Penguin Black Spine

Penguin Classics relaunch The award-winning new translation of the great Russian novel.Leo Tolstoy (Author) Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 in the Tula province. He studied at the University of...

Penguin Classics relaunch Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to...

Traditionally attributed to Lao Tzu, an older contemporary of Confucius (551 - 479 BC), it is now thought that the work was compiled in about the fourth century BC. An...

Penguin Classics relaunch The epic tale of Odysseus and his ten-year journey home after the Trojan War forms one of the earliest and greatest works of Western literature. Confronted by...

A major anthology of great Japanese short stories, now in Penguin Classics This fantastically varied and exciting collection celebrates the great Japanese short story, from its modern origins in the...

Tim Parks's celebrated new translation of this classic text, now in paperback As a diplomat in turbulent fifteenth-century Florence, Niccol Machiavelli (1469-1527) knew how quickly political fortunes could rise and...

Penguin Classics relaunch Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord....

A guaranteed best-seller - a brilliant new edition of one of Penguin's top-ten classics - more than 35k of the Black Classic edition sold every year. Orphaned Jane Eyre grows...

The most influential political statement of the twentieth century The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels's revolutionary summons to the working classes, is one of the most important and influential...

A newly updated edition of the landmark translation by the esteemed Biblical scholar The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Judaean desert between 1947 and 1956 transformed our...

"I think this version is terrific. The light enjambed English hexameters are a great success. The effect is properly propulsive." - Prof A D Nuttall, Oxford Ovid's deliciously witty and...

George Eliot's most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search...

The definitive version of Jane Austen's timeless novel of love's triumph over adversity When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is...

Eusebius is regarded as *the* historian of Christian antiquity Eusebius's account is the only surviving historical record of the Church during its crucial first 300 years. Bishop Eusebius, a learned...

These writings capture the beginnings of the Christian Church The writings in this volume cast a glimmer of light upon the emerging traditions and organization of the infant church, during...

A rich new selection of Buddhist writings, representing the full range of historical periods, geographical origins and literary styles. While Buddhism has no central text such as the Bible or...

A new translation by Richard Pevear Young D'Artagnan arrives in Paris to join the King's elite guards, but almost immediately finds he is duelling with some of the very men...

'I am only just returned to a sense of real wonder about me, for I have been reading Villette - There is something preternatural about its power' George Eliot With...

A fascinating collection of medieval Arabic travel writing, translated into English by Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone In 922 AD, an Arab envoy from Baghdad named Ibn Fadlan encountered a...

New to Classics, a wide-ranging survey of the Jewish mystical tradition 'The Torah is both hidden and revealed . there is a secret meaning to the holy Torah that is...

Either/Or is a brilliant exploration of the conflicts inherent in life between living aesthetically, and living morally In Either/Or, using the voices of two characters - the aesthetic young man...

Beyond Good and Evil confirmed Nietzsche's position as the towering European philosopher of his age. The work dramatically rejects the tradition of Western thought with its notions of truth and...

Woolf's innovative modernist novel, in a new Black Classics edition Tracing the lives of a group of friends, this novel follows their development from childhood to middle age. While social...

A terrifying vision of scientific progress without moral limits, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein leads the reader on an unsettling journey from the sublime beauty of the Swiss alps to the desolate...

New translation of one of the central texts of Sanskrit The Bhagavad Gita is an early epic poem that recounts the conversation between Arjuna the warrior and his charioteer Krishna,...

Penguin Classics relaunch. Writing at the time of Napoleon's greatest campaigns, Prussian soldier and writer Carl von Clausewitz created this landmark treatise on the art of warfare, which presented war...

Penguin Classics relaunch. That proud, impassioned soul, so ungovernable now that she has felt the sting of injustice' 'Medea', in which a spurned woman takes revenge upon her lover by...

An enlightening collection of works by the most eloquent advocate of Stoicism It is philosophy that has the duty of protecting us ... without it no one can lead a...

New translation by Roger Pearson of the novel considered to be Zola's masterpiece Considered by Andre Gide to be one of the ten greatest novels in the French language, Germinal...

A selection of Lafcadio Hearn's brilliantly entertaining and eerie ghost stories, regarded as major classics in Japan In this collection of classic ghost stories from Japan, beautiful princesses turn out...

The companion book to Beyond Good and Evil, the three essays included here offer vital insights into Nietzsche's theories of morality and human psychology Nietzsche claimed that the purpose of...

One of the most influential - and best loved - spiritual autobiographies Born in the Castilian town of vila in 1515, Teresa entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation when...

The definitive translation of the world's oldest known epic, now revised in a second edition (2020) and updated with newly discovered material. The definitive translation of the world's oldest known...

A simple peasant seeks spiritual fulfilment in this apparently artless tale of popular piety 'Here, see my belongings- a bag of dry crusts on my back and the Holy Bible...

Two terrifying modern classics by cult horror favorite Thomas Ligotti, in time for their 30th and 25th anniversaries Two terrifying classics by "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction"...

A unique new selection, bringing together Akutagawa's undisputed masterpieces and several less well known tales, never before translated into English. Ry nosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) is one of Japan's foremost stylists...

A superb translation by Michael Hofmann of some of Kafka's most frightening, strange and visionary short fiction After Franz Kafka's death, in perhaps the most important of all acts of...

Penguin Classics relaunch Independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence...

The first collection of its kind- a compendium of source texts on yoga, translated, introduced and edited by two of the foremost yoga scholars in the world Despite the immense...

A prodigiously brilliant thinker who sharply challenged the beliefs of his age, the political and social radical John Stuart Mill was the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century....

An enthralling exploration of the human experience, from the author of To The Lighthouse On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party and remembering her...

A new edition of the book that has been more widely read than any book in English except the Bible Bunyan wrote the first part of The Pilgrim's Progress when...

Unique to this edition is a translation of Tocqueville's other American writings-Two Weeks in the Wilderness and The Excursion to Lake Oneida. In 1831 Tocqueville set out from post-revolutionary France...

The Gothic novel, which flourished from about 1765 until 1825, revels in the horrible and the supernatural, in suspense and exotic settings. This volume, with its erudite introduction by Mario...

Bawdy and moving, hilarious and reflective - these stories offer the very best of Boccaccio's Decameron in a brilliant, playful new translation This hugely enjoyable volume collects the best stories...

The complete collection of Blake's symbolic and revolutionary poems, from the deceptive simplicity of Songs of Innocence, to the grandeur of Jerusalem One of the great English Romantic poets, William...

Penguin Classics relaunch Few figures in intellectual history have proved as notorious and ambiguous as Niccol Machiavelli. But while his treatise The Prince made his name synonymous with autocratic ruthlessness...

Penguin Classics relaunch Cook led three famous expeditions to the Pacific Ocean between 1768 and 1779. In voyages that ranged from the Antarctic circle to the Arctic Sea, Cook charted...