Penguin Classics

Natsume Soseki's only coming-of-age novel, Sanshiro depicts the eponymous twenty-three-year-old protagonist as he leaves the sleepy countryside to attend a university in the constantly moving "real world" of Tokyo. Baffled and excited by the traffic, the academics, and-most of all-the women,

Now the subject of a major new film from director Baz Luhrmann (Romeo+Juliet, Moulin Rouge!), starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, The Great Gatsby is F. Scott Fitzgerald's brilliant fable of the hedonistic excess and tragic reality of 1920s America. This Penguin Classics edition is

Out of the sea as if Homer himself had arranged it for me the islands bobbed up lonely deserted mysterious in the fading light Enraptured by a young womans account of the landscapes of Greece Henry Miller set off to explore the Grecian countryside with his friend Lawrence Durrell in 1939 In The

In The Outsider (1942), his classic existentialist novel, Camus explores the alienation of an individual who refuses to conform to social norms. Meursault, his anti-hero, will not lie. When his mother dies, he refuses to show his emotions simply to satisfy the expectations of others. And when he

'Interplanetary, quite extraordinary . . . awash with dark humour and scenes of intense beauty' Financial Times 'One of the greatest avant-garde Japanese writers of the twentieth century' New Yorker Beautiful Star is a 1962 tale of family, love, nuclear war and UFOs, and was considered by

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde 'I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me ... Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day - mock me horribly!' A story of evil, debauchery and

Introducing Penguin Japanese Classics: a collection of some of Japan's most celebrated and ground-breaking 20th century writers, with covers inspired by Japanese art and design. Taking us from a sun-drenched affair in a seaside town to an underground 'ark' full of shadows and eccentrics, with stops

The summation of the existentialist philosophy threaded throughout all his writing, Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus is translated by Justin O'Brien with an introduction by James Wood in Penguin Classics. In this profound and moving philosophical statement, Camus poses the fundamental question:

“Soseki is the representative modern Japanese novelist, a figure of truly national stature.”—Haruki Murakami The father of modern Japanese literature's best-loved novel, in its first new English translation in half a century No collection of Japanese literature is complete without Natsume

The groundbreaking writings on the philosophy of the individual by iconic feminist and social thinker, Simone de Beauvoir How should we think and act in the world? These writings on the human condition by one of the twentieth century's great philosophers explore the absurdity of our notions of

A stunning new English translation—the first in more than forty years—of a major novel by the father of modern Japanese fiction Natsume Soseki's Kusamakura—meaning “grass pillow”—follows its nameless young artist-narrator on a meandering walking tour of the mountains. At the inn at a hot spring

New York is an aquarium where there are nothing but hellbenders and lungfish and slimy snagtoothed groupers and sharks In 1935 Henry Miller set off from his adopted home Paris to revisit his native land America Aller Retour New York his exuberant humorous missive to his friend Alfred Perles

'An indispensable writer ... Calvino, possesses the power of seeing into the deepest recesses of human minds and then bringing their dreams to life' Salman RushdieThe difference between life and literature; the good intentions of holiday reading; the avante-garde; the fate of the novel; the

Italo Calvino's enchanting stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures, The Complete Cosmicomics is translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks and William Weaver in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Naturally, we were

Pin is a bawdy, adolescent cobbler's assistant, both arrogant and insecure who - while the Second World War rages - sings songs and tells jokes to endear himself to the grown-ups of his town - particularly jokes about his sister, who they all know as the town's 'mattress'. Among those his sister