Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire is the tale of a catastrophic confrontation between fantasy and reality, embodied in the characters of Blanche DuBois and S
A daring work of experimental, Modernist genius, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is one of the greatest literary achievements of the twentieth century, and the crowning glory of Joyce's life. The Pengui
'Fresh, timeless ... a lively work of art' Observer
'Buchi Emecheta was the foremother of black British women's writing . . . powerful fictions written from and about our lives' Bernardine Evarist
The most beautiful and powerful of Milosz's poems from across his writing life
This selection brings together the most beautiful and powerful of Czeslaw Milosz's poems, spanning his writing life.
It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life'
Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will alway
The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a deadly plague, which condemns its victims to a swift and horrifying death. Fear, isolation and claustrophobia follow as they are forced into quarantine. E
Originally written in 1952 but not published till 1985, Queer is an enigma - both an unflinching autobiographical self-portrait and a coruscatingly political novel, Burroughs' only realist love story
After The Second World War, Czeslaw Milosz was exiled for many years from his home country of Poland. In Native Realm, he evokes that homeland and his years away from it; how it nurtured him and how
In 1929 Robert Graves went to live abroad permanently, vowing 'never to make England my home again'. This is his superb account of his life up until that 'bitter leave-taking': from his childhood and
The bestselling American classic of youthful rebellion and coming of age on the streets, adapted into an award-winning film by Francis Ford Coppola
The Greasers and the rich-kid Socs are at war on
Lolly Willowes, so gentle and accommodating, has depths no one suspects. When she suddenly announces that she is leaving London and moving, alone, to the depths of the countryside, her overbearing re
In Kingsley Amis's Take A Girl Like You, twenty year old Jenny Bunn is supernally beautiful and stubbornly chaste, which is why Patrick Standish, an arrogant schoolmaster, wants her so much. This per
Baldwin's ground-breaking second novel, which established him as one of the great American writers of his time
David, a young American in 1950s Paris, is waiting for his fiancée to return from vac
Published in 1972, Enemies, A Love Story is an astonishing novel that blends humour and pathos to create a rich, humane portrayal of a man who cannot escape his past.
Herman Broder, a refugee and
It is Warsaw in the 1930s. Aaron Greidinger is an aspiring young writer and the son of a rabbi, who struggles to be true to his art when he is faced with the chance of riches and a passport to Americ
The difference between life and literature; the good intentions of holiday reading; the avante-garde; the fate of the novel; the fantastical; the art of translation: these are just some of the ideas
Harry Goldfarb, heroin addict and son of lonely widow Sara, cares only about enjoying the good life with girlfriend Marion and best friend Tyrone C Love, and making the most of all the hash, poppers
The first volume in his Roads to Freedom trilogy, Jean-Paul Sartre's The Age of Reason is a philosophical novel exploring existentialist notions of freedom, translated by Eric Sutton with an introduc
A historical romance, Sontag's book is based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his wife, Emma, and Lord Nelson in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Passionately examining the shape of
Lady Sings the Blues is the inimitable autobiography of one of the greatest icons of the twentieth century. Born to a single mother in 1915 Baltimore, Billie Holiday had her first run-in with the law
Evelyn Waugh's hilarious debut novel, with an introduction by Barbara Cooke
Sent down from Oxford in outrageous circumstances, Paul Pennyfeather is oddly unsurprised to find himself qualifying for
Each phase of his wandering life is included, from a precocious essay written while still at Cambridge in 1921, through his fame in the aftermath of the publication of Lolita to the final, fascinatin
Drifters in search of work, George and his simple-minded friend Lennie, have nothing in the world except each other - and a dream. A dream that one day they will have some land of their own. Eventual
'But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction - what has that got to do with a room of one's own?'
A Room of One's Own grew out of a lecture that Virginia Woolf had been invited
'How could such a book speak so powerfully to our present moment? The short answer is that we, too, live in dark times' Washington Post
Hannah Arendt's chilling analysis of the conditions that led
'This century's most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism' Angela Davis
'Fanon is our contemporary ... In clear language, in words that can only have been written in the cool heat of rage
The best-known of Shirley Jackson's novels and a major inspiration for writers like Neil Gaiman and Stephen King as well as the hit Netflix series, The Haunting of Hill House is a chilling story of t
To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family, the Ramseys, whose annual summer holiday in Scotland falls under the shadow of war, and a meditation on marriage, on parent
'A masterwork... an almost unbearable, tumultuous, blood-pounding experience' Washinton Post
When Another Country appeared in 1962, it caused a literary sensation. James Baldwin's masterly story o
'This century's most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism' Angela Davis
Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from French colonial rule and first published in 1961, F