‘One of the most important American novels of the twentieth century’ The Times ‘It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves’ Ralph Ellison’s blistering and impassioned…
‘One of the most important American novels of the twentieth century’ The Times ‘It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves’ Ralph Ellison’s blistering and impassioned…
‘Though their house was new, the wall had been there a long time.’ In these two stories, which have never before been translated into English, Tsushima shows how memories, dreams and fleeting images describe the…
Professor Timofey Pnin, late of Tsarist Russia, is now precariously perched at the heart of an American campus. Battling with American life and language, Pnin must face great hazards in this new world: the ruination…
‘They didn’t seem to take much interest in my private parts which to tell the truth were nothing to write home about, I didn’t take much interest in them myself.’ From the master of the…
‘I gained his secret and we were both lost for ever’ Mary Shelley’s dark story of a bereaved man’s disturbing passion for his daughter was suppressed by her own father, and not published for over…
‘Deeply moving, original, and dealing with material that I had never encountered in fiction, but only in life’ Margaret Drabble Growing up in the world of the ‘five towns’ of industrial England, with their furnaces…
‘Summer was drawing to a close, and I realized that the book was monstrous.’ Fantastical tales of mazes, puzzles, lost labyrinths and bookish mysteries, from the unique imagination of a literary magician. Penguin Modern: fifty…
A new Penguin English Library edition of Jane Austen’s tantalizing final work – set to be a major Andrew Davies ITV adaptation this autumn Written in the last months of Austen’s life, Sanditon features a…
‘Time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.’ Science and fiction interweave delightfully in these playful Cosmicomic short stories. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with…
‘Of what a mistake were you guilty in marrying a Man of his age! – just old enough to be formal, ungovernable and to have the Gout – too old to be agreable, and too…
‘As you are well aware, we never loved each other in your lifetime. Both of us pretended.’ Simenon explores the complexity of parent child relationships and the bitterness of things left unsaid in this stark,…
‘How can the bird that is born for joy / Sit in a cage and sing?’ A selection of Blake’s most haunting verse, including ‘The Songs of Innocence and Experience’. One of 46 new books…
‘What matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now.’ A hugely influential collection for writers and artists of all kinds, Rilke’s profound and lyrical letters to a young friend advise on writing, love,…
He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension praeternatural….
‘It is only a bruise’ A carefree Russian official has what seems to be a trivial accident… One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin…
My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that really so little for the whole of a man’s life? A poignant tale of love and loneliness from Russia’s foremost writer. One of 46 new books…
‘Acker gives her work the power to mirror the reader’s soul’ William S. Burroughs ‘Kathy Acker’s writing is virtuoso, maddening, crazy, so sexy, so painful, and beaten out of a wild heart that nothing can…
‘The foremost work on the key democratic task: helping people to identify and challenge the sources of their oppression … a transformative text’ George Monbiot, Guardian Arguing that ‘education is freedom’, Paulo Freire’s radical international…
