Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2889

Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2889

The Penguin Classics run here is exceptional — Sophocles, Rabelais, Boccaccio, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche alongside Gissing, Waugh, two Laurie Lees, and Muriel Spark. Twenty-four volumes for the reader who keeps a list.

1. New Grub Street — George Gissing (Penguin English Library) — Gissing's savage portrait of the Victorian literary marketplace, as clear-eyed about failure and ambition as any novel written.
2. The Song of Roland — trans. Dorothy L. Sayers (Penguin Classics) — the great medieval French epic in Sayers's acclaimed verse translation.
3. A Breath of French Air — H.E. Bates (Penguin) — the irresistible Larkin family invade France in a second comic adventure.
4. The Theban Plays — Sophocles (Penguin Classics, trans. E.F. Watling) — King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone: the three plays on which Western drama rests.
5. Gargantua and Pantagruel — Rabelais (Penguin Classics, trans. J.H. Cohen) — the great comic epic, earthy, encyclopedic, and inexhaustible.
6. The Loved One — Evelyn Waugh (Penguin Modern Classics) — Waugh's devastating satire on the California funeral industry and the Americanisation of death.
7. Washington Square — Henry James (Penguin Classics) — James's lean, precise study of an heiress, a charming suitor, and a father who sees through everything.
8. The Decameron — Boccaccio (Penguin Classics) — one hundred tales told by ten young Florentines sheltering from the plague: funny, bawdy, and timeless.
9. Adolphe — Benjamin Constant (Penguin Classics) — the classic French novel of emotional paralysis, romantic cruelty, and the inability to leave.
10. Some People — Harold Nicolson (Vintage) — Nicolson's elegant, semi-fictional portraits of the eccentric figures encountered in his diplomatic life.
11. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning — Laurie Lee (Penguin) — Lee's lyrical account of walking across pre-Civil War Spain with a violin.
12. A Rose for Winter — Laurie Lee (Penguin) — Lee's return to Andalusia fifteen years later, equally beautiful and more elegiac.
13. The New Machiavelli — H.G. Wells — Wells's political novel of a rising Liberal politician torn between public ambition and private desire.
14. Essays — Montaigne (Penguin Classics) — a generous selection from the great French essayist, as companionable as any writer who ever lived.
15. Fruits of the Earth — André Gide (Penguin Modern Classics) — Gide's lyrical hymn to liberation and the full life of the senses.
16. The Ballad of Peckham Rye — Muriel Spark (Penguin) — Spark at her most wicked, with a supernatural stranger loose in south London's offices and bedsits.
17. The Dream of a Queer Fellow & The Pushkin Speech — Dostoevsky (Unwin Books) — two essential Dostoevsky texts: a visionary short story and his great speech on the Russian soul.
18. Beyond Good and Evil — Nietzsche (Penguin Classics) — Nietzsche's assault on conventional morality, demanding and still provocative.
19. Sister Carrie — Theodore Dreiser (Penguin American Library, unexpurgated, intro. Alfred Kazin) — the unexpurgated text of Dreiser's scandalous debut, a landmark of American realism.
20. Edwin Drood and Master Humphrey's Clock — Charles Dickens (Everyman's Library) — Dickens's unfinished mystery novel alongside the earlier shorter sketches.
21. Parents and Children — Ivy Compton-Burnett (Penguin Modern Classics) — Compton-Burnett's razor-sharp domestic comedy of power, cruelty, and the impossibility of family life.
22. Headlong Hall and Gryll Grange — Thomas Love Peacock (World's Classics) — two sparkling satirical novels of ideas, conversation, and absurdity.
23. Richard II — William Shakespeare (Signet Classic) — the tragedy of a king who loves words more than power.
24. Henry V — William Shakespeare (Signet Classic) — the warrior king and the battle of Agincourt, with the ambiguity that underlies the triumph.