'How did I so unwittingly transform the joy of living into the great luxury of being alive?'Between 1967 and 1977, Clarice Lispector wrote weekly dispatches from her desk in Rio for the...
While on a year of study in Paris in 1927, Liebling acquired the friendship and tutelage of Yves Mirande, 'one of the last great gastronomes of France', beginning a joyous apprenticeship in the fin...
Shimamura is tired of the bustling city. He takes the train through the snow to the mountains of the west coast of Japan, to meet with a geisha he believes he loves. Beautiful and innocent, Komako ...
An extraordinary story of love and exile, from one of the great masters of the Latin American novel'Having news from you is like opening a window'Santiago is trapped. Taken ...
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 idea...
Garin, a country doctor, is desperately trying to reach the village of Dolgoye, where a mysterious epidemic is transforming the villagers into zombies. He has with him a vaccine which will prevent ...
Nineteen-year-old Sanna just wants to drink her beer in peace, but that's difficult when Hitler has come to town and his motorcade is blocking the streets of Frankfurt. What's more, her best friend...
A couple on an epicurean journey across Mexico are excited by the idea of a particular ingredient, suggested by ancient rituals of human sacrifice. Precariously balanced on his throne, a king is ab...
'The best Norwegian novel ever' Karl Ove KnausgaardMattis doesn't understand much about the world. He doesn't understand why others call him simple. Or why his sister Hege, who has care...
Sylish, shimmering and amoral, Sagan's tale of adolescence and betrayal on the French Riviera was her masterpiece, published when she was just eighteen. However, this frank and explicit novella was...
This surreal fable, set in America's Old West, features a cast of notorious characters: The Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his opponent; The Priest, who goes into gunfights givin...
Few writers have expressed loneliness, the need for human understanding and the search for love with such power and poetic sensibility as the American writer Carson McCullers, and The Ballad of the...
A philosophical exploration of the idea of 'rebellion' by one of the leading existentialist thinkers, Albert Camus' The Rebel looks at artistic and political rebels throughout history, from Epicuru...
Also known as Dulcimer Street, Norman Collins's London Belongs to Me is a Dickensian romp through working-class London on the eve of the Second World War. This Penguin Modern Classics edition inclu...
The play is a parable inspired by the Chinese play Chalk Circle. Written at the close of World War II, the story is set in the Caucasus mountains of Georgia, and retells the tale of King Solomon an...
These three great plays by one of the founding fathers of the theatre of the absurd, are alive and kicking with tragedy and humour, bleakness and farce. In Rhinoceros we are shown the innate brutal...
In a rocky cove in the bay of Hakata, the bodies of a young and beautiful couple are discovered. Standing in the coast's wind and cold, the police see nothing to investigate: the flush of the coupl...
The Forsyte Saga is the first part of John Galsworthy’s magnificent, well-loved Forsyte Chronicles, which trace the changing fortunes of the wealthy Forsyte dynasty through fifty years of mat...
Anaïs Nin's Little Birds is published in Penguin Modern Classics.Anaïs Nin's second volume of erotic short stories after Delta of Venus, Little Birds is broader in scope, enco...
Asher Lev is a gifted loner, the artist who painted the sensational Brooklyn Crucifixion. Into it he poured all the anguish and torment a Jew can feel when torn between the faith of his fathers and...