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The Umbrella
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'Then she would feel exposed and cry, as if her life and happiness were ruined for all time, even though she...
The House of Hunger
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'The disenchanted, the disadvantaged and the disinherited seem, at times of deep crisis, to summon up some sort of genius that...
Requiem: A Hallucination
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'My dear friend, he said, life is strange and strange things happen in life' It is a hot July Sunday in...
Secretary
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books A writer engulfed by a new obsession, an occasional sex-worker, a runaway, a teenager entering the workplace- these four tales of...
The Country of the Pointed Firs
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books A young writer leaves the city to complete her manuscript in a small coastal town, but finds herself writing about the...
Night Owls
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'I decided that my trip had evidently been in vain, since nothing of interest could possibly occur on this visit. I...
Sunflower Sutra
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys'...
The Seducer's Diary
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'What does love fear? Limitation.' Johannes stealthily pursues Cordelia through the streets of Copenhagen, and through an intricate, manipulative courtship contrives...
Stan the Killer
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'Maigret moved slowly, edging his bulky frame through the throng in Rue Saint-Antoine, which burst into life every morning, the sunshine...
Closely Watched Trains
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Closely Watched Trains tells the story of Milos Hrma, a young railroad apprentice coming of age in wartime Czechoslovakia. Milos is...
The Daemon Lover
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books It's terribly important that I get in touch with a gentleman who may have stopped in here to buy flowers this...
The Broken Nest
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Rabindranath Tagore was one of the greatest authors of his generation. In these two short stories - 'The Broken Nest' and...
The Lady Bandit
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Priests with shotguns, scheming lovers and a necrophiliac gravedigger haunt the fables of Emilia Pardo Bazan, the formidable Spanish aristocrat, intellectual...
All God's Chillun Got Pride
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Best known for his hardboiled Harlem Detective series, Chester Himes was also a superb literary writer, beginning his creative life by...
Thousand Cranes
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Kikuji has been invited to a tea ceremony by a mistress of his dead father, only to find that the mistress'...
A Lady in Kyoto
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books All moonlight is moving, wherever it may be... Japanese gentlewoman Sei Shonagon invites us to look behind the painted screens in...
Strange News from Another Planet
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Of course, very few people go through the gate and abandon the beautiful phenomenon of the outside world for the interior...
A Lost Lady
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books How light and alive she was! Like a bird caught in a net . . . Marian Forrester enchants everyone around...
A Moment of War
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books In one of the great English war memoirs, we learn what it is to cross the Pyrenees through freezing snow to...
The Driver's Seat
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Muriel Spark claimed The Driver's Seat to be her best and creepiest novel. Once you have met her heroine Lise -...
Reflections in a Golden Eye
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books On a military base in 1930s Georgia, Private Ellgee Williams catches sight of his captain's wife in the nude and becomes...
A Short Guide to Towns Without a Past
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Best known for his existentialist novel The Outsider, set in French-occupied Algeria, Albert Camus was profoundly influenced by the landscapes, towns...
Horsie
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books What can you say, when a man asks you to dance with him? I most certainly will not dance with you....
The Maverick Pig
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Razor-sharp, pugnacious and blackly funny, Wang Xiaobo's essays established him as one of China's most popular - and subversive - writers....
The History of England by a Partial, Prejudiced and Ignorant Historian
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books During his reign, Lord Cobham was burnt alive, but I forget what for. In Jane Austen's breezy and entirely biased telling...
After Midnight
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Arrested in Cologne for remarking that the Fuhrer looked sweaty, nineteen-year-old Sanna has fled to Frankfurt. But her troubles are far...
Unpacking My Library
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'Every sort of passion verges on chaos, I know, but what the collecting passion verges on is a chaos of memories.'...
I am a Bird from Paradise
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books May I remember always when, Your glance in secrecy met mine, And in my face your love was like A visibly...
October Nights
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books In October Nights, Gerard de Nerval takes us on a gentle meander through nighttime Paris - a dreamlike journey towards getting...
The Price of Freedom
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Saadat Hasan Manto, the most widely read and translated writer in the Urdu language, captured the devastation and absurdity of the...
Night Flight
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Fabien tonight was wandering over the vast splendour of a sea of clouds, but below him lay eternity. Inspired by his...
Revenge
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'And this is fantasy, the flutter, the rapture of fantasy!' A bashful dragon, a lost wood-sprite, the prophet Elijah and the...
The Genius
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Known as Ireland's Chekhov, Frank O'Connor was a master of the modern short story, with an eye for capturing the spaces...
Sailing to Byzantium
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'Under bare Ben Bulben's head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid. An ancestor was rector there Long years ago, a church...
Odour of Chrysanthemums
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books This small group of stories by D. H. Lawrence show him in a number of moods. The hope is that in...
The Dreaming Child
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'As for me I have one ambition only- to invent stories, very beautiful stories' Gothic, expansive and truly spellbinding, Karen Blixen's...
Can Socialists be Happy?
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books No thinking person can or does genuinely keep out of politics, in an age like the present one Unfailingly wise and...
Why I am a Stoic
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Plagued by ill-health, violently sick at sea, irritated by renovation costs- Seneca is never less than sympathetically human. In these letters...
Some Japanese Ghosts
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'The body was cold as ice; the heart had long ceased to beat- yet there were no other signs of death.'...
The Story of an Hour
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it...
The Emperor's New Clothes
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Many years ago there lived an Emperor who was so terribly fond of beautiful new clothes that he spent all his...
Cicada!
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Now you slip away in sleep. Your boat is sea-mist, dreaming, by the shore. Spain's most beloved poet, Federico Garcia Lorca...
Paris France
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books \"All Frenchmen know you have to become civilised between eighteen and twenty-three and that civilisation comes upon you by contact with...
A Confirmed Bachelor
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Following the death of his sister, middle-aged Dr Graesler leaves his winter home in Lanzarote for a health resort in Germany,...
Lois the Witch
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Beware the self-righteous man of faith, the wicked-eyed child, the jealous lover. For this is Salem, in 1691, where rumours fly...
The Chimes
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Trotty Veck, an elderly porter, has read so many newspaper reports about crime and immorality that he believes the working classes...
A Poet Can Survive Everything But a Misprint
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books \"All art,\" Oscar Wilde once announced, \"is quite useless.\" Selected here are some of his finest prose works on the subject...
The Time Machine
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books The Time Machine is the great, gleeful anarchist novel of the 1890s. It is both a thrilling adventure story and a...