Penguin twentieth-century classics

Written after the First World War when he was living in Sicily, Sea and Sardinia records Lawrence's journey to Sardinia and back in January 1921. It reveals his delighted response to a new landscape and people and his uncanny ability to transmute the spirit of place into literary art. Like his other travel writings the book is also a shrewd inquiry into the political and social values of an era which saw the rise of communism and fascism. On one level an indictment of contemporary materialism, Sea and Sardinia is nevertheless an optimistic book, celebrating the creativity of the human spirit and seeking in the fundamental laws which governed human nature in the past fresh inspiration for the present. This edition restores censored passages and corrects corrupt textual readings to reveal for the first time the book Lawrence himself called 'a marvel of veracity'.

A short novel written in an experimental blend of play and novel. The story is a simple morality play set in a circus. When an ageing man’s young wife suspects that her husband is sterile she decides to seduce his young assistant solely to become pregnant, wanting to give her husband the child he craves. When the husband discovers the truth he must come to terms with his pride.

Arthur and Waldo Brown were born twins and spent their childhood, their youth, middle-age and retirement together. They shared everything, even a girl, but their view of things differed. Waldo, a retired librarian, saw everything and understood little. Arthur was the fool who didn't bother to look. He understood. The book is set in Sydney, Australia in the early 20th century. The two men, sons of English immigrants, are never fully accepted by others even in their old age. They walk holding hands and this causes a stir among the local Aussies. Their somewhat sad lives are rather dull and drab.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft's unique contribution to American literature was a melding of traditional supernaturalism (derived chiefly from Edgar Allan Poe) with the genre of science fiction that emerged in the early 1920s. This new Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition brings together a dozen of the master's tales-from his early short stories "Under the Pyramids" (originally ghostwritten for Harry Houdini) and "The Music of Erich Zann" (which Lovecraft ranked second among his own favorites) through his more fully developed works, "The Dunwich Horror," The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and At the Mountains of Madness.The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories presents the definitive corrected texts of these works, along with Lovecraft critic and biographer S. T. Joshi's illuminating introduction and notes to each story.

It's 1922 and David Bendiger, an aspiring eighteen-and-a-half-year-old writer, arrives in Warsaw, penniless and homeless. His only contacts are Sonya, a young woman with whom he has had amorous dealings in the village they have left, and a Zionist functionary who informs him he has qualified for a certificate permitting him to emigrate to Palestine. But in order to make the journey David must enter into a fictitious marriage with a woman so eager to get to Palestine that she will pay all the expenses. While David waits for his certificate, he becomes involved not only with Sonya but with Edusha, the sexually avant-garde Communist Party member in whose apartment he finds a temporary haven; and with Minna, the well-to-do young woman who wants to join her fiance in Palestine and agrees to "marry" David. Grappling with romantic, political, and youthful turmoil, David also confronts his literary future and religious past when his older brother - a writer disillusioned by a recent sojourn in Russia - and his father, an Orthodox rabbi, both turn up in Warsaw. The Certificate was serialized in Yiddish in 1967, but may have been written much earlier. The translator, Leonard Wolf, in a postscript calls it "a very young man's book" and "certainly the most playful of Singer's long fictions", with its alternately comic and poignant shifts in plot. Young David's passions for women, philosophizing, Jewish religious speculation, and Walter Mitty-like fantasies make The Certificate a captivating novel in the great tradition of a master storyteller.

With precision, vitality, and a fury that earned him praise as India's Charles Dickens, Mulk Raj Anand recreates in" Untouchable" what it was like to live on the fringes of society in pre-independence India. Bakha, an attractive, proud, and strong young man, is also an Untouchable, the lowest of the low in India's caste system. A sweeper and a toilet-cleaner, he must warn others on the street of his status so that he will not pollute them with his presence. In this urgent 1935 re-creation of one day in the life of an outcast, a violent encounter leads Bakha to question his fate--and to find an answer in the unlikeliest of places.

A collection of stories from H.P. Lovecraft, the unrivaled master of early-twentieth-century horrorFrequently imitated and widely influential, H. P. Lovecraft reinvented the horror genre for the twentieth century. Discarding witches and ghosts, he envisaged mankind as an outpost of dwindling sanity in a chaotic and malevolent universe. S. T. Joshi makes his selection from the early tales of nightmares and madness to the overpowering cosmic terror of 'The Call of Cthulhu'. This is the first paperback edition to include the definitive corrected texts of these classics of American fantasy fiction.

Georges Perec contempla las muchas maneras en que ocupamos el espacio que nos rodea, describe los elementos comunes con los que estamos familiarizados de una manera sorprendente y engorrosa, mientras relata su psicoanálisis, permaneciendo reticente sobre sus sentimientos o representando el París de su infancia sin dejar rastros de sentimentalismo. Entretanto, Nos damos cuenta de que estamos en presencia de un notable escritor virtuoso.

Drawn from the original, uncensored journals of Anaïs Nin,Henry and June is an intimate account of a woman's sexual awakening. It covers a single momentous year - from late 1931 to the end of 1932 - during Nin's life in Paris, when she met Henry Miller and his wife, June. She fell in love with June's beauty and Henry's writing and, soon after June's departure for New York, began a fiery affair with Henry, which liberated her sexually and morally but undermined her marriage and let her into psychoanalysis. One question dominated her thoughts: what would happen when June returned to Paris? That event took place in October 1932, leaving Nin trapped between two loves - Henry and June.

Wallace Stegner's Pultizer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery—personal, historical, and geographical. Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.

Men-Of-War: Life in Nelson's Navy This book is a companion to Patrick O'Brian's sea novels, a straightforward exploration of what daily life in Nelson's navy was really like, for everyone from the captain down to the rawest recruit. What did they eat? What songs did they sing? What was the schedule of watches? How were the officers and crew paid, and what was the division of prize-money?

"One of Iris Murdoch’s more successful novels, A Fairly Honourable Defeat combines elements of realism and allegory to create a commentary on the moral shortcomings of the individual and society. The book opens as Hilda and Rupert Foster, an ostensibly happily-married couple, anticipate their forthcoming twentieth anniversary party."

En apariencia se trata de la simple biografía de un escritor, Sebastian Knight, escrita por su hermanastro «V» con la intención de corregir las falsedades vertidas sobre su persona en otra biografía, escrita con tendenciosidad y graves prejuicios intelectuales por el ex agente literario de Sebastian. Como en una novela policíaca, «V» tratará de hallar la verdad acerca de ese hermano con el que apenas convivió, buscará en sus obras alusiones autobiográficas, se entrevistará con las mujeres que tuvo por amantes y con los testigos que pueden proporcionarle alguna luz. Pero, siempre anticonvencional, Nabokov hará que todas esas tentativas se frustren e irá dejando sucesivamente abiertos todos los interrogantes, pues esta fingida investigación sólo pretende delatar la falacia de nuestras certidumbres y recordarnos la radical incognoscibilidad del ser humano.

Presents a collection of short stories from early twentieth-century author F. Scott Fitzgerald including "The Ice Palace," "May Day," "The Four Fists," and more.

This edition comprizes Millay's first three books, "Renascence", "Second April" and "A Few Figs", as well as a biographical and critical introduction and indexes both by title and by first line.

Steinbeck's only work of political satire turns the French Revolution on its head, as amateur astronomer Pippin Heristal is drafted in to rule the unruly French. Enchanting comedy ensues as Steinbeck creates the most hilarious royal court ever around the brief, bold reign of the corduroy-clad Pippin, his social-climbing wife Maria, his star-struck daughter Clotilde and her Californian beau, Todd. Featuring a motley crew of courtiers and con men, guards and gardeners, Steinbeck's late comic novel is an entrancing read about politics, power and the daily struggle not to lose one's head!

The inspiring sermon-poems of James Weldon Johnson. James Weldon Johnson was a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and one of the most revered African Americans of all time, whose life demonstrated the full spectrum of struggle and success. In God's Trombones, one of his most celebrated works, inspirational sermons of African American preachers are reimagined as poetry, reverberating with the musicality and splendid eloquence of the spirituals. This classic collection includes "Listen Lord (A Prayer)," "The Creation," "The Prodigal Son," "Go Down Death (A Funeral Sermon)," "Noah Built the Ark," "The Crucifixion," "Let My People Go," and "The Judgment Day."

Not so long ago Emilio Brentani was a promising young author. Now he is an insurance agent on the fast track to forty. He gains a new lease on life, though, when he falls for the young and gorgeous Angiolina--except that his angel just happens to be an unapologetic cheat. But what begins as a comedy of infatuated misunderstanding ends in tragedy, as Emilio's jealous persistence in his folly--against his friends' and devoted sister's advice, and even his own best knowledge--leads to the loss of the one person whom, too late, he realizes he truly loves.

Hilarious activities of a naive blonde and her instinct for self-protection from men.

Shalanov is a unique historical witness of the cruellest region of Stalin's Gulag Archipelago, the white hill of Kolyma. He also happens to be one of the finest short story writers, not only in Russian but in world literature.

This work contains Jean Rhys' final collection of short stories. The sixteen stories are loosely chronological, often mirroring Rhys' own life. They stretch over an approximate 75-year period, starting from the end of the nineteenth century (November 1899) to circa 1975.

Naipaul’s breakthrough novel is a marvellous comic tale of a Trinidadian of Indian descent striving to improve his lot. Continually making big plans for himself he constantly finds himself thwarted by his wife’s family and by his own ineptitude and over-reaching ambition.

The Assassination Bureau kills people for money. It also has a social conscience. Determined to eliminate only society's enemies, its chief, Ivan Dragomiloff, decides whether or not each murder is "justified." But one day Dragomiloff accepts a contract without knowing the name of the victim and the person marked for death turns out to be himself ... Unfinished when Jack London died, this thrilling novel has been so successfully completed by Robert L. Fish that the reader is challenged to find the point where one writer stops and the other begins. "Fascinating . . . London fans will be delighted to have another story from the master's hands." —Best Sellers "The book is one unified delight—the grandest thriller in years." —The New York Times Book Review

Before becoming one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated economists, John Maynard Keynes served as a financial representative for the British Treasury at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference to negotiate the Versailles treaty which would officially end World War I. Keynes resigned from the treasury in protest about a month before the final treaty was signed, and The Economic Consequences of the Peace describes his reasons for doing so. Keynes contends that domestic political considerations and a desire for revenge led to an unreasonably high burden being placed on the defeated Germany. In making the argument he paints unflattering portraits of the then French President Georges Clemenceau, the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and the American President Woodrow Wilson. According to Keynes, the effect of a negotiated treaty on the population of an already impoverished enemy was considered a far lower priority than disputes involving borders. Meanwhile, the exceptionally high cost of reparations placed on an economically-spent Germany could never be repaid, and was mainly an act of political grandstanding. Keynes predicted widespread suffering in the defeated powers, resulting in a turn towards political extremism. Unfortunately, subsequent events would prove his predictions right. The Economic Consequences of the Peace was an immediate bestseller in both the U.S. and the U.K. and has never been out of print. Though today some economists contend that Keynes may have been overly pessimistic about Germany’s ability to pay and the leniency of the Allies, many of the recommendations presented in the book were adopted as part of the Marshall Plan after the conclusion of World War II.

"Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross, and destined to be caught in a no-man's-land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy proves, in the end, neither innocent nor innocuous."--BOOK JACKET.

Seduction of the Minotaur is the fifth and final volume of Anaïs Nin's continuous novel known as Cities of the Interior. First published by Swallow Press in 1961, the story follows the travels of the protagonist Lillian through the tropics to a Mexican city loosely based on Acapulco, which Nin herself visited in 1947 and described in the fifth volume of her Diary. As Lillian seeks the warmth and sensuality of this lush and intriguing city, she travels inward as well, learning that to free herself she must free the "monster" that has been confined in a labyrinth of her subconscious."-- Provided by publisher

This is the sequel to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. These Jazz Age classics are written as the diaries of flapper, Lorilei Lee, telling of her own adventures and those of her friend, Dorothy, in their search for husbands.

«Il n'y a qu'un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux : c'est le suicide.» Avec cette formule foudroyante, qui semble rayer d'un trait toute la philosophie, un jeune homme de moins de trente ans commence son analyse de la sensibilité absurde. Il décrit le «mal de l'esprit» dont souffre l'époque actuelle : «L'absurde naît de la confrontation de l'appel humain avec le silence déraisonnable du monde.»

"Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner's boyhood was spent on the beautiful and remote frontier of the Cypress Hills in southern Saskatchewan, where his family homesteaded from 1914 to 1920. In a recollection of his years there, Stegner applied childhood remembrances and adult reflection to the history of the region to create this wise and enduring portrait of a pioneer community existing on the verge of a modern world."--BOOK JACKET.

Presents the story about a young, working girl in a poor London neighborhood. Her sad story is the story of poverty everywhere.

Set in London and in the South of France, this brilliantly structured novel centers on two women: Gertrude Openshaw, bereft from the recent death of her husband, yet awakening to passion; and Anne Cavidge, who has returned in doubt from many years in a nunnery, only to encounter her personal Christ. A fascinating array of men and women hover in urgent orbit around them: the "Count," a lonely Pole obsessively reliving his émigré father's patriotic anguish; Tim Reede, a seedy yet appealing artist, and Daisy, his mistress; the manipulative Mrs. Mount; and many other magically drawn characters moving between desire and obligation, guilt and joy. This edition of Nuns and Soldiers includes a new introduction by renowned religious historian Karen Armstrong.

This is a collection of short stories and poems written about the lives of African Americans in the 1920s.

Three war novels planned to be read as one are now combined with revisions.

Narration of author's travel through Russia.

In her great historical epic Kristin Lavransdatter, set in fourteenth-century Norway, Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset tells the life story of one passionate and headstrong woman. Painting a richly detailed backdrop, Undset immerses readers in the day-to-day life, social conventions, and political and religious undercurrents of the period. Now in one volume, Tiina Nunnally's award-winning definitive translation brings this remarkable work to life with clarity and lyrical beauty.As a young girl, Kristin is deeply devoted to her father, a kind and courageous man. But when as a student in a convent school she meets the charming and impetuous Erlend Nikulausson, she defies her parents in pursuit of her own desires. Her saga continues through her marriage to Erlend, their tumultuous life together raising seven sons as Erlend seeks to strengthen his political influence, and finally their estrangement as the world around them tumbles into uncertainty.

Contains: [Soldiers Three]( [In Black and White](

It is only James Joyce's towering genius as a novelist that has led to the comparative neglect of his poetry and sole surviving play. And yet, argues Mays in his stimulating and informative introduction, several of these works not only occupy a pivotal position in Joyce's career; they are also magnificently assured achievements in their own right. Chamber Music is 'an extraordinary debut', fusing the styles of the nineties and the Irish Revival with irony and characteristic verbal exuberance. Pomes Penyeach and Exiles (highly acclaimed in Harold Pinter's 1970 staging) were written when Joyce had published Dubliners and was completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Both confront painfully personal issues of adultery, jealousy and betrayal and so pave the way for the more detached and fully realized treatment in Ulysses. Joyce's occasional verse includes 'Ecce Puer' for his new-born grandson, juvenilia, satires, translations, limericks and a parody of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. All are brought together in this scholarly, fully annotated yet accessible new edition.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by political theorist Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on Adolf Eichmann's trial for The New Yorker. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1964.

By turns bizarre, unsettling, spooky, and sublime, Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories showcases nine incomparable stories from master conjuror Algernon Blackwood. Evoking the uncanny spiritual forces of Nature, Blackwood's writings all tread the nebulous borderland between fantasy, awe, wonder, and horror. Here Blackwood displays his best and most disturbing work-including "The Willows," which Lovecraft singled out as "the single finest weird tale in literature"; "The Wendigo"; "The Insanity of Jones"; and "Sand."

A selection of Capote's works divided into six parts: short stories, novellas, travel sketches, reportage, portraits, and essays.

Victim in the VineyardJessica Fletcher is visiting the Napa Valley wine country while doing research for her next book, and invites her old friend, Scotland Yard detective George Sutherland to join her at a cozy Bed and Breakfast. No sooner do they arri

Duluth est une sorte de Dallas, ville US typique où tout semble se prêter à la réalisation d'un feuilleton. Gore Vidal a longtemps écrit pour la télévision : ici, sa plume fait naître une cité mi-réelle, mi-fictionnelle, où les habitants, une fois morts, réapparaissent de l'autre côté du petit écran. Un scénario sur la middle-class américaine et les dessous de la télévision...

From the Publisher: Electrocuted in 1927 for the murder of two guards in Massachusetts, the Italian-American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti defied the verdict against them, maintaining their innocence to the end. Whether they were guilty continues to be the subject of debate today. First published in 1928, Sacco and Vanzetti's letters represent one of the great personal documents of the twentieth century: a volume of primary source material as famous for the splendor of its impassioned prose as for the brilliant light it sheds on the characters of the two dedicated anarchists who became the focus of worldwide attention.

A posthumously published novella, the story tells of two sisters seemingly condemned to a drab and joyless existence with their father, a vicar, and their mean-spirited grandmother and aunt. When one of the girls befriends a Gypsy and a young unmarried couple, one of them a Jew, her father threatens to have her admitted to an asylum.

In Front of Your Nose features Orwell's final writings, including extracts from his manuscript notebook, as well as details of his remarriage and adoption of a son, notes on the writing and publication of Nineteen Eighty-four, as well as reviews of books by Jean-Paul Sartre and Graham Greene, an examination of politics and literature in Gulliver's Travels, and the hidden meanings of "nonsense poetry."

A biting satire about an African Emperor, educated at an English public school, who unilaterally decides to modernize his backward nation and brings in an English friend assist him, giving him the title Minister for Modernization.

Review in the NY Times

Djuna est l'héroïne principale de ce roman. Vouée d'une double personnalité, elle rêve dès l'enfance de celui qui viendra rompre sa solitude mais elle ne semble rencontrer que des rêveurs que leurs trop grandes ailes empêchent de marcher ... Ce roman fait partie des cinq textes publiés entre 1946 et 1961 dans lesquels on retrouve trois amies inséparables : Lillian, Djuna et Sabina.

Arrival and Departure (1943) is the third novel of Arthur Koestler’s trilogy concerning the conflict between morality and expedience (as described in the postscript to the novel’s 1966 Danube Edition). The first volume, The Gladiators, is about the subversion of the Spartacus revolt, and the second, Darkness at Noon, is the celebrated novel about the Soviet Show trials. Arrival and Departure was Koestler’s first full-length work in English, The Gladiators and Darkness at Noon having originally been written in German. It is often considered to be the weakest of the three. Reviewing the novel in December 1943 George Orwell called it notable "for what must be one of the most shocking descriptions of Nazi terrorism that have ever been written." (Source: [Wikipedia](

"The previously uncollected writings of Carson McCullers."

Speak, Memory is an autobiographical memoir by writer Vladimir Nabokov. The book includes individual essays published between 1936 and 1951 to create the first edition in 1951. Nabokov's revised and extended edition appeared in 1966. ([Wikipedia](