Of all the many things humans rely on plants for, surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate, calm, or completely alter the qualities of our mental experience....
'Magisterial ... Immensely readable' Douglas Alexander, Financial Times'Insightful, productively provocative and downright brilliant' New York TimesA compelling history of c...
The young Walter Miller was a product of his time. Growing up Black in the Jim Crow American South, he was in trouble with the police before his fourteenth birthday. And, like so many young Bla...
'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 pio...
'I have lived in important places, timesWhen great events were decided . . .'By turns comical, grouchy and exalted, and including his tragic masterpiece 'The Great Hunger', some o...
'She felt a cozy solidarity with the big company of the voluntary dead.'Wise-cracking and heartbreaking, these tales of women on the edge by the legendary wit Dorothy Parker show the da...
'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, ...
In two I'll slice the hair-seat / of Helga's kiss-gulper'In this epic tale from the Viking Age that ranges across Scandinavia and Viking Britain, two poets compete for the love of Helga...
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and acros...
A selection of Coleridge's poems, including 'This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison' and 'Frost at Midnight'Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black...
But I, while vineyards ring with the cicadas' scream,Retrace your steps, alone, beneath the burning sun.'Virgil's lyrical, wistful and often witty pastoral poems.Intro...
Two moving stories of love, loss, desire and divorce, from one of the great chroniclers of nineteenth-century New York life.Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80t...
'If he only knew what it was, he would fix it; he would kill this mean thing that made Mama feel so bad.'Belonging and estrangement intertwine in these four lyrical short stories from t...
'Life is but a slow, drawn-out process of getting your balls crushed.'Twenty-one year old Wang Er, stationed in a remote mountain commune, spends his days herding oxen, napping and drea...
'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,...
The story of an unsolved literary mystery that explores what James referred to as "troubled artistic consciousness"Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80...
After the death of his wife Emma, a grief-stricken Hardy wrote some of the best verse of his career. Moving and evocative, it ranks among the greatest elegiac poetry in the language.Int...
'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...