The author who most epitomises the decadent jazz age and 'the lost generation' of post-World War One America, Fitzgerald remains a best-selling author worldwide. Collected here in this covetable and m
Mrs Bridge, an unremarkable and conservative housewife in Kansas City, has three children and a kindly lawyer husband. She spends her time with shopping, going to bridge parties and bringing up her ch
The Penguin English Library Edition of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by james Hogg 'He was constantly harassed with the idea, that the next time he lifted his eyes, he woul
The Penguin English Library Edition of The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope "He is so scandalously weak, and she is so radically vicious, that they cannot but be wrong together. The v
'We lose everything because everything remains except us'. In this book, the author recalls the strange events and people that shaped his past, including ghostly literary figures, a pilot, an adventur
On a train journey from Paris to Madrid a young opera singer becomes fascinated by those in his compartment: a middle-aged businessman, his alluring wife and their male travelling companion. Soon his
The Penguin English Library Edition of Nostromo by Joseph Conrad 'There is something in a treasure that fastens upon a man's mind. He will pray and blaspheme and still persevere, and will curse the da
Introduction by Jeffrey EugenidesWritten in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde’s story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the aut
In 1581 Edmund Campion, a Jesuit priest working underground in Protestant England, was found guilty of treason and hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. Years later he would be beatified. Evelyn Waug
From Evelyn Waugh, the author of beloved novels such as Brideshead Revisited, A Handful of Dust and Vile Bodies, this is the biography of Ronald Knox - priest, classicist, prolific writer and one of t
My First Wife is Jakob Wassermann's intense, powerful account of a marriage - and its ruinous collapse - translated by the award-winning translator of Alone in Berlin, Michael Hofmann. It is the story
In February 1822 the writer and adventurer Edward John Trelawny arrived in Pisa to make the acquaintance of his heroes Shelley and Byron, leaving a broken marriage and an exotic seafaring career behin
At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a generation of French soldiers found themselves haunted by defeat and disappointment. One of these soldiers was Alfred de Vigny, an aristocratic poet who also serve
A narrative of the suffering of Dalton 'Diddy' Harron, told through his own observations. He works in advertising for a microscope manufacturer, is thirty-three and divorced and a month ago tried to c
Leontes, the jealous King of Sicily becomes convinced that his wife, Hermione is carrying the child of his best friend Polixenes. Imprisoned and put on trial, the Queen collapses when the King refuses
Banishing his cousin, Bolingbroke, King Richard II prevents a dispute from turning bloody. But Richard is an arrogant and despotic ruler, prone to tyranny and vanity, who listens only to his flatterer
This selection of John Donne's most powerful prose shows that the man remembered predominantly for his poetry was also a preacher, and a prose writer of extraordinary power. In it, he explores the met
Explores a mans desperate desire for freedom. It finds him in the midst of his stormy marriage to the volatile, duplicitous Mona, and joyfully quitting his dreary job for a hand-to-mouth existence in
At twenty-one, the passionate and headstrong Ann Veronica Stanley is determined to rule her own life. When her autocratic father forbids her, via formal letter, from attending a fashionable art-school
In Greenmantle (1916) Richard Hannay, hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps, travels across war-torn Europe in search of a German plot and an Islamic Messiah. He is joined by three more of Buchan's heroes: Pe
Abandoned to his fate when his English parents die in the African jungle, a baby boy is rescued and reared by a loving ape foster mother. Conquering the savage laws of the wilderness, Tarzan grows int
An ancient evil walks among them. When Adam Salton arrives at his grand-uncle’s Derbyshire estate he quickly senses that a macabre and malevolent force is at work. In his attempts to uncover the grisl
However you try to escape it, horror is always there Outside the abbey's armoured walls, the common poor are ravaged by a grisly pestilence known as the 'Red Death', while within, safe and untroubled,
To be poor and destitute in 1920s Paris and London was to experience life at its lowest ebb. George Orwell, penniless and with nowhere to go, found himself experiencing just this as he wandered the st
The town is Galloway in Massachusetts, birthplace of the five sons and three daughters of the Martin family in the early 1900s. The city is New York, the vast and heaving melting pot which lures them
Tod Hackett is a brilliant young artist - and a man in danger of losing his heart. Brought to an LA studio as a set-designer, he is soon caught up in a fantasy world where the cult of celebrity rules.
Though best known in the English speaking world for his short fictions and poems, Borges is revered in Latin America equally as an immensely prolific and beguiling writer of non-fiction prose. This ti
Published in order of first publication as far as possible, this selection ranges from initial offerings such as 'Tinker's Wife' and 'Inniskeen Road: July Evening' to his tragic masterpiece 'The Great
A man's mother can be a terrible burden sometimes. For Tarry Flynn - poet, farmer and lover-from-afar of beautiful young virgins - the responsibility of family, farm, poetic inspiration and his own un
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, an intrepid and eccentric adventurer, transferred his passion for flying to the written word by writing several classics of aviation literature, including Southern Mail and N
What happened to the characters of DECLINE AND FALL and VILE BODIES when the war broke out? PUT OUT MORE FLAGS shows them adjusting to the changing social pattern of the times. Some of them play a val
This collection of writings is famous for giving us the phrase 'Freudian slip'. It also builds up a strong social history of Vienna and the middle-class social milieu of Freud and his patients. Throug
Against a brilliantly observed background of life in the Staffordshire Potteries, ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS is both a novel about a gossipy, myopic, savage community and at its heart a young girl dominat
An inability to control his fantasies sends Gilbert Pinfold, a well-known author, cruising on a Ceylon-bound liner to recuperate. Yet, to his horror, the hallucinations increase and life on board beco
Virginia Woolf's last novel, in equal parts a triumphant celebration and witty mockery of 'Englishness', Between the Acts is edited by Stella McNichol, with an introduction and notes by Gillian Beer i
A penniless and parentless Chicago boy growing up in the Great Depression, Augie March drifts through life latching on to a wild succession of occupations, including butler, thief, dog-washer, sailor
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,
The author roams the US, Mexico, Morocco, Paris and London, Kerouac records, in prose of pure poetry, life on the road. In this book, he reveals both the endless diversity of human life and his own hi
