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First time in Modern Classics It's 1959 and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, one time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence -...

With a new introduction by Tristram Hunt The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists tells the story of a group of working men who are joined one day by Owen, a journeyman-prophet with...

Freud's most famous work and one of the most famous books in modern European history, published for the first time as a Penguin Modern Classic. By a detailed investigation of...

With an introduction by Maya Jaggi Chris, Ikem and Beatrice are like-minded friends working under the military regime of His Excellency, the Sandhurst-educated President of Kangan. In the pressurized atmosphere...

June 1940 was the summer of defeat for the French soldiers, deserted by their officers, utterly demoralized, awaiting the Armistice. Day by day, hour by hour, Iron in the Soul...

A collection of passionate and rousing plays, re-issuing in a new look. In these three exotic, steamy dramas Tennessee Williams portrays loss, faded lives and passionate love affairs. The Rose...

The Wayward Bus travelled the backroads through the lush California countryside. Its driver was a man of the land - lusty, hot-blooded and uninhibited. On the bus was a girl...

An omnibus comprising Raymond Chandler's three Philip Marlowe novels, THE LADY IN THE LAKE, THE HIGH WINDOW and THE LITTLE SISTER.

If you can't prove something, it is literally senseless - so argues Ayer in this irreverent and electrifying book. Statements are either true by definition (as in maths), or can...

If one theme unifies the 11 tales collected here, it is that of longing. Written after her return from Kenya and during the dark days of the Nazi occupation, they...

Growing up in a mining community in rural South Wales, Huw Morgan is taught many harsh lessons. Looking back, where difficult days are faced with courage and the valleys swell...

Imagism was a brief, complex yet influential poetic movement of the early 1900s, a time of reaction against late nineteenth-century poetry which Ezra Pound, one of the key imagist poets,...

Series edited by celebrated psychoanalyst Adam Philips Building on the crucial insight that jokes use many of the same mechanisms he had already discovered in dreams, Freud developed one of...

Bataille's first novel, published under the pseudonym 'Lord Auch', is still his most notorious work. In this explicit pornographic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle...

When Lolita was first published in 1955 it created a sensation and established Nabokov as one of the most original prose writers of the twentieth century. This annotated edition, a...

The Mahabharata is some 3,500 years old and is the longest poem in any language. It is one of the founding epics of Indian culture and, with its mixture of...

'A modernist ... playing with meaning, creating a new language for the idea of self' - Independent The tormenting of the body by the troubled mind, hysteria is among the...

Chosen by Ginsberg himself from nearly fifty years of experimental, groundbreaking verse, this selection, in his words, 'summarizes what I deem most honest, most penetrant of my writing', and includes...

At the centre of Music for Chameleons is Handcarved Coffins, a 'nonfiction novel' based on the brutal crimes of a real-life murderer.Taking place in a small Midwestern town in America,...

Auden, Day, Lewis, Spender, MacNeice and the other key poets of the Thirties were children of the First World War, obsessed by war and by communalism, by the class-struggle and...

These pieces show the range of Waugh's skills: Mr Loveday's Little Outing; Cruise; Period Piece; On Guard; An Englishman's Home; Excursion in Reality; Bella Fleace Gave a Party; Winner Takes...

With a new introduction and editorial apparatus by eminent military historian Hew Strachan In what is one of the finest autobiographies to come out of the First World War, the...

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...

'One of the most remarkable artists of our age.' MARIO VARGAS LLOSA Borges' first collection of stories (1935). In his writing, Borges always combined high seriousness with a wicked sense...

A charming story of a young farmer's life in rural Ireland, from the author of The Green Fool and The Great Hunger He did not ask things to have a...

One of fifteen new translations of Freud's key writings. This project, under the general editorship of celebrated psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, reimagines one the modern era's greatest writers. Freud's religious unbeliefs...

This wonderful translation of Dream Story will allow a fresh generation of readers to enjoy this beautiful, heartless and baffling novella. Dream Story tells how through a simple sexual admission...

Bowles's sensational second novel of dissent, decadence and oblivion Let It Come Down, with its title from Macbeth, tells the story of Dyar, a New York bank clerk who throws...

This epoch-making book cuts through confused thinking and forces us to re-examine many cherished ideas about knowledge, imagination, consciousness and the intellect. The result is a classic example of philosophy.

This collection of pithy, brilliantly acerbic pieces is a companion to Sixty Stories, Barthelme's earlier retrospective volume. Barthelme spotlights the idiosyncratic, haughty, sometimes downright ludicrous behavior of human beings, but...

This excellent collection of Donald Barthelme's literary output during the 1960s and 1970s covers the period when the writer came to prominence--producing the stories, satires, parodies, and other formal experiments...

John L. Allen, one of the most trusted reporters at the Vatican, brings together the first biography of the new pope, taking an in-depth look at his background and opinions....

This superbly authoritative new work provides a comprehensive A to Z guide to every aspect of some 1000 years of Western music.

Both works have had a powerful influence on later Western literature, inspiring poets from Ben Jonson and Alexander Pope to W. H. Auden and Robert Frost. The Satires of Horace...

This selection comprises: "THE ADMIRABLE BASHVILLE" "HOW HE LIED TO HER HUSBAND" "PASSION, POISON AND PETRIFACTION" "THE GLIMPSE OF REALITY" "THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS" "OVERRULED" "THE MUSIC-CURE" "GREAT...

Recorded in sacred Sanskrit texts, including the Rig Veda and the Mahabharata, Hindu Myths are thought to date back as far as the tenth century BCE. Here in these seventy-five...

An essential text in Confucian thought Mencius was one of the great philosophers of ancient China, second only in influence to Confucius, whose teachings he defended and expanded. The Mencius,...

A unique collection of stories that spans the centuries and ranges across the entire continent, from Ancient Egypt and Ethiopia through the Sahara to Zimbabwe Gathering a wide range of...

Includes new map,chronology, bibliography, note on 16th and 17th Spanish currency. The unlikely heroes of the Spanish picaresque novels make their way - by whatever means they can - through...

An essential introduction to one of the most inventive and provocative poets A phenomenonally precicious schoolboy, Rimbaud was still a teenager when he became notorious as Europe's most shocking and...

The Saga of the Greenlanders and Eirik the Red's Saga contain the first ever descriptions of North America, a bountiful land of grapes and vines, discovered by Vikings five centuries...

The lais are a unique form depicting a moment of crisis in a love relationship Marie de France (fl. late twelfth century) is the earliest known French woman poet and...

An excellent companion to our edition of H lderlin's Selected Poems and Fragments, this collection of prose and letters introduces the reader to the man behind the art One of...

The Story of the Stone (c. 1760), also known by the title of The Dream of the Red Chamber, is the great novel of manners in Chinese literature. Divided into...

An epic story of lust, cruelty, and sensuality, this historical novel is set in Carthage in the days following the First Punic War with Rome.

Turgenev is an author who no longer belongs to Russia only. During the last fifteen years of his life he won for himself the reading public, first in France, then...

Three of Racine's powerful and groundbreaking tragedies. Strongly influenced by Classical drama, Jean Racine (1639-99) broke away from the grandiose theatricality of baroque drama to create works of intense psychological...

Three powerful plays on revenge, fate and justice, Agamemnon, The Choephori and The Eumenides Aeschylus (525-c.456 bc) set his great trilogy in the immediate aftermath of the Fall of Troy,...