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
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
George Smiley, who is a troubled man of infinite compassion, is also a single-mindedly ruthless adversary as a spy.
The scene which he enters is a Cold War landscape of moles and lamplighters, sca
Jacob, a Jewish slave held in a mountain village after escaping a massacre by Cossacks, will be killed if he tries to escape. The one saving grace is his love for his master's daughter, Wanda. They b
Set in the rich farmland of the Salinas Valley, California, this powerful, often brutal novel, follows the interwined destinies of two families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons - whose generations hope
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
'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
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
How I Came to Know Fish (1974) is Ota Pavel's magical memoir of his childhood in Czechoslovakia. Fishing with his father and his Uncle Prosek - the two finest fishermen in the world - he takes a peac
"Why, having stood up for and held their own place in a once absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history? A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown... I want to
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
Shocking and controversial when it was first published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer prize-winning epic remains his undisputed masterpiece. Set against the background of dust bowl Oklahoma and Califo
Raymond Chandler created the fast talking, trouble seeking Californian private eye Philip Marlowe for his first great novel The Big Sleep in 1939. Marlowe's entanglement with the Sternwood family - a
A Jorge Luis Borges for the Space Age - The New York Times
Stanislaw Lem's set of short stories, written over a period of twenty years, all feature the adventures of space traveller Ijon Tichy and
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
'Rhys took one of the works of genius of the 19th Century and turned it inside-out to create one of the works of genius of the 20th Century' Mic
One of fifteen volumes in the new Freud series commissioned for Penguin by series editor Adam Phillips. Part of a plan to generate a new, non-specialist Freud for a wide readership, which goes way b
The exquisite last novel from Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata
Ineko has lost the ability to see things. At first it was a ping-pong ball, then it was her fiancé. The doctors call it '
English crime novelist Charles Latimer is travelling in Istanbul when he makes the acquaintance of Turkish police inspector Colonel Haki. It is from him that he first hears of the mysterious Dimitrio
Ralph Ellison's blistering and impassioned first novel tells the extraordinary story of a man invisible 'simply because people refuse to see me'. Published in 1952 when American society was in the cu
Child of Fortune is deceptively gentle and dreamlike, teetering on the edge of tragedy. It covers a year in the life of a single mother with an eleven-year-old daughter, combining a complex interior
Walter Mitty is an ordinary man living an ordinary life. But he has dreams - vivid, extraordinary day dreams - in which the life he leads is one of excitement and even adventure, in which he - a wear
A remarkable collection of dark, funny and haunting short stories from the inimitable author of 'The Lottery'.
An anxious devil, an elderly writer of poison pen letters and a mid-century Jack the
Eugene Gant, born in 1900 to hard-drinking stone-cutter Oliver and entrepreneurial Eliza, grows up in small-town America. Both lonely outsider and passionate chronicler of American life, Eugene exper
Elie Wiesel's harrowing first-hand account of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust, Night is translated by Marion Wiesel with a preface by Elie Wiesel in Penguin Modern Classics.
Born int
Including a previously-unpublished story 'The Bargain', Truman Capote's The Complete Stories is the first ever complete collection stories from one of the masters of American literature, and the auth
Set in Italy in the summer of 1940, this trio of stories explores the relationships between the different generations caught up in the war as well as Calvino's own experiences as a teenager. In the t
Arthur Miller's play A View from the Bridge is a tragic masterpiece of the inexorable unravelling of a man, set in a close-knit Italian-American community in 1950s New York.
Eddie Carbone is a lon
Building on the crucial insight that jokes use many of the same mechanisms he had already discovered in dreams, Freud developed one of the richest and most comprehensive theories of humour that has e
When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, they sent virtually the entire Jewish population to Auschwitz. A Hungarian Jew and a medical doctor, Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was spared from death for a grimmer fat
'Repetition made a great and, as I have since learned, lasting impression on me' W. G. Sebald
Filip Kobal, an Austrian teenager, is on the trail of his missing older brother Gregor, who he never k