'There is in this world a kind of desire like stinging pain'
A Japanese teenager is overcome with longing for his male classmate. He imagines his body punctured with arrows, like the body of St Se
His hand sought the adjacent flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense complexity of love.
These moving stories by one of the great masters of Southern gothic portray love, sorrow and our
'She was bored and fought against her boredom, which only bored her still more.'
Five sparkling, irreverent brief portraits of famous literary figures (including libertines, eccentrics and rogues)
'For once there had been false idols and asses' heads drawn on the walls...'
Sleepers awake in a remote cave and the ancient mystic Simon Magus attempts a miracle, in these two magical, otherworld
'I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided . . .'
By turns comical, grouchy and exalted, and including his tragic masterpiece 'The Great Hunger', some of the key poem
'Back, away from here, drowned people, go. I haven't stolen anyone's place'
A selection of poetry from the author of If this is a Man and The Periodic Table.
Penguin Modern: fifty new books cel
'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'
This landmark missive from one of the greatest activists in history calls for direct, non-violent resistance in the fight against racism, an
'It was what we call in the trade a potato...'
Tales of low-lifes and grifters trying to make ends meet in pre-War Germany.
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of
Pip switches identities, sexes and centuries in this punk, fairytale reimagining of Charles Dickens's original Great Expectations. Both familiar and unfamiliar, our orphaned narrator is transplanted
'So the club rose, the blood came down, and his bitterness and his anguish and his guilt were compounded'
Drawing on Baldwin's own experiences of prejudice in an America violently divided by race,
'The morning became a long, drawn-out afternoon that became depthless night dawning innocently through the house'
Tales of desire and madness from this giant of Brazilian literature.
Penguin Mo
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. H
'To create today is to create dangerously'
Camus argues passionately that the artist has a responsibility to challenge, provoke and speak up for those who cannot in this powerful speech, accompani
'If I think about it, and I have the time and inclination and capacity to do so, we dogs are an odd lot.'
How does a dog see the world? How do any of us? In this playful and enigmatic story of a c
'The sap had dried up; the sap, the incentive, the fever, the desire to do, to act, to act the fool, make love, create'
A middle-aged woman breaks with her handsome young lover; a placid husband i
'She only wished to prove to herself she was once more on a train going somewhere'
A passionate, unfulfilled woman considers her life and her marriage in this moving novella by one of America's fi
'The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs'
Biting and timeless reflections on patriotism, prejudice and power, from the man who wrote abou
'Like rotting stakes in a forest clearing'
The great journalist of conflict in the Third World finds an even stranger and more exotic society in his own home of post-War Poland
Penguin Modern:
'The alphabet of
the trees
is fading in the
song of the leaves'
Filled with bright, unforgettable images, the deceptively simple work of William Carlos Williams revolutionized American verse,
'The illegible signature of teetering disaster'
Three great stories--The Aurelian, Signs and Symbols and Lance--the last both a derisive attack on science-fiction and an attempt to imagine the rea
'But no, she's abstract, is a bird
Of sound in the air of air soaring,
And her soul sings unencumbered
Because the song's what makes her sing.'
Dramatic, lyrical and ranging over four distinct
Sadder than salad.
From apples to artichokes, these glittering, fragmented, painterly portraits of food by the avant-garde pioneer Gertrude Stein are redolent of sex, laughter and the joy of every
' "Another hour gone. But I'm not afraid. There's only one thing I regret: that I've lived for so many years without knowing where human happiness is to be found" '
In these stories, four writers
Untrustworthy, charming Fussy Joe spins stories and breaks hearts in this rollicking story set in the 'sensational city' of 1960s Lagos.
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering
'I knew he was imagining a really lovely girl - all curves, curls, heart and hidden claws'
In stories that span the course of a lifetime - from childhood in the Caribbean to adolescent modelling i
'Everything was dead, everything unreal; the dark mob was made up of stiff lay-figures'
One of America's greatest writers explores mob violence, voyeurism and betrayal in these unforgettable tales
From the self-described 'black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet', these soaring, urgent essays on the power of women, poetry and anger are filled with darkness and light.
Penguin Modern: fifty new
Now Brando looked at people with assurance, and with what can only be called a pitying expression, as though he dwelt in spheres of enlightenment where they, to his regret, did not.
This mesmerizi
'He felt a sudden deep pity for the finger joint that lay there on the dresser, a few drops of blood gathering around the white bone.'
A deliberately severed finger, a junky's Christmas miracle an
'They didn't seem to take much interest in my private parts which to tell the truth were nothing to write home about, I didn't take much interest in them myself.'
From the master of the absurd, th