Penguin modern classics

Powerfully depicts the fall of France in 1940, and the anguished response of the French people to the German occupation.

The story of three closely-related Oxfordshire communities -- a hamlet, a village, and a town -- and the memorable cast of characters who people them. Based on Thompson's own experiences as a child and young woman, it is keenly observed and beautifully narrated, quiet and evocative.

'Angel Pavement' provides readers with a vivid picture of London life before the war and the Blitz changed everything dramatically. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the story centres around the arrival of a mysterious Mr. Golspie at Twigg & Dersingham from the Baltic region.

Story about the havoc wrought by inharmonious relationships in a middle-class English family.

"A novel of Ireland in the Nineteen-Twenties"--Cover.

Consecuencias sobre las personas que les tocó vivir una nueva realidad que todavía existe pero que aún no se ha comprendido. Aquellos que sufrieron Chernóbil son los supervivientes de una Tercera Guerra Mundial nuclear. Según Alexievich, en este mundo hostil ?todo parece completamente normal, el mal se esconde bajo una nueva máscara, y uno no es capaz de verlo, oírlo, tocarlo, ni olerlo. Cualquier cosa puede matarte... el agua, la tierra, una manzana, la lluvia. Nuestro diccionario está obsoleto. Todavía no existen palabras, ni sentimientos, para describir esto?. Voces de Chernóbil recibió en marzo de 2006 el premio del Círculo de Críticos de Estados Unidos en reconocimiento a la fuerza narrativa de Alexievich y a la importancia de las historias que cuenta. Esta edición en castellano incluye además testimonios inéditos hasta la fecha, incorporados por la autora a la que es la última versión de la obra elaborada por ella con motivo del XX aniversario de la catástrofe

Mann's novelistic biography of Goethe was first published in English in 1940. Lotte in Weimar is a vivid dual portrait, a complex study of Goethe and of Lotte, the still-vivacious woman who in her youth was the model for Charlotte in Goethe's widely-read The Sorrows of Young Werther. Lotte's thoughts, as she anticipates meeting Goethe again after forty years, and her conversations with those in Weimar who knew the great man, allow Mann to assess Goethe's genius from many points of view. Hayden White's fresh appraisal of the novel reveals its consonances with our own concerns.

We Think the World of You combines acute social realism and dark fantasy, and was described by author J.R. Ackerley as “a fairy tale for adults.” Frank, the narrator, is a middle-aged civil servant, intelligent, acerbic, self-righteous, angry. He is in love with Johnny, a young, married, working-class man with a sweetly easygoing nature. When Johnny is sent to prison for committing a petty theft, Frank gets caught up in a struggle with Johnny’s wife and parents for access to him. Their struggle finds a strange focus in Johnny’s dog—a beautiful but neglected German shepherd named Evie. And it is she, in the end, who becomes the improbable and undeniable guardian of Frank’s inner world

174 p. ; 19 cm

Basically the entire book is about sex, urine, eggs and disgusting and disturbing situations. The narrator and Simone traverse England (?) and Spain, often naked, getting themselves in stranger and stranger situations. Not remotely for the faint of heart. It's a mix of a John Waters movie, Marquis de Sade, Brett Easton Ellis and J.G. Ballard.

The author's survival in Auschwitz and his travels through Eastern Europe and Russia are the subjects of this memoir.

Wolf Solent moves to Dorsetshire and discovers "a world of pagan splendor and medieval insularity."publisher description.

A collection of fourteen short anecdotes, Bliss & Other Stories captures the human spirit in a way few writers have ever dreamed of doing. Mansfield’s ability to string together words approaches poetry. Her stories are free from the over-dramatic writing style that many women writers have been criticized for using, and instead candidly touch on the human experience. Whether writing about the awakening of sexuality in the title story or the bond of a family in “Prelude,” Mansfield explores the search for contentment in life.

The novel takes place at an army base in the U.S. state of Georgia. Private Ellgee Williams, a solitary man full of secrets and desires, has served for two years and is assigned to stable duty. After doing yard work at the home of Capt. Penderton, he sees the captain's wife nude and becomes obsessed with her. Capt. Weldon Penderton and his wife Leonora, who grew up as an Army brat, have a fiery relationship, and she takes many lovers. Leonora's current lover, Major Morris Langdon, lives with his depressed wife Alison and her flamboyant houseboy Anacleto, near the Pendertons. Capt. Penderton, as a closeted homosexual, realizes that he is physically attracted to Pvt. Williams, but remains unaware of the private's attraction to Leonora.

This book continues the story of Eugene Gant, the protagonist in Look Homeward Angel. If you have read and liked Angel you should definitely follow through and read this(vol 1 and 2). Autobiographical in nature..

Scornful of his younger sister's fears, a young boy decides to explore a tunnel forcing her to go after him when he doesn't return.

The sequel to Mr. Norris Changes Trains, this is another semi-autobiographical account of Isherwood’s experiences in pre-war Berlin. The author leads the reader on a thoroughly entertaining tour through the seedier side of a particularly decadent time in that city’s history.

“Whom the gods wish to destroy,” writes Cyril Connolly, “they first call promising.” First published in 1938 and long out of print, Enemies of Promise, an “inquiry into the problem of how to write a book that lasts ten years,” tests the boundaries of criticism, journalism, and autobiography with the blistering prose that became Connolly’s trademark. Connolly here confronts the evils of domesticity, politics, drink, and advertising as well as novelists such as Joyce, Proust, Hemingway, and Faulkner in essays that remain fresh and penetrating to this day.

506 pages ; 18 cm

"Contains twenty-nine short sketches of famous characters."

London life just after World War I, devoid of values and moving headlong into chaos at breakneck speed—Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay. like Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, portrays a world of lost souls madly pursuing both pleasure and meaning. Fake artists, third-rate poets, pompous critics, pseudo-scientists, con-men, bewildered romantics, cock-eyed futurists—all inhabit this world spinning out of control, as wildly comic as it is disturbingly accurate. In a style that ranges from the lyrical to the absurd, and with characters whose identities shift and change as often as their names and appearances, Huxley has here invented a novel that bristles with life and energy. What the New York Times called “a delirium of sense enjoyment!”

Darkness at Noon (German: Sonnenfinsternis) is a novel by Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940. His best known work, it is the tale of Rubashov, an Old Bolshevik who is arrested, imprisoned, and tried for treason against the government that he helped to create. The novel is set in 1939 during the Stalinist Great Purge and Moscow show trials. Despite being based on real events, the novel does not name either Russia or the Soviets, and tends to use generic terms to describe people and organizations: for example the Soviet government is referred to as "the Party" and Nazi Germany is referred to as "the Dictatorship". Joseph Stalin is represented by "Number One", a menacing dictator. The novel expresses the author's disillusionment with the Bolshevik ideology of the Soviet Union at the outset of World War II. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Darkness at Noon number eight on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, even though Koestler wrote it in German. (Source: [Wikipedia](

Early in the 19th century, a couple stay in seclusion to hide the woman's pregnancy caused by premarital indiscretion.

Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) was one of the most influential book reviewers and critics in England, contributing regularly to The New Statesmen, The Observer, and The Sunday Times. His essays have been collected in book form and published to wide acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. The Unquiet Grave is considered by many to be his most enduring work. It is a highly personal journal written during the devastation of World War II, filled with reflective passages that deal with aging, the break-up of a long term relationship, and the horrors of the war around him. It is also a wonderfully varied intellectual feast: a collection of aphorisms, epigrams, and quotations from such masters of European literature as Horace, Baudelaire, Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, and Goethe. Dazzlingly original in both form and content, The Unquiet Grave has continued to influence generations of writers.

A dramatic story of a young widow in mourning who unburdens herself to a handsome ex-soldier. In the car he drives for hire, he takes her out on journeys.

Retelling of a medieval legend "of the exceeding mercy of God and the birth of the Pope Gregory."

Mémoires d'Hadrien est un roman historique de l'écrivaine française Marguerite Yourcenar, publié en 1951. Ces pseudo-mémoires de l'empereur romain Hadrien ont immédiatement rencontré un extraordinaire succès international et assuré à son auteur une grande célébrité. Il s’agit d’une œuvre dont le projet remonte à l’adolescence de l’autrice. Yourcenar considérant le projet comme trop ambitieux pour être une œuvre de jeunesse, le décrivait de la trempe de ceux « qu’on ne doit pas oser avant d’avoir dépassé quarante ans ». Le livre est présenté comme une longue lettre d’un vieil empereur adressée à son petit-fils adoptif et éventuel successeur âgé de 17 ans, Marc Aurèle. L’empereur Hadrien médite et se remémore ses triomphes militaires, son amour de la poésie et de la musique, sa philosophie ainsi que sa passion pour son jeune amant bithynien, Antinoüs.

"...La larga gestación de El Señor Presidente, por encima de su condición de novela-denuncia, trasciende los ecos surgidos de la memoria colectiva a partir de la resonancia natural de las palabras y las fantasías oníricas asimiladas de manera gradual por la realidad de la vida..."

Set in Georgia on the eve of court-ordered integration, Clock Without Hands contains McCullers's most poignant statement on race, class, and justice. A small-town druggist dying of leukemia calls himself and his community to account in this tale of change and changelessness, of death and the death-in-life that is hate. It is a tale, as McCullers herself wrote, of "response and responsibility--of man toward his own livingness."

Bearing an uncanny resemblance to the now blind displaced King of the Scots, former gladiator and slave Phaedrus impersonates the Horse Lord to regain from the Picts the control of the Scottish kingdom.

"This new bilingual selection brings together some two hundred poems - the largest collection of Borges's poetry ever assembled in English, including scores of poems never previously translated. Edited by Alexander Coleman, the selection draws from a lifetime's work - from Borges's first published volume of verse, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), to his final work, Los conjurados, published just a year before his death in 1986. Throughout this unique collection the brilliance of the Spanish originals is matched by luminous English versions rendered by a remarkable cast of translators."--BOOK JACKET. "This new bilingual selection brings together some two hundred poems - the largest collection of Borges's poetry ever assembled in English, including scores of poems never previously translated. Edited by Alexander Coleman, the selection draws from a lifetime's work - from Borges's first published volume of verse, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), to his final work, Los conjurados, published just a year before his death in 1986. Throughout this unique collection the brilliance of the Spanish originals is matched by luminous English versions rendered by a remarkable cast of translators."--Jacket.

The Thief's Journal (Journal du voleur, published in 1949) is a novel by Jean Genet. It is a part-fact, part-fiction autobiography that charts the author's progress through Europe in a depoliticized 1930s, wearing nothing but rags and enduring hunger, contempt, fatigue and vice. The main character encounters bars, dives, flophouses, robbery, prison and expulsion in Spain, Italy, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Nazi Germany and Belgium. The novel is structured around a series of homosexual love affairs and male prostitution between the author/anti-hero and various criminals, con artists, pimps, and a detective.

Conjuring up a cascade of sexual encounters, this book evokes the essence of female sexuality in a world where only love has meaning. Among these provocative stories, a Hungarian adventurer seduces wealthy women then vanishes with their money; a veiled woman selects strangers from a chic restaurant for private trysts; and a Parisian hatmaker named Mathilde leaves her husband for the opium dens of Peru.

Charlie, a brilliant and beautiful young actress, is lured into 'the theatre of the real' by an Israeli intelligence officer. Forced to play her ultimate role, she is plunged into a deceptive and delicate trap set to ensnare an elusive Palestinian terrorist. The Little Drummer Girl is a thrilling, deeply moving and courageous novel of our times.

Los avatares del comerciante marsellés Victor Hugues en el Caribe y en un París convulsionado por la Revolución son el tema central de El sigo de las luces, una novela tan fascinante como ambiciosa en la que historia y ficción confunden sus límites.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom is the autobiographical account of the experiences of British Army Colonel T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") while serving as a military advisor to Bedouin forces during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire of 1916 to 1918. It was completed in February 1922, but first published in December 1926, originally published for the US market in 1927 as Revolt in the Desert and is the only version that was commercially released while he was alive. Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935) is a longer form of the book at almost double the page count and released to the international market.

Collection of letters written to his nices Indirā Debī Caudhurāṇī, 1873-1960 between September 1887 and December 1895.

Recurrent themes of bravery and cowardice, freedom and responsibility, love and death are woven into this timeless epic of the Spanish Civil War -- universally recognized as one of the great modern novels. -- Back cover.

'There has been no such analysis of the corrupting power of the police state in Soviet literature'--Stuart Hood in the Listener Solzhenitsyn, like Oleg Kostoglotov, the central character of this novel, went in the mid-1950s from concentration camp to cancer ward and later recovered. The British publication of Cancer Ward in 1968 confirmed him as Russia's greatest living novelist although it has never been openly published in the Soviet Union.

"Translated into twenty languages and published in more than fourteen Spanish editions, The Lost Steps, originally published in 1953, is Alejo Carpentier's most heralded novel. A composer, fleeing an empty existence in New York City, takes a journey with his mistress to one of the few remaining areas of the world not yet touched by civilization - the upper reaches of a great South American river. The Lost Steps describes his search, his adventures, and the remarkable decision he makes in a village that seems truly outside history."--BOOK JACKET.

Je vais encourir bien des reproches. Mais qu'y puis-je ? Est-ce ma faute si j'eus douze ans quelques mois avant la declaration de la guerre ? Sans doute, les troubles qui me vinrent de cette periode extraordinaire furent d'une sorte qu'on n'eprouve jamais a cet age ; mais comme il n'existe rien d'assez fort pour nous vieillir malgre les apparences, c'est en enfant que je devais me conduire dans une aventure ou deja un homme eut eprouve de l'embarras.

One of the stories, "Babette's Feast," was adapted for the cinema by Gabriel Axel in 1987, and won the Academy Award for best foreign film.

Long hailed as a seminal work of modernism in the tradition of Joyce and Kafka, and now available in a supple new English translation, Italo Svevo's charming and splendidly idiosyncratic novel conducts readers deep into one hilariously hyperactive and endlessly self-deluding mind. The mind in question belongs to Zeno Cosini, a neurotic Italian businessman who is writing his confessions at the behest of his psychiatrist. Here are Zeno's interminable attempts to quit smoking, his courtship of the beautiful yet unresponsive Ada, his unexpected -- and unexpectedly happy -- marriage to Ada's homely sister Augusta, and his affair with a shrill-voiced aspiring singer. -- Text refers to other edition.

The novel is a satirical and fantastical narrative set in an opulent and imaginary world. It follows the story of a character named Princess Sphinx, who is the ruler of a mythical kingdom. The plot delves into themes of decadence, vanity, and the absurdities of high society, presented through a highly stylized and unconventional narrative. Firbank's work is known for its lush, ornate prose and its focus on the superficialities of upper-class life. In "The Flower Beneath the Foot," he uses satire to critique the extravagances and moral vacuity of his characters, creating a story that is both humorous and sharply observant.

"Strange beasts, night terrors, absurd bureaucrats and sinister places abound in this collection of stories by Franz Kafka. Some are less than a page long, others more substantial; all were unpublished in his lifetime. These matchless short works range from the gleeful miniature horror 'Little fable' to the off-kilter humour of 'Investigations of a dog', and from the elaborate waking nightmare of 'Building the Great Wall of China' to the creeping unease of 'The burrow', where a nameless creature's labyrinthine hiding place turns into a trap of fear and paranoia." -- rear cover.

"The Wretched of the Earth is an analysis of the psychology of the colonized and their path to liberation. Bearing singular insight into the rage of colonized peoples and the role of violence in historical change, the book also incisively attacks postindependence disenfranchisement of the masses by the elite on one hand, and intertribal and interfaith animosities on the other. A veritable handbook of social reorganization for leaders of emerging nations, The Wretched of the Earth has had a major impact on civil rights, anticolonialism, and black-consciousness movements around the world."--Jacket.

Painter hero, the charming and larcenous Gulley Jimson, has an insatiable genius for creation and a no less remarkable appetite for destruction. Is he a great artist? a has-been? or an exhausted, drunken ne'er-do-well? He is without doubt a visionary, and as he criss-crosses London in search of money and inspiration the world as seen though his eyes appears with a newly outrageous and terrible beauty.

A Hollywood millionaire with a terror of death, whose personal physician happens to be working on a theory of longevity—these are the elements of Aldous Huxley's caustic and entertaining satire on man's desire to live indefinitely. With his customary wit and intellectual sophistication, Huxley pursues his characters in their quest for the eternal, finishing on a note of horror. "This is Mr. Huxley's Hollywood novel, and you might expect it to be fantastic, extravagant, crazy and preposterous. It is all that, and heaven and hell too....It is the kind of novel that he is particularly the master of, where the most extraordinary and fortuitous events are followed by contemplative little essays on the meaning of life....The story is outrageously good."―New York Times. "Mr. Huxley's elegant mockery, his cruel aptness of phrase, the revelations and the ingenious surprises he springs on the reader are those of a master craftsman; Mr. Huxley is at the top of his form..." ―London Times Literary Supplement.

The Man on a Donkey is an enthralling, panoramic historical novel that brings to life one of the most tumultuous times in British history—the reign of King Henry VIII. In Part 1, readers are introduced to the world of the Tudors through the lives of five individuals. In Part 2—as King Henry VIII continues his arrogant rule, Thomas Cromwell closes the monasteries, and rebellion breaks out in the North of England—readers discover the destiny of these five people and, through their stories, learn that God's love is felt only by those whose hearts are open to mystery and grace.

A few years after its liberation from the brutality of French colonial rule in 1803, Haiti endured a period of even greater brutality under the reign of King Henri-Christophe, who was born a slave in Grenada but rose to become the first black king in the Western Hemisphere. In prose of often dreamlike coloration and intensity, Alejo Carpentier records the destruction of the black regime--built on the same corruption and contempt for human life that brought down the French while embodying the same hollow grandeur of false elegance, attained only through slave labor--in an orgy of voodoo, race hatred, madness, and erotomania.

Unrevised draft of a novel telling of the growth and development of a young man in French society at the turn of the century.

Virginia Woolf's intention to publish her short stories is carried out in this volume, posthumously collected by her husband, Leonard Woolf. Containing six of eight stories from Monday or Tuesday, seven that appeared in magazines, and five other stories, the book makes available Virginia Woolf's shorter works of fiction. Foreword by Leonard Woolf.

Conrad’s Second novel (An Outcast of the Islands) is about the colonial enterprise and their faults while they take a region. The characters are complex and deep. It makes for a great read.Please Note: This book is easy to read in true text, not scanned images that can sometimes be difficult to decipher. The Microsoft eBook has a contents page linked to the chapter headings for easy navigation. The Adobe eBook has bookmarks at chapter headings and is printable up to two full copies per year. Both versions are text searchable.

I'ts a supernatural story where very strange things happen. For exemple, a girl dies because a flower is growing in her chest.

In his writing, Borges always combined high seriousness with a wicked sense of fun. Here he reveals his delight in re-creating (or making up) colorful stories from the Orient, the Islamic world, and the Wild West, as well as his horrified fascination with knife fights, political and personal betrayal, and bloodthirsty revenge. Spark-ling with the sheer exuberant pleasure of story-telling, this collection marked the emergence of an utterly distinctive literary voice.