'I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday'Freewheeling and spontaneous, Mexico City Blues is Jack Kerouac's most significant and em...
Ever since it exploded into Vietnam's cultural life two centuries ago, The Song of Kieu has been one of that nation's most beloved and defining central myths. It recounts the tragic fate of the bea...
From the bestselling author of Alone in Berlin, his acclaimed novel of a young couple trying to survive life in 1930s Germany'Nothing so confronts a woman with the deathly futility of h...
'Her fragrant body and burning red lips'A married couple reveal their darkest sexual fantasies to each other, in this erotic psychodrama of infidelity, transgression and decadence in ea...
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.
'Twenty-three dagger thrusts went home as he stood there. Caesar did not utter a sound...'This vivid, racy account of the men who wielded absolute power over ancient Rome - including ma...
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 rapturous work of savage beauty, Willa Cather's 1913 tale of a pioneer woman who tames the wild, hostile lands of the Nebraskan prairie is also the story of what it means to be American.
'Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head. Don't ever surrender yourself - not to Japan, not to anything'A shy, unworldly young student has his eyes opened to Tokyo's bustling ...
Mad, macabre tales of demonic spirits, hideous rites, ancient curses and alien entities lurking beneath the surface of rural New England, from the man who created the modern horror story.
'The hideous, then unfamiliar shriek of the air-raid sirens sang out over London.'Upper-class rogues, bohemians, dowagers, socialites, bureaucrats and delinquent evacuees prepare for En...
'He scampered over rooftops, swam in deep water, leapt from balconies.'Set in the vanished world of the shtetl of nineteenth-century eastern Europe, this spellbinding fable tells the st...
Following a Parisian philosophy teacher through the cafés and bars of Montparnasse over two days in the sweltering summer of 1938, Sartre's searing novel explores what it truly means to be f...
In 1851, at the age of twenty-two, Tolstoy joined the Russian army and travelled to the Caucasus as a soldier. The four years that followed were among the most significant in his life, and deeply i...
Featuring an ordinary man who wakes up to find himself turned into a giant cockroach, Kafka's masterpiece of unease and black humour, Metamorphosis, is brought together here with the best of his sh...
This humane, moving masterpiece of families, love, duels, heartache, failure and the clash between generations caused a scandal in nineteenth-century Russia with its portrayal of youthful nihilism....
An aspiring young Berlin actress turns the tables on her lustful middle-aged admirer, in Nabokov's deadpan, deliciously cruel story of hopeless infatuation and horribly inventive revenge.
The great Victorian scientist's heroic adventures across South-East Asia, from Singapore to the wilds of New Guinea, encountering head-hunters, jungles, birds of paradise and new discoveries that w...
A novel of desperate yearning and vanished adolescence, the story of Meaulnes and his restless search for a lost, enchanted world has the atmosphere of a dream and the purity of a fairy tale....