned spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff 'Gurdjieff's voice is heard as a call. He calls because he suffers from the inner chaos in
New to Penguin Modern Classics, the seminal work of gay literature that sparked an infamous legal trial for obscenity and went on to become a bestseller. The Well of Loneliness tells the story of tomb
Austen’s hilarious early stories and sketches, now collected in one gorgeous clothbound volumeJane Austen’s earliest writing dates from when she was just eleven-years-old, and already shows the hallma
Of all the extraordinary Victorian travelogues, The Malay Archipelago has a fair claim to be the greatest - both as a beautiful, alarming, vivid and gripping account of some eight years' travel across
For more than 2,000 years, Sun Tzu's The Art of War has provided leaders with essential advice on battlefield tactics, managing troops and terrain, and employing cunning and deception. An elemental pa
Freud's epoch-making insights revolutionized our perception of who we are, forming the foundation for psychoanalysis. In Civilization and its Discontents he considers the incompatibility of civilizati
Henry James' great masterpiece, now in a stunning Penguin clothbound edition designed by the acclaimed Coralie Bickford-Smith. When Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American, is brought to Europe
One of the most iconoclastic philosophers of all time, Nietzsche dramatically rejected notions of good and evil, truth and God. Beyond Good and Evil demonstrates that the world is steeped in false pie
One of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer (1788-1860) believed that human action is determined not by reason but by 'will' - the blind and irrational desire for physical
A Room of One's Own is Virginia Woolf's most powerful feminist essay, justifying the need for women to possess intellectual freedom and financial independence. Based on a lecture given at Girton Colle
The Penguin English Library Edition of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen 'We have all been more or less to blame ... every one of us, excepting Fanny' Taken from the poverty of her parents' home in Portsm
When Huck escapes from his drunken father and the 'sivilizing' Widow Douglas with the runaway slave Jim, he embarks on a series of adventures that draw him to feuding families and the trickery of the
Obsessed by creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life by electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frank
The Penguin English Library edition Many readers would claim that The Adventure of the Copper Beeches or The Man with the Twisted Lip was their favourite Sherlock Holmes story - but then that would be
The Penguin English Library edition A dense yellow miasma swirls in the streets of London as Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson accompany a beautiful young woman to a sinister assignation. For Mary Marston
The Penguin English Library edition As usual with the Sherlock Holmes stories it is very hard to say which are the best - but there are many stories here which would get the vote - ranging from The Bo
The Penguin English Library edition When Dr John Watson takes rooms in Baker Street with amateur detective Sherlock Holmes, he has no idea that he is about to enter a shadowy world of criminality and
The Penguin English Library Edition The deadly hand of Professor Moriarty once more reaches out to commit a vile and ingenious crime, but a mole in Moriarty's criminal organization alerts Sherlock Hol
A haunting novel about art and its power to heal, J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 'That night, for the first time during many months, I slept l
America, fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. The winning Axis powers have divided their spoils: the Nazis control New York, while California is ruled by the Japanese. But between thes
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Evelyn Waugh’s 1934 novel is a bitingly funny vision of aristocratic decadence in England between the wars. It tells the story of Tony Last, who, to the irritation of his
When a freak cosmic event renders most of the Earth's population blind, Bill Masen - one of the lucky few to keep his sight - finds himself trapped in a London jammed with sightless mobs who prey on t
Regeneration by Pat Barker is a classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young - published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 'I just don't think our war aims -
'Some people are coming here today, now you will have a companion.' But young Edmund Hooper doesn't want anyone else in Warings, the large and rambling Victorian house he shares with his widowed fathe
