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Penguin Group
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'Is it me you love, friend? or the race that made me?' A gothic novella about love, torment and doomed aristocracy, set in the remote mountains of Spain. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). Stevenson's works available in Penguin Classics are An Apology for Idlers, The Black Arrow, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, In the South Seas, Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae, Treasure Island and Selected Poems. |
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The Weather Makers tells the dramatic story of the earth's climate, of how it has changed, how we have come to understand it, and of what that means for the future. Tim Flannery's gripping narrative takes the reader on an extraordinary journey into the past and around the globe, bringing us closer to the science than ever before. Along the way he explodes the many illusions that have grown up around this subject. |
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«How did George Eliot's love life affect her prose? Why did Kafka write at three in the morning? In what ways is Barack Obama like Eliza Doolittle? Can you be over-dressed for the Oscars? What is Italian Feminism? If Roland Barthes killed the Author, can Nabokov revive him? What does 'soulful' mean? Is «Date Movie» the worst film ever made? Split into five sections — Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling and Remembering — «Changing My Mind» finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural. This engaging collection of essays — some published here for the first time — reveals Smith as a passionate and precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books and bad movies, family and philosophy, British comedians and Italian divas. Whether writing of Obama, Katherine Hepburn, Kafka, Anna Magnani or David Foster Wallace, she brings a practitioner's care to the art of criticism, with a style as sympathetic as it is insightful. «Changing My Mind» is journalism at its most expansive, intelligent and funny — a gift to readers and writers both. Within its covers an essay is more than a column of opinions: it's a space in which to think freely.» |
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When you're 36, going on 18, life is about being hip, being cool, and embracing all that Mothercare has to offer... Nick Hornby's best-selling novel is now a phenomenally successful film starring Hugh Grant, from the makers of Four Weddings & A Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones's Diary. Starring: Hugh Grant (Bridget Jones's Diary); Toni Collette (Muriel's Wedding); Rachel Weisz (The Mummy Returns) and Nicholas Hoult as Marcus. Written & Directed By Chris and Paul Weitz. Produced By Eric Fellner, Tim Bevan and Robert de Niro. |
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Written in mischievous and magically flowing prose, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle — Nabokov's other great love story — offers even more sexual and imaginative surprises than Lolita. A romance that follows Ada from her first childhood meeting with Van on his uncle's country estate, in a 'dream-bright' America, through eighty years of rapture, Nabokov's 'longest, richest, most ambitious novel' also becomes, as Brian Boyd says, a great many other things: 'myth, fairy tale, utopian idyll, family chronicle, personal memoir, historical romance, erotic catalogue ... picture gallery and filmic folly'. |
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She was a princess, daughter of perhaps the most hated king in Europe. He was just a lowly hussar. Their love affair in turn-of-the-century Vienna was to scandalize a continent. The story of Princess Louise of Belgium and Geza Mattachich, stepson of a minor Croatian count, began with no more than an exchanged glance in a park. Yet the princess and her soldier, divided by wealth and status, pursued their devotion to one another through scandal, ruin, madness and imprisonment. Dan Jacobson's brilliant imagining of this forgotten episode of the Hapsburg court brings to life one of the century's great love stories. |
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‘Everything is finished. I have nothing but you now. Remember that’ Anna Karenina seems to have everything – beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son. But she feels that her life is empty until the moment she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalizes society and family alike and soon brings jealously and bitterness in its wake. Contrasting with this tale of love and self-destruction is the vividly observed story of Levin, a man striving to find contentment and a meaning to his life – and also a self-portrait of Tolstoy himself. This new translation has been acclaimed as the definitive version of Tolstoy’s masterpiece. It also contains an introduction by Richard Pevear and a preface by John Bayley. |
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When Lolita was first published in 1955 it created a sensation and established Nabokov as one of the most original prose writers of the twentieth century. This annotated edition, a revised and considerably expanded version of the 1970 edition, does full justice to the textual riches of Lolita, illuminating the elaborate verbal textures and showing how they contribute to the novel's overall meaning. Alfred Appel, Jr. also provides fresh observations on the novel's artifice, games and verbal patternings and a delightful biographical vignette of Nabokov. The annotations themselves were prepared in consultation with Nabokov while newly identified allusions were confirmed by him during the final years of his life. |
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Zoe, Jennifer, and Nadia are three women with nothing in common. Except for the man who wants to kill them. He sends them terrifying letters, full of the intimate details of their lives — the clothes they wear, their little habits, how they act when they think they're alone — and promises that he will bring those lives to a violent, horrible end. But not before he has enjoyed himself. Invisible and apparently unstoppable, he delights in watching the women suffer, thrilled by his power to destroy their lives and their faith in those closest to them; to leave them utterly helpless, alone in their terror and confusion. But they're not all as helpless as he thinks ... |
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Kathleen Flynn-Hui — hairdresser to the stars — takes readers behind the frosted glass panels of the top salons and into the glamorous and bitchy world of women (and men) who'd kill for a handful of honeyed highlights. Beyond the Blonde follows the fortunes of Georgia, a small-town girl with big-city ambitions as she makes her ascent to the position of colourist at one of the most exclusive salons in New York. But if Georgia is to achieve the heady heights of urban salon success first she must battle bullies, find romance, endure heartbreak and betrayal. Can she make the cut? Or will it all unravel like a perm in a rainstorm? Anyone who loved The Nanny Diaries for its peek into an unknown world of slavery and hardship will adore Beyond the Blonde for similar reasons. And as for those who couldn't miss an episode of Cutting It, here is the ideal book to plug the gap between series. In this superb roman-a-clef, Kathleen Flynn-Hui tells it like it is and gives readers more than one opportunity to spot the stars behind the stories ... |
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It's New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail-hour to breakfast at Tiffany's. And nice girls don't, except, of course, Holly Golightly. Pursued by Mafia gangsters and playboy millionaires, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turned-up nose, a heart-breaker, a perplexer, a traveller, a tease. She is irrepressibly 'top banana in the shock department', and one of the shining flowers of American fiction. |
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The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them. |
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Oh, if you were the kind of man I am … I loved the shame of depravity. I loved cruelty … In a word – a Karamazov!’ The murder of brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov changes the lives of his sons irrevocably: Mitya, the sensualist, whose bitter rivalry with his father immediately places him under suspicion for parricide; Ivan, the intellectual, whose mental tortures drive him to breakdown; the spiritual Alyosha, who tries to heal the family’s rifts; and the shadowy figure of their bastard half-brother Smerdyakov. As the ensuing investigation and trial reveal the true identity of the murderer, Dostoyevsky’s dark masterwork evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil blur, and everyone’s faith in humanity is tested. This powerful translation of The Brothers Karamazov features an introduction highlighting Dostoyevsky’s recurrent themes of guilt and salvation, with a new chronology and further reading. |
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Credited with inventing the modern horror tradition, H. P. Lovecraft remade the genre in the early twentieth century, discarding ghosts and witches and instead envisaging mankind at the mercy of a chaotic and malevolent universe. This selection of stories ranges from early tales of nightmares and insanity such as ‘The Outsider’ and ‘Rats in the Walls’, through the grotesquely comic ‘Herbert West – Reanimator’ and ‘The Hound’, to the extra-terrestrial terror of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, which fuses traditional supernaturalism with science fiction. Including the definitive corrected texts, this collection reveals the development of Lovecraft’s mesmerizing narrative style and establishes him as a hugely influential – and visionary – American writer. Edited with an Introduction by S. T. Joshi. |
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Clarkson on Cars is a revamped, rejuvenated and expanded edition of Clarkson's classic collection of car journalism. Clarkson rewrote the rule book for motor journalism and here's how. Opinionated, original and laugh-out-loud funny, this is Clarkson at his best. |
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‘He saw a most wonderful sight. Through a little hole in the wall the children had crept in … the trees were so glad to have the children back again that they had covered themselves with blossoms’ Fairy tales, ghost stories, detective fiction and comedies of manners – the stories collected in this volume made Oscar Wilde’s name as a writer of fiction, showing breathtaking dexterity in a wide range of literary styles. Victorian moral justice is comically inverted in ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ and ‘The Canterville Ghost’, and society’s materialism comes under sharp, humorous criticism in ‘The Model Millionaire’, while ‘The Happy Prince’ and ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ are hauntingly melancholic in their magical evocations of selfless love. These small masterpieces convey the brilliance of Wilde’s vision, exploring complex moral issues through an elegant juxtaposition of wit and sentiment. This edition includes the complete texts of Wilde’s three volumes of short fiction, together with ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’. Ian Small’s introduction discusses Wilde’s life, the cultural and literary background to his fiction, and the complex ways in which it can be read. |
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The famous tale of adventure, courage and loyalty in the South Seas. Fifteen-year-old Ralph, mischievous young Peterkin and clever, brave Jack are shipwrecked on a coral reef with only a telescope and a broken penknife between them. At first the island seems a paradise, with its plentiful foods and wealth of natural wonders. But then a party of cannibals arrives, and after that a pirate ship . . . |
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Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in the provincial town of 'N', visiting a succession of landowners and making each a strange offer. He proposes to buy the names of dead serfs still registered on the census, saving their owners from paying tax on them, and to use these 'souls' as collateral to re-invent himself as a gentleman. In this ebullient masterpiece, Gogol created a grotesque gallery of human types, from the bear-like Sobakevich to the insubstantial fool Manilov, and, above all, the devilish con man Chichikov. Dead Souls, Russia's first major novel, is one of the most unusual works of nineteenth-century fiction and a devastating satire on social hypocrisy. |
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They presided over the most destructive regimes in history, murdered millions and fought the most barbarous war the world had seen. Yet countless Germans and Russians worshipped them and the values they stood for. How did Hitler and Stalin come to cast such a shadow over the twentieth century? Richard Overy’s acclaimed history is the first to examine both the two regimes and the people who lived under them: how dictatorship became possible, the use of terror, the camp systems, the bond between leader and followers, and, above all, how these men managed to draw the wide consent that enabled them to kill on such a colossal scale. |
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One of the masters of 'weird fiction', H. P. Lovecraft expanded the vast boundaries of the horror genre with his vividly imagined stories of exotic and fantastical otherworlds, nightmarish dreamscapes or the supernatural terrors lurking beneath the surface of small-town America. The shadow of New England's witch-hunting past hangs over many of the tales, as in 'The Shunned House' and 'The Dreams in the Witch House', in which malevolent spectres return to haunt the region. Others, such as 'From Beyond' and 'The Shadow Out of Time', depict the catastrophic results when cosmic channels of time and space are opened, while stories such as 'Polaris' and 'The Doom that Came to Sarnath' portray the downfall of mythical civilizations. |
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