A philosopher, essayist, novelist, pornographer and fervent Catholic who came to regard the brothels of Paris as his true 'churches', Georges Bataille ranks among the boldest and most disturbing of...
In 1941 a cruise ship is heading to Buenos Aires, and on board a group of eager passengers challenge the reigning world chess champion to a match. At first they lose pitifully, until a kind strange...
Everybody knows now that Ulysses is the greatest novel of the century' Anthony Burgess, ObserverFollowing the events of one single day in Dublin, the 16th June 1904, and what happens to...
James Joyce's Dubliners is an enthralling collection of modernist short stories which create a vivid picture of the day-to-day experience of Dublin life. This Penguin Classics edition includes note...
The Second World War. Poland. Our narrator has no intention of being a hero. He plans to survive this war, whatever it takes.Meticulously he recounts his experiences: the slow unravelli...
Old Masters (1985) is Thomas Bernhard's devilishly funny story about the friendship between two old men.For over thirty years Reger, a music critic, has sat on the same bench in front o...
Demian is a coming-of-age story that follows a young boy's maturation as he grapples with good and evil, lightness and darkness, and forges alternatives to the ever-present corruption and suffering...
Moodily atmospheric, full of verve and energy, Maggie Cassidy is Kerouac's poignant tale of teenage romance in New England. The story of Jack and Maggie, in love with the idea of being in love, loo...
Mary Gaitskill's tales of desire and dislocation in 1980s New York caused a sensation with their frank, caustic portrayals of men and women's inner lives. As her characters have sex, try and fail t...
Full grown with a long, smoke-coloured beard, requiring the services of a cane and fonder of cigars than warm milk, Benjamin Button is a very curious baby indeed. And, as Benjamin becomes increasin...
Holly Golightly, glittering socialite traveller, generally upwards, sometimes sideways and once in a while down. She's up all night drinking cocktails and breaking hearts. She's a shoplifter, a d...
A colourful, multi-facted chronicle of New York in the early 1920s, Manhattan Transfer ranks with Joyce's Ulysses as a powerful and often lyrical meditation on the modern city. Using experimental m...
A colourful, multi-facted chronicle of New York in the early 1920s, Manhattan Transfer ranks with Joyce's Ulysses as a powerful and often lyrical meditation on the modern city. Using experimental m...
Their troubled courtship long behind them, Jenny Bunn and Patrick Standish have settled into London life. Patrick works in publishing and Jenny teaches sick children in a hospital. They have reache...
Karl Rossman has been banished by his parents to America, following a family scandal. There, with unquenchable optimism, he throws himself into the strange experiences that lie before him as he slo...
Set in the days of the Empire, with the British ruling in Burma, Burmese Days describes both indigenous corruption and Imperial bigotry, when 'after all, natives were natives – interesting, n...
Ayn Rand's story of Howard Roark, a brilliant architect who dares to stand alone against the hostility of second-hand souls. First published in 1943, this best-selling novel is a passionate defense...
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...
It's 1959 and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, one time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence - stuck with a fragile, alcoholic wife, a hou...
'It would not do to be found in the desert under these circumstances: firing wildly into the cactus from a car full of drugs'Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone showcases the evolution o...