'Mind you, it was a pukka, respectable opium-house, and not one of those stifling, sweltering chandoo-khanas that you can find all over the City.'Kipling first became famous for his pungent, harsh ...
A phantom child roams the Northumberland moors, while a host of fairytale characters gone to seed gather in the dark, dark woods in these two surprising tales of the uncanny from the great Victoria...
'Oh, good God,' he kept saying with great relish. 'Good God...''Gooseberries' is accompanied here by 'The Kiss' and 'The Two Volodyas' - three exquisite depictions of love and loss in nineteenth-ce...
In this selection from Marco Polo's famous travel book, the intrepid Venetian describes the customs of India, recounts the story of the king who died eighty-four times and explains how to retrieve ...
'Politics and the English Language' is widely considered Orwell's most important essay on style. Style, for Orwell, was never simply a question of aesthetics; it was always inextricably linked to p...
'One swallow does not make a summer; neither does one day. Similarly neither can one day, or a brief space of time, make a man blessed and happy'What does it mean to be a good person? R...
Cnut, or Canute, was King of England for nearly 20 years, dying in Dorset in 1035. A formidable figure, Cnut is one of the great 'what ifs' in English history. The culmination of a long period of V...
The American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. His last poem, Pale Fire, is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on ca...
'The alphabet ofthe treesis fading in thesong of the leaves'Filled with bright, unforgettable images, the deceptively simple work of William Carlos Williams revo...
From the father of American literature, four sparkling comic tales of extraordinary animals and parables subverted.One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, t...
A haunting novella of fame and disillusionment by a Japanese literary iconAll eyes are upon Rikio. And he likes it, mostly. His fans cheer from a roped-off section, screaming and yellin...
A disgusting account of a school of giant squid attacking a seaside resort, and two other examples of Wells' extraordinary imagination at work - 'The Magic Shop' and 'The Land Ironclads'
The disturbing tale of a young man's obsession with the Sandman, stealer of eyes, which has inspired writers from Sigmund Freud to Neil Gaiman.One of 46 new books in the bestselling Lit...
'We are bought and sold like apes or monkeys, to be the sport of women, fools, and cowards, and the support of rogues . . .'Spy, traveller and pioneering female writer Aphra Benn's stor...
Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the most revolutionary thinkers in Western philosophy. Here he sets out his subversive views in a series of aphorisms on subjects ranging from art to arrogance, bored...
This dreamlike meditation on being young and alone in Paris is a feverish work of nerves, angst and sublime beauty from one of the twentieth century's greatest poets.
Drunkard, malingerer, oaf and possible genius - the story of Czech soldier Svejk and his misadventures in the First World War is one of the most hilarious and subversive satires on war ever written.
A carefree Russian official has what seems to be a trivial accident...One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in...
James Patterson’s BookShots. Short, fast-paced, high-impact entertainment.Will you marry me for $10,000,000?I am a creative, open-minded businessman with limited time ...
Offering an entertaining introduction to the fin-de-siecle, this selection from the notorious magazine The Yellow Book includes stories and poems by famous writers such as Arnold Bennett and John B...