Classic literature

A dystopian masterpiece - the powerful and prophetic novel that defined the twentieth century.The year is 1984. War and revolution have created an unrecognisable world. Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, is ruled by the Party, led by Big Brother. Mass surveillance is total and The Thought Police ensure...

A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned –a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that...

This unusual fictional memoir - in good part autobiographical - narrates without self-pity and often with humor the adventures of a penniless British writer among the down-and-outs of two great cities. The Parisian episode is fascinating for its expose of the kitchens of posh French restaurants, where the narrator works...

This is Orwell's memoir of his experiences during the Spanish Civil War - a groundbreaking work of dissident literature drawn from vivid personal experience. There are occasions where it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all...  This is dissident literature drawn from vivid personal experience. Orwell...

In her final novel, Villette, Charlotte Brontë tells the story of Lucy Snowe, a woman grappling with loneliness and emotional turmoil. After a difficult period in England, Lucy moves to Villette, where she becomes an English teacher at a girls' school. Surrounded by cultural prejudices, she faces challenges that push...

The Sicilian prince Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa (1896-1957) died just after writing The Leopard, his only novel. Visconti's film adaptation, starring Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1963.In Sicily, in 1860, a family from the high aristocracy suffered the consequences of the change of regime in...

THE EXTRAORDINARY LOST NOVEL FROM THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA AND ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDEA TOP TEN SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERSitting alone, overlooking the still and blue lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach surveys the men of the hotel bar. She is happily married and has no reason to...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island,...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island,...

Little Clothbound irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.   Magical books, infinite libraries, parallel worlds, mazes, labyrinths and philosophical paradoxes haunt these spellbinding tales by one of the most uniquely inventive short story writers of the twentieth century....

"Tristram Shandy is one of the greatest novels ever written, now available in a beautifully designed clothbound edition. Laurence Sterne’s brilliant work of wit, humor, and satire resists categorization, offering a wonderfully rich narrative that might be considered the first "postmodern" novel. Part novel, part digression, Tristram Shandy weaves together the...

For the Sullivan family, Christmas isn’t a season of joy it’s a holiday for other people. Widower Henry Sullivan and his two children, Will and Ella, have spent years avoiding the festivities. No stockings, no tree, no gifts just quiet, uneventful Decembers in their Harlem brownstone. Until, one year, Christmas refuses to...

Charlie Gordon, IQ 68, is a floor sweeper and the gentle butt of everyone's jokes - until an experiment in the enhancement of human intelligence turns him into a genius.But then Algernon, the mouse whose triumphal experimental transformation preceded his, fades and dies, and Charlie has to face the possibility...

Pride and Prejudice has charmed generations of readers for more than two centuries. Jane Austen's much-adapted novel is famed for its witty, spirited heroine, sensational romances, and deft remarks on the triumphs and pitfalls of social convention. Author Jane Austen (1775-1817) was an English novelist whose works of social realism...

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement. With the precision of a scientist and the simplicity of a fable, Rachel Carson reveals how man-made pesticides have destroyed wildlife, creating a world of polluted streams and silent songbirds. Over the past 75 years, a new canon...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. George Bernard Shaw’s classic play and satire of the British class system, first performed in 1913.   One of George Bernard Shaw's best-known plays, Pygmalion was a rousing success on the London and New York stages, an entertaining motion picture and...

The Little Prince is a modern fable, and for readers far and wide both the title and the work have exerted a pull far in excess of the book's brevity. Written and published first by Antoine de St-Exupery in 1943, only a year before his plane disappeared on a reconnaissance...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars. First published in 1855, and edited, revised and expanded over thirty years, Leaves of Grass’ has become one of the most celebrated...

Retold with stunning modern illustration and design from award-winning illustrator Tina Berning, enjoy Robert Louis Stevenson's gripping exploration of the duality of human nature in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The haunting, colorful interpretation of this classic gothic tale follows London lawyer Gabriel John Utterson as he investigates strange occurrences between his old...

'Like rotting stakes in a forest clearing'The great journalist of conflict in the Third World finds an even stranger and more exotic society in his own home of post-War PolandPenguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a...

"I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more."HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. This selection of works showcases the best-known, most chilling stories of H. P. Lovecraft, including Dagon, The Call of Cthulhu, The Thing...

Podtitul díla zní "Humoristická - pokud je to možné - novela z ghetta". Známý pražský satirik, spolutvůrce "divadel malých forem" a přispěvatel humoristického Dikobrazu jej vydal r. 1969. Obraz vlastního dospívání v "ghettě" Terezín se vymyká z literatury holocaustu nejen spojením smrti a hrůzy s absurditou a smíchem, ale také...

Casting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the same time completely avoiding realism-that's The Festival of Insignificance. Readers who know Kundera's earlier books know that the wish to...

'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 Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity...

The Giver is a modern classic and one of the most influential books of our time. Now in graphic novel format, Lois Lowry's Newbery Medal-winning classic story of a young boy discovering the dark secrets behind his seemingly ideal world is accompanied by renowned artist P. Craig Russell's beautifully haunting...

‘It is best to do nothing! The best thing is conscious inertia! So long live the underground!’ Alienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of Dostoyevsky’s groundbreaking Notes from Underground tells the story of his tortured life. With bitter sarcasm, he describes his refusal to...

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. The story grew out of a map that led to imaginary treasure, devised during a holiday in Scotland...

Set in the contemporary Paris of American expatraites, liasons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. James Baldwin's brilliant narrative delves into the mystery of loving with a sharp, probing imagination, and he creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that...

Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows him through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated in time by more than two hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and ridiculous.As Kundera's readers would expect, Slowness is at the same time a formidable display of existential analysis....

Four seminal plays by one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century.An existential portrayal of Hell in Sartre's best-known play, as well as three other brilliant, thought-provoking works: the reworking of the Electra-Orestes story, the conflict of a young intellectual torn between theory and conflict, and an arresting attack...