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New to Modern Classics The play is a parable inspired by the Chinese play Chalk Circle. Written at the close of World War II, the story is set in the...

This vivid and touching picture of family life int eh East End of the 1950s is one of the great pioneering works of modern sociology Although housing in Bethnal Green...

New to PMC An intoxicating yet sensitive novel about the sexual experiences of ten couples from Tarbox, New England. Well-to-do, sociable, articulate but dangerously unfulfilled; they play word games in...

New to PMC The air of Eastwick breeds witches - women whose powerful longings can stir up thunderstorms and fracture domestic peace. Jane, Alexandra and Sukie, divorced and dangerous, have...

First time in PMC Tristao Raposo, a nineteen-year old black child of the Rio slums, spies Isabel Leme, an eighteen-year-old upper-class white girl, across the hot sands of Copacabana Neach,...

First time in Modern Classics and for Penguin to publish one of the great American writers of the last 50 years. Captain Cleve Connell arrives in Korea with a single...

First time in Modern Classics Henry Bech, the celebrated author of Travel Light, has been scrutinized, canonized and vilified by critics and readers across the world. Here, the experiences of...

New to Modern Classics It's 1979 and Rabbit is no longer running. He's walking, and beginning to get out of breath. That's OK, though - it gives him the chance...

New to Penguin Modern Classics, to be published alongside THE WOMAN IN THE DUNES The narrator is a scientist hideously deformed in a laboratory accident - a man who has...

First time in Penguin Modern Classics In the summer of 1936, Agee and Evans set out on assignement for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the...

'A work of art' - The New York Times At the Diamond County Home for the Aged, the inmates prepare for the annual ritual of the Poorhouse Fair, a summer...

New to Classics WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALI SMITH Young Chris Guthrie lives a brutal life in the harsh landscape of northern Scotland, torn between her passion for the land,...

New translation by the poet Jamie McKendrick This is a haunting, elegiac novel which captures the mood and atmosphere of Italy (and in particular Ferrara) in the last summers of...

New to Modern Classics alongside Spark's The Drivers' Seat (ISBN: 0141188340) A man of devilish charm and enterprising spirit, Dougal Douglas is employed to revitalize the ailing firm of Meadows,...

Slick, upbeat and funny, these stories inspired the popular musical and film Guys and Dolls. 'Of all the high players this country ever sees, there is no doubt but that...

First time in Modern Classics for Penelope Lively's evocative memoir of her childhood in Egypt. This autobiography is about growing up in Egypt. It is also an investigation into childhood...

First time in Modern Classics In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to...

First time in Modern Classics Welcome to America at the turn of the twentieth century, where the rhythms of ragtime set the beat. Harry Houdini astonishes audiences with magical feats...

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...

Written in Paris in the early 1950s, this book created instant controversy in its analysis of modern society that had allowed itself to be hypnotized by socio-political doctrines, and to...

Is it possible to die a happy death?This is the central question of Camus's astonishing early novel, published posthumously and greeted as a major literary event. It tells the story...

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...

Truman Capote's unfinished final novel is an unsparing tell-all of New York high society that sent a seismic shock through the public and Capote's own social circle Catapulted from a...

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,...

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,...

Finding the theatre of the 1920s lacking in bite and conviction, Thornton Wilder set out to bring back realism and to celebrate the innocent, simple and religious. Yet he also...

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...