After seven years of marriage the beautiful Lady Brenda Last is bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with the s
Dean Corde is a man of position and authority at a Chicago university. He accompanies his wife to Bucharest where her mother lies dying in a state hospital. As he tries to help her grapple with an unf
“What makes all of this so remarkable is not merely Bellow’s eye and ear for vital detail. Nor is it his talent for exposing the innards of character in a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase. It is Bellow
As Cold War hysteria inflames America, FBI agents pay a surprise visit to a Communist man and his wife in their New York apartment. After a trial that divides the country, the couple are sent to the e
Peter Martin, a college track star determined to idle away what he knows will be one of his last innocent summers in his tranquil New England home town. But with the war escalating in Europe and his t
Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother.'Alexander Cleave, an actor who thinks his best days are behind him, remembers his first unlikely affair as a teenage boy in a small to
'Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched - love for instance - we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next'Tracing the lives of a group of
As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair is beginning between a sixteen-year-old boy and a young woman married to a soldier at the front. They meet secretly in her flat on
The landmark comic satire that asks, “What would happen if all black people in America turned white?” It’s New Year’s Day 1933 in New York City, and Max Disher, a young black m
"He is so scandalously weak, and she is so radically vicious, that they cannot but be wrong together. The very fact that such a man should be a bishop among us is to me terribly strong evidence o
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
The story grew out of a map that led to imaginary treasure, devised during a holiday in Scotland by Stevenson and his nephew. The tale is told by an adventurous boy, Jim Hawkins, who gets hold of a tr
As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair is beginning between a sixteen-year-old boy and a young woman married to a soldier at the front. They meet secretly in her flat on
A Small Circus is a powerful 1931 portrayal of a German town on the brink of chaos, from bestselling author Hans Fallada (writer of Alone in Berlin) It is summer, 1929, and in a small German town a st
Fires the reader into a textual outer space to show us our burning planet and to reveal the operations of the Nova Mob in all their ugliness. This book reveals how Nova Express was cut from a wealth o
Here are poems to take you on a journey from the 'suddenly' of love at first sight to the 'truly, madly, deeply' of infatuation and on to the 'eternally' of love that lasts beyond the end of life, alo
The Penguin English Library Edition of The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot If life had no love in it, what else was there for Maggie? Tragic and moving, The Mill on the Floss is a novel of grand pas
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
When John Franklin brings his plane down into Occupied France at the height of the Second World war, there are two things in his mind - the safety of his crew and his own badly injured arm. It is a st
A golden Cadillac big enough to cross the ocean has been seen sailing along the streets of Harlem. A hit-and-run victim's been hit so hard she got embedded in the wall of a convent. A shootout with th
★ 改變一整個世代觀看方式的藝術經典★ BBC同名節目改編，跨越影像與文字的思想之作★ 一句話顛覆藝術理解：「觀看，先於語言」在我們還不會說話之前，就已經開始「看」。但你是否曾想過，我們看到的，真的只是眼前的事物嗎？《觀看的方式》從最日常的視覺經驗出發，帶領讀者重新思考：我們如何看畫、看影像、看世界。約翰．伯格以敏銳而直白的語言，拆解藝術長久以來被包裝的權威與距離，揭示觀看其實深受文化、權力與歷史影響。當我們看一幅畫時，同時也在看見自己的位置與價值。本書發想自BBC經典節目，出版後迅速成為影響深遠的思想之作，不只改變藝術理解方式，更重新定義「觀看」本身。這不只是一本藝術書，而是一場關於視覺、權力與意識的革命。Based on the BBC television series, John Berger's Ways of Seeing is a unique look at the way we view art, published as part of the Penguin on Design series in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.''But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words.It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.' John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language. First published in 19
Edmund Campion (1540-1581) was a Jesuit priest who, in the turbulent years before the Spanish Armada, was charged with treason and executed. This book offers homage to this man whom the author revered
One of the great derisive monuments to the imbecilities of the tourist experience, Mark Twain's (1835-1910) account of his tour with a group of fellow Americans around the sights of Europe is both hil
Paul stepped off the curb and got hit by a truck. He didn't know what it was that hit him at first, but now, here on his back, under the truck, there could be no doubt.
Considered by many to the greatest novel ever written, Tolstoy's masterpiece is a story of family life set against the backdrop of war. The novel begins in 1805 in the crowded and gossip-filled rooms
'We are bought and sold like apes or monkeys, to be the sport of women, fools, and cowards, and the support of rogues . . .' Spy, traveller and pioneering female writer Aphra Benn's story of an Africa
'The train ran on without a driver, on and on, like some mindless, unseeing beast...' One of Zola's darkest and most violent works - a tense thriller of political corruption and a graphic exploration
'Cut iron with iron, What makes iron valuable, Big kuku tree and big silk-cotton tree, Fari and Kaunju -' Told and retold since the fourteenth century, this West African epic chronicles the story of t
With an Introduction and Notes by Merry M. Pawlowski, Professor and Chair, Department of English, California State University,Bakersfield.Virginia Woolf's singular technique in Mrs Dalloway heralds a
Focuses on the concept of 'precious print', as embodied by Penguin Classics and Fantastic Man. This title explores the myriad advantages of the printed word and image: beautiful typography, high dwell
One of India's greatest epics, the Ramayana pervades the country's moral and cultural consciousness. Believed to have been composed by Valmiki sometime between the eighth and sixth centuries BC, the R
Exploring issues of colonialism, faith and the limits of comprehension, E.M. Forster's A Passage to India is edited by Oliver Stallybrass, with an introduction by Pankaj Mishra. When Adela Quested and
Pozdnyshev and his wife have a turbulent relationship. When her beauty blossoms after the birth of their children, men begin to flock around her, and he becomes increasingly jealous. Convinced his wif
THE INSPIRATION FOR THE NEW NETFLIX SERIES DEBUTING THIS HALLOWE'EN The best-known of Shirley Jackson's novels and a major inspiration for writers like Neil Gaiman and Stephen King, The Haunting of Hi
Saved, rescued, fished-up, half-drowned, out of the deep, dark river, dry clothes, hair shampooed and set... Set in a 1930s Paris of shabby hotel rooms, seedy bars and drunken encounters, Jean Rhys's
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 a cunnin
The Penguin English Library Edition of Washington Square by James Hardy "Why, you must take me or leave me ... You can't please your father and me both; you must choose between us" When timid and plai
She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart. The author's writing confronts the g
Wu Ch'eng-en wrote "Monkey" in the middle of the 16th century, adding to an ancient Chinese legend his own touches of delicacy and humour. The result is a jumble of the absurd and the profound, of rel
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I h
