Penguin Black Spine

First Penguin volume Of best Japanese haiku Vivid translations Now a global poetry, the haiku was originally a Japanese verse form that flourished from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Although...

A revised edition of Robert Graves' classic translation (9780140449211), with completely fresh editorial material As private secretary to the Emperor Hadrian, the scholar Suetonius had access to the imperial archives...

Penguin Classics relaunch The son of a pagan father and a Christian mother, Saint Augustine spent his early years torn between conflicting faiths and world views. His Confessions, written when...

A new selection of stories featuring the celebrated literary detective, Inspector Maigret An ageing boxer caught in a love triangle. A wealthy Parisian family on the brink of collapse. A...

A masterful tale of murder and intrigue in a small French town, from the celebrated author of the Maigret series Nobody mentioned the victims, or the terror that had gripped...

Penguin Classics relaunch. In the summer of 1348, as the Black Death ravages their city, ten young Florentines take refuge in the countryside. They amuse themselves by each telling a...

Penguin Classics relaunch Nietzsche was one of the most revolutionary and subversive thinkers in Western philosophy, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra remains his most famous and influential work. It describes how...

The first great German novel - an extraordinary recreation of the horrors of the Thirty Years War, written by a veteran of the conflict First published in 1668, Simplicissimus tells...

Penguin Classics relaunch. The trial and condemnation of Socrates on charges of heresy and corrupting young minds is a defining moment in the history of Classical Athens. In tracing these...

The foundational anthology of the Orthodox Church The Philokalia is the most influential book in the recent history of the Orthodox Church, aside from the Bible. It is an anthology...

A new translation and abridgement of one of the four classical Chinese novels, this is the epic story of the fall of the Han dynasty and rise of the Three...

This edition contains a revision of the existing translation, revision of chronology and genealogy, and a new introduction of 4-6000 words, new notes and a new selection of further reading...

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...

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...

Penguin Classics Relaunch In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer created one of the great touchstones of English literature, a masterly collection of chivalric romances, moral allegories and low farce. A story-telling...

Dreamlike Welsh tales from the thirteenth century Drawing on myth, folklore and history, the stories of the Mabinogion passed from generations of storytellers before they were written down in the...

Penguin Classics relaunch The Greek statesman Polybius (c.200-118 BC) wrote his account of the relentless growth of the Roman Empire in order to help his fellow countrymen understand how their...

Sue Bridehead, his last heroine, is an extaordinarily complex woman - an English Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. Jude Fawley, the stonemason excluded not by his wits but by poverty...

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...

Woolf's most autobiographical novel, now in Penguin Black Classics To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood...

The greatest classic of Vietnamese literature in a stunning new verse translation. "This manuscript is ancient, priceless, bamboo-rolled, perfumed with musty spices. Sit comfortably by this good light, that you...

The volume that completes our new 4-book collection of Euripides plays. Through their sheer range, daring innovation, flawed but eloquent characters and intriguing plots, the plays of Euripides have shocked...

The "forgotten" second volume of Capital, Marx's world-shaking analysis of economics, politics, and history, contains the vital discussion of commodity, the cornerstone to Marx's theories. The \"forgotten\" second volume of...

Unfinished at the time of Marx's death in 1883 and first published with a preface by Frederick Engels in 1894, the third volume of Das Kapital strove to combine the...

Tacitus' Annals of Imperial Rome recount the major historical events from the years shortly before the death of Augustus up to the death of Nero in AD 68. With clarity...

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 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...

New to Penguin Classics, these two Japanese texts are timeless reflections on Buddhism, nature and the value of being idle These two works on life's fleeting pleasures are by Buddhist...

No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class...

The complete collection of the poetry of Walt Whitman, one of the most influential American voices In 1855 Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass, the work which defined him as...

A collection of some of Dostoyevsky's finest short stories With their penetrating psychological insight and their emphasis on human dignity, respect and forgiveness, Dostoyevsky's early short stories contain the seeds...

Dante's descent into the Underworld to find his lost love. Guided by the poet Virgil, Dante plunges to the very depths of Hell and embarks on his arduous journey towards...

A fascinating account of the time of the Vikings and the feuds of the Orkney Isles Written around AD 1200 by an unnamed Icelandic author, the Orkneyinga Saga is an...

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...

'Gogol was a strange creature, but then genius is always strange' Vladimir Nabokov Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in the provincial town of 'N', visiting a succession of landowners and...

Penguin Classics Relaunch. Wrongly accused of theft and exiled from a religious community many years before, the embittered weaver Silas Marner lives alone in Raveloe, living only for work and...

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...

A collection of Kafka's greatest stories, including his famous tale of alienation, now in Penguin Black Classics This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works...

With new introduction by Cynthia Wall, chronology further reading, glossary, and explanatory notes. In 1665 the plague swept through London, claiming over 97,000 lives. Daniel Defoe was just five at...

A comic masterpiece that has never been out of print since it was first published in 1889, Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat includes an introduction and notes...

The first-person chronicle of a lengendary journalist at the flashpoint of the Russian Revolution Ten Days That Shook the World is John Reed's eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution. A...

Offers unexpurgated translation of the best-known tales including such classics as 'Sindbad the Sailor' The tales told by Shahrazad over a thousand and one nights to delay her execution by...

The definitive edition of Anne Frank's diary, now in Penguin Black Classics. 'June, 1942- I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been...

Penguin Classics relaunch The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter...

Andrei Bely's masterpiece; a vivid, memorable and striking story set at the heart of the 1905 Russian revolution Andrei Bely's Petersburg is a colourful evocation of Russia's capital during the...

A new selection and translation of the best of de Maupassant's short stories Set in the Paris of society women, prostitutes and small-minded bourgeousie, and the isolated villages of rural...

A landmark, searing critique of pornography that condemns how culture consumes and manipulates images of women and eroticises male dominance 'Pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women's bodies and souls...

One of the most beloved translations of all time returns to Penguin Classics- Scott Moncrieff's masterful version of Proust Proust's masterpiece is one of the seminal works of the twentieth...