Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. The epic tale of Odysseus and his ten-year journey home after the Trojan War forms one of the earliest and greatest works of Western literature. Confronted by natural and supernatural threats - shipwrecks, battles, monsters and the i...
For years, Emelle has been a cupid - The ultimate matchmaker to help others fall in love. But this job means that she has no physical body and can't be seen by anyone. Or be able to fall in love herself.Unfortunately, she becomes responsible for some rather bad matchmaking. So much so, she's punished and exiled from the human world.Fed up she angrily fires Love Arrows at a fae prince, but he retaliates, and suddenly, she's pushed out of the Veil.Now, she has a real body. A re...
'... ever-present, phantom thing;My slave, my comrade, and my king'Some of Emily Brontë's most extraordinary poemsIntroducing 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...
She spent years in the Veil as an invisible cupid. Unable to talk, touch or love anyone, which made her a little bitter.Now, Emelle has a life . . . and a bounty on her head. The fae prince wants her dead, and her three gorgeous genfins are arrested. The royal culling trials are about to begin, but Emelle isn't going to let everything be taken from her without a fight.There's rebellion in the air, a princess who's not all she appears to be and a lamassu fae who claims to be E...
Streetwise George and his big, childlike friend Lennie are drifters, searching for work in the fields and valleys of California. They have nothing except the clothes on their back, and a hope that one day they'll find a place of their own and live the American dream. But dreams come at a price. Gentle giant Lennie doesn't know his own strength, and when they find work at a ranch he gets into trouble with the boss's daughter-in-law. Trouble so bad that even his protector Georg...
The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs'Biting and timeless reflections on patriotism, prejudice and power, from the man who wrote about his nation better than anyone. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Bald...
* SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION * * SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD * Lea Ypi grew up in one of the most isolated countries on earth, a place where communist ideals had officially replaced religion. Albania, the last Stalinist outpost in Europe, was almost impossible to visit, almost impossible to leave. It was a place of queuing and scarcity, of political executions and secret police. To Lea, it was home. People were equal, neighbours he...
Emelle used to be just a stupid cupid helping others fall in love (or not) and living a loveless life.Everything changed when she went to the fae realm and was no longer invisible. Her sole goal was to find love for herself, and she did. With four fae men.Too bad she found trouble too.She's somehow become an accidental spy for the kingdom's rebels, and there's a war brewing in the realm.All this cupid really wants to do is spread a bit of love . . .Good thing there's nothing ...
When Mae is hired to work for the Circle, the world's most powerful internet company, she feels she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime. Run out of a sprawling California campus, the Circle links users' personal emails, social media, and finances with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of transparency. Mae can't believe her great fortune to work for them - even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange enc...
Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life; indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman inthe eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence. The novel was a succčs de scandale and the book was later used as evidence against Wilde at the Old Bailey in 1895. It has lost none of its power to f...
Discover the standalone enemies-to-lovers dark mafia romance from the New York Times bestselling author and TikTok sensation, perfect for fans of Penelope Douglas and Sophie Lark. 'This book was a masterpiece' ***** Reader review ‘I couldn’t put it down, definitely recommend and the spice omg’ ***** Reader review 'Dark and delicious' ***** Reader review 'BookTok did not disappoint' ***** Reader review When Cecily Knight sneaks into the Heathen Club’s initiation on behalf of a...
Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his ne...
What is the life of a human being - a drop of dew, a flash of lightning? This is so sad, so sad.' Autobiographical stories from one of Japan's masters of modernist story-telling.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,...
A colourful universe of aristocratic buffoonery and public school nonsense' Greg James, host of BBC Radio 1 BreakfastPoor Pongo Twistleton only has to endure his energetic seventy-year-old Uncle Fred for lunch, once a year, but when he descends from Ickenham (he's the fifth Earl, don't you know) he has a plan that will make Pongo's hair stand on end and re-introduce him to his long-lost fiancée Sally Painter.But Pongo is busy impressing his future father-in-law Sir Aylmer Bos...
This is an all new version of the popular PARALLEL TEXT series, containing eight pieces of contemporary fiction in the original Italian and in English translation. Including stories by Calvino, Benni, Sciascia and Levi, this volume gives a fascinating insight into Italian culture and literature as well as providing an invaluable educational tool.
Emelle and her four mates are now parents, and their nest is growing.Aside from the impending delivery she has to prepare for, Emelle also happens to be the cupid boss, which means she needs to train the new recruits just in time for Valentine's Day.With cupids, and babies, and her harem mates, she's got her hands full.Yet as she knows, if you can't do something with love, then it's not worth doing at all. Luckily, she still has plenty of that to go around.And she's about to ...
*TOP 2 BESTSELLER IN THE ENTIRE STORE!*From USA Today bestselling author Rina Kent comes a new STANDALONE grumpy sunshine college romance.Creighton King is silent, brooding, and hostile. Annika Volkov still has a crush on him. She is everything he is not: bright, lively, and the heart of every party. What Annika doesn’t realize is that behind Creighton’s quiet beauty lies a dark and violent soul.Creighton knows he can never outrun his past, so he unleashes his pain on others....
Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubl...
Rosalie Harrow is unmarried, near destitute and faces two choices: snag a wealthy gentleman or take a position as a governess. But headstrong Rosalie sees both futures as a kind of cage.When Rosalie receives an invitation to Alcott Hall, she believes she’s there to meet the Dowager Duchess of Norland, the mysterious childhood friend of her late mother. Instead, Rosalie is thrust in the middle of a house party of eligible high society ladies all desperate to win the hand of th...
Welcome to the Japan of tomorrow. Here, the practice of a radical sympathy toward criminals has become the norm – and a grand skyscraper in the heart of Tokyo is planned to house wrongdoers in compassionate comfort. Acclaimed architect Sara Machina has been tasked with designing the city's new centrepiece, but is riven by doubt. As she casts her mind to the terrible crime she experienced as a young girl, she wonders if she might think against the grain of her time: could it b...
In this ambitious, myth-busting book, leading scientist and internationally bestselling author Vaclav Smil investigates many of the burning questions facing the world today: Why are some of the world’s biggest food producers also the countries with the most undernourished populations? Why is food waste a colossal 1,000kcal per person daily, and how can we solve that? Could we all go vegan and be healthy? Should we? How will we feed the ballooning population without killing th...
Evie Sage didn’t mean to become the right-hand woman to the kingdom’s most terrifying villain. One minute, she was applying for an entry-level position that promised “light paperwork and occasional beheadings,” and the next, she was knee-deep in magical mayhem, murder plots, and an entirely inappropriate crush on her brooding, sharp-jawed, walking disaster of a boss.Now, with a magical prophecy unraveling, assassins showing up in the break room, and a suspicious amount of fro...
This selection of Poe's stories, poetry and other writing demonstrates the astonishing power and imagination with which he probed the darkest corners of the human mind. 'The Fall of the House of Usher' describes the final hours of a family tormented by tragedy and the legacy of the past. In 'The Tell-Tale Heart', a murderer's insane delusions threaten to betray him, while stories such as 'The Pit and the Pendulum' and 'The Cask of Amontillado' explore extreme states of decade...
While on a business trip to Kobe, Tsuneo Asai receives the news that his wife Eiko has died of a heart attack. Eiko had a heart condition so the news of her death wasn't totally unexpected. But the circumstances of her demise left Tsuneo, a softly spoken government bureaucrat, perplexed. How did it come about that his wife, who was shy and withdrawn, and only left their house twice a week to go to haiku meetings ended up dead in a small shop in a shady Tokyo neighbourhood?Whe...
History belongs to the heroes. But to get the full story, sometimes you have to ask the side characters.The lives of Leonardo da Vinci, Henry VIII and Queen Victoria fill bookshelves and fascinate scholars all over the world. But little attention is given to the ferret who posed for the renaissance master, the servant who oversaw the Tudor’s toilet time, or the famous horse who thrilled the miserable old monarch.These supporting cast members have been waiting in the wings for...
One beautiful Californian evening, a wealthy businessman falls to his death from his secluded cliff-top house onto the rocks below.A tragic accident? Or murder?Nora and her half-brother Sam suspect it may be the latter, and team up to uncover the truth of what really happened that night.But their relationship has never been easy, and it is about to be tested to the limit as they start to question how well either of them really knew their elusive father.Unravelling his mysteri...
You may not know the stranger in room six. But they know everything about you.It's been fifteen years since Belinda was convicted of her husband's murder. Now, she's ready for her life to begin again, and she's set on that happening at Sunnyside Home for the Young at Heart.The owner, Mabel, has spent her life here. First as an evacuee during the Blitz and now as the care home's oldest resident, Mabel has held the secrets of this house for as long as she can remember. Secrets ...
Falling in love can be murder…No one in Lily Lennox’s life can understand why, each of the past five summers, she has shut her successful business and chosen instead to be paid minimum wage life-guarding at the exclusive Riovan Wellness Resort in a sun-soaked Caribbean island.Fortunately for her, they also aren’t aware of the mysterious deaths that have occurred on the island every time she’s there.Lily always tries to avoid bringing attention to herself. After all, if your m...
Why can no two people ever see the same rainbow? What happens when you pull a pop song apart into pure sine waves and play it back on a piano? Why does the wake behind a duck always form an angle of exactly 39 degrees? And what did mathematicians have to do with the great pig stampede of 2012? The answer to each of these questions can be found in the triangle.In Love Triangle, stand-up comedian, ex-maths teacher and Sunday Times number one bestselling author Matt Parker is on...
SOLDIERYears ago, Cal Dexter was a Vietnam tunnel rat recruited to ferret out the enemy. Today, he's hired to pursue a new target – a dangerous, violent man, responsible for murdering an innocent aid worker. Dexter wants revenge, and he never misses his mark.VIGILANTEBut the beast Dexter's hunting is Zilic, a Serbian warlord who is cocooned in a fortified South American compound with the best security money can buy. And it isn't long before Dexter's personal mission explodes ...
It's never too late to find where you belong...Thea knew the holiday house her late husband Marco bought in Tuscany wasn't pristine. But when she relocates to Italy for the summer with her children, she's shocked by how much work Casa Luna needs. And she only has six weeks to fix it up ready to sell! Her only option is to ask the tight-knit Italian community for help.In return, Thea and her children become involved in the community kitchen, working alongside handsome chef Gio...
From 'one of our most thrilling and singular innovators on the page' (Laura Van Den Berg), a tightly wound, consuming tale about a 1950s American housewife, for fans of Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Franzen and Taffy Brodesser-AknerLONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2024A Barnes & Noble BEST BOOK of 2024'Clever, moving and unexpected. A brilliantly deft and subtle story.' - Emma Healey, author of Elizabeth is Missing---A warm Sunday in November 1957. As Sputnik 2 orbits the ear...
If only summer could last forever . . .Belly has only ever loved two boys: Conrad and Jeremiah Fisher. One broke her heart, the other made her happier than she thought she could ever be.And after being with Jeremiah for the last two years, she’s almost positive he is her soul mate. Almost.But each brother is keeping a secret, and this summer Belly must choose between the Fisher boys, once and for all.Who will she choose? And who’s heart will she break?...
WINNER OF THE IRISH BOOK OF THE YEARSHORTLISTED FOR THE NERO NOVEL OF THE YEARSHORTLISTED FOR THE KERRY GROUP IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEARFINALIST FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR FICTION'Donal Ryan’s writing has earned him a place among the greatest names in Irish literature and this lyrical novel speaks to the very heart of modern Irish society.' Maria Dickenson, Chair of the IBA judges'Beautiful...a book full of love and hope, more needed in these days than ever' Kit de Waal'I am blown...
Orlando has always been an outsider...His longing for passion, adventure and fulfilment takes him out of his own time. Chasing a dream through the centuries, he bounds from Elizabethan England amd imperial Turkey to the modern world.Will he find happiness with the exotic Russian Princess Sasha? Or is the dashing explorer Shelmerdine the ideal man? And what form will Orlando take on the journey - a nobleman, traveller, writer? Man or... woman?
The story of Britain is revealed through its buildings, and yet the language of architecture is a mystery to all but a few. In this enlightening history, spanning castles and cathedrals to factories and railway stations, Jenkins translates the hidden narratives infused in the facades we walk past every day.Britain’s history has been formed by its politics, religion and society and these influences can be seen in the architectural styles that have shaped its landscape. From pr...
In Delta of Venus Anaďs Nin conjures up a glittering cascade of sexual encounters. Creating her own 'language of the senses', she explores an area that was previously the domain of male writers and brings to it her own unique perceptions. Her vibrant and impassioned prose evokes the essence of female sexuality in a world where only love has meaning. Her second volume of erotic writings, Little Birds, is also published by Penguin.
Heath and Teagan have one thing in common: they don't want to be in a relationship.Teagan, who is busy finishing her law degree, needs a break from the stress of living up to her parents' expectations. Heath is following his passion and starting his career as a physical therapist, but his family's drama is tearing his life apart behind the scenes.As members of the same friend group, Heath and Teagan will be around each other plenty during wedding season, whether they like it ...
Jean-Baptiste Clamence is a soul in turmoil. Over several drunken nights he regales a chance acquaintance with his story. From this successful former lawyer and seemingly model citizen a compelling, self-loathing catalogue of guilt, hypocrisy and alienation pours forth.The Fall (1956) is a brilliant portrayal of a man who has glimpsed the hollowness of his existence. But beyond depicting one man's disillusionment, Camus's novel exposes the universal human condition and its ab...
In a shabby house in the new capital of Madrid, Luzia Cotado uses scraps of magic to get through her days of endless toil. But when her scheming mistress discovers her scullion is hiding a talent for little miracles, she demands Luzia use those gifts to win over the royal court.Determined to seize this chance to better her fortunes, Luzia plunges into a world of power-hungry nobility, desperate kings, holy men and seers, where the lines between magic, science and fraud blur. ...
A chance encounter while holidaying in Central America leads an American couple, the Slades, to befriend the charming, handsome Grove Soto and his young Cuban mistress. But as the Slades' trip becomes prolonged and they grow increasingly dependent on their new acquaintances, an undercurrent of cruelty begins to disturb the comfort and niceties to which they are accustomed. Up Above the World shows Paul Bowles to be a master of the tension and horror of rising viciousness....
We talk about sex more and more, but are we more liberated?The first part of Michel Foucault's landmark account of our evolving attitudes in the west shows how the nineteenth century, far from suppressing sexuality, led to an explosion of discussion about sex as a separate sphere of life for study and examination. As a result, he argues, we are making a science of sex which is devoted to the analysis of desire rather than the increase of pleasure.
A newly married woman longs, irrationally, for a silk umbrella; a husband chases away his wife's beloved cat; a betrayed mother impulsively sacks her housekeeper. Underneath the surface of these precisely observed tales of love, marriage and family life in mid-century Copenhagen pulse currents of desire, violence and despair, as women and men dream of escaping their conventional roles and finding freedom and happiness - without ever truly understanding what that might mean....
A cultural landmark and the most shocking novel in the English language, Naked Lunch is an exhilarating ride into the darkest recesses of the human psyche. An unnerving tale of an addict unmoored in New York, Tangier, and ultimately a nightmarish wasteland known as Interzone, Naked Lunch's formal innovation, formerly taboo subject matter, and tour de force execution has exerted its influence authors like Thomas Pynchon and J. G. Ballard; on the relationship of art and obsceni...
Clarice Lispector's sensational, prize-winning debut novel Near to the Wild Heart was published when she was twenty-three and earned her the name 'Hurricane Clarice'. It tells the story of Joana, from her wild, creative childhood, as the 'little egg' who writes poems for her father, through her marriage to the faithless Otávio and on to her decision to make her own way in the world. As Joana, endlessly mutable, moves through different emotional states, this impressionistic, d...
The Hearing Trumpet is the story of 92-year-old Marian Leatherby, who is given the gift of a hearing trumpet only to discover that what her family is saying is that she is to be committed to an institution. But this is an institution where the buildings are shaped like birthday cakes and igloos, where the Winking Abbess and the Queen Bee reign, and where the gateway to the underworld is open. It is also the scene of a mysterious murder. Occult twin to Alice in Wonderland, The...
Jean Rhys's late, literary masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea was inspired by Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. After their marriage the rumours begin, poisoning her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoine...
How the world’s best actors communicate with gravitas – and how you can, too.‘The theatre stars’ voice guru’ Daily MailActing is all about charisma. Whether you’re an A-list star or an extra, when you’re on stage you need to perform in a way that makes your audience listen.That stage presence is something we can all learn from. Every time you speak up in a meeting, recount an anecdote, or tell a joke, it’s essential to communicate with gravitas.Jeannette Nelson knows a thing ...
Growing up in a working-class neighbourhood in Copenhagen, Tove feels that her childhood is made for a completely different girl. As 'long, mysterious words begin to crawl across my soul', she comes to understand that she has a vocation that will define her life. Her path seems assured, but she has no idea of the struggles ahead - love affairs, wanted and unwanted pregnancies, artistic failure and destructive addiction. As the years go by, the central tension of Tove's life c...
We're not Christians, Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli.' Exiled to a remote and barren corner of Italy for his opposition to Mussolini, Carlo Levi entered a world cut off from history and the state, hedged in by custom and sorrow, without comfort or solace, where, eternally patient, the peasants lived in an age-old stillness and in the presence of death - for Christ did stop at Eboli.
There's something nasty in suburbia. In these deliciously dark tales, the daily commute turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, the loving wife hides homicidal thoughts and the concerned citizen might just be an infamous serial killer. In the haunting world of Shirley Jackson, nothing is as it seems and nowhere is safe, from the city streets to the crumbling country pile, and from the small-town apartment to the dark, dark woods...
Nobody before Borges had ever attempted this strange and wonderful mixture of arcana, popular literature, national myth, the nature of time and classical themes. Now we can see it in all its intense and disturbing brilliance, certain that we will never see anything like it again' - Justin Cartwright, Independent on Sunday
From the moment Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya in 1914 to manage a coffee plantation, her heart belonged to Africa. Drawn to the intense colours and ravishing landscapes, Karen Blixen spent her happiest years on the farm and her experiences and friendships with the people around her are vividly recalled in these memoirs. Out of Africa is the story of a remarkable and unconventional woman and of a way of life that has vanished for ever.
Abandoned by her husband, Amanda Wingfield comforts herself with recollections of her earlier, more gracious life in Blue Mountain when she was pursued by 'gentleman callers'. Her son Tom, a poet with a job in a warehouse, longs for adventure and escape from his mother's suffocating embrace, while Laura, her shy crippled daughter, has her glass menagerie and her memories. Amanda is desperate to find her daughter a husband, but when the long-awaited gentleman caller does arriv...
In a rocky cove in the bay of Hakata, the bodies of a young and beautiful couple are discovered. Standing in the coast's wind and cold, the police see nothing to investigate: the flush of the couple's cheeks speaks clearly of cyanide, of a lovers' suicide. But in the eyes of two men, Torigai Jutaro, a senior detective, and Kiichi Mihara, a young gun from Tokyo, something is not quite right. Together, they begin to pick at the knot of a unique and calculated crime . . .Now wid...
For the past fifty years, Louise Glück has been a major force in modern poetry, distinguished as much for the restless intelligence, wit and intimacy of her poetic voice as for her development of a particular form: the book-length sequence of poems. This volume brings together the twelve collections Glück has published to date, offering readers the opportunity to become immersed in the artistry and vision of one of the world's greatest poets.From the allegories of The Wild Ir...
In the spring of 1948 Arthur Miller retreated to a log cabin in Connecticut with the first two lines of a new play already fixed in his mind. He emerged six weeks later with the final script of Death of a Salesman - a painful examination of American life and consumerism. Opening on Broadway the following year, Miller's extraordinary masterpiece changed the course of modern theatre. In creating Willy Loman, his destructively insecure anti-hero, Miller himself defined his aim a...
Meticulously selected and artfully recreated, the selection of stories in Italian is vast and ranges geographically from Corsica and Sicily to Venice and the Alps. Calvino is himself clearly captivated by the folkloric imagination and communicates this in what is a fascinating and rich addition to folk literature.
Harry Goldfarb, heroin addict and son of lonely widow Sara, cares only about enjoying the good life with girlfriend Marion and best friend Tyrone C Love, and making the most of all the hash, poppers and dope they can get. Sara Goldfarb sits at home with the TV, dreaming of the life she could have and struggling with her own addictions - food and diet pills. But these four will pay a terrible price for the pleasures they believe they are entitled to. A passionate, heart-break...
‘One of the masters of the short story’ GuardianThese six stories of obsession, secrets, delusions and desires from one of the greatest European writers show individuals caught up in forces beyond their control – whether an art dealer agreeing to a heartbreaking deception, a soldier destroyed by war, a servant infatuated with her employer or a young boy witnessing illicit adult passions. Portraying innocence lost and lives crushed by history, each tale is a psychologically ac...
For Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas, life in Paris was based upon the rue de Fleurus and the Saturday evenings and ‘it was like a kaleidoscope slowly turning’. Picasso was there with ‘his high whinnying spanish giggle’, as were Cezanne and Matisse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. As Toklas put it – ‘The geniuses came and talked to Gertrude Stein and the wives sat with me’. A light-hearted entertainment, this is in fact Gertrude Stein’s own autobiography and a roll-...
'Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it'At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, we see the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the world of the theatre lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. And everywhere there is the ang...
Combining startling lyricism with what often seems like the entire breadth of human sensuality, Little Birds is Anais Nin's masterwork. Each of the volume's thirteen stories builds on the other, embracing desire in all its variety, its complexity, its paradoxical simplicity.Anais Nin's Little Birds is now a major series on Sky Atlantic.
The subject of this book is the life of the former cement-worker and haulier Franz Biberkopf in Berlin. As our story begins, he has just been released from prison, where he did time for some stupid stuff, and now he is back in Berlin, determined to go straight.To begin with, he succeeds. But then he gets involved in a set-to with an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate. To see and hear this will be worthwhile for many readers who, like Franz Biberko...
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in 1943, only a year before his plane vanished over the Mediterranean Sea during a reconnaissance mission. Nearly eighty years later, this fable of love and loneliness has lost none of its power.The narrator is a pilot downed in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the miraculous appearance of a little prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. "In the fa...
At Waterloo Station, hopeful new arrivals from the West Indies step off the boat train, ready to start afresh in 1950s London. There, homesick Moses Aloetta, who has already lived in the city for years, meets Henry 'Sir Galahad' Oliver and shows him the ropes. In this strange, cold and foggy city where the natives can be less than friendly at the sight of a black face, has Galahad met his Waterloo? But the irrepressible newcomer cannot be cast down. He and all the other lonel...
‘You have talked so often of going to the dogs – and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them.’ George Orwell’s vivid memoir of his time among the desperately poor and destitute in London and Paris is a moving tour of the underworld of society. Here he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor – sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses, working as a dishwasher in the vile ‘Hôtel X’, living alongside tramps, surviving on scraps and c...
Over the past two centuries, economic growth has freed billions from poverty and made our lives far healthier and longer. As a result, the unfettered pursuit of growth defines economic life around the world. Yet this prosperity has come at an enormous price: deepening inequalities, destabilizing technologies, environmental destruction and climate change.Confusion reigns. For many, in our era of anaemic economic progress, the worry is slowing growth - in the UK, Europe, China ...
A Short History of Decay (1949) is E. M. Cioran's nihilistic and witty collection of aphoristic essays concerning the nature of civilization in mid 20th-century Europe. Touching upon man's need to worship, the feebleness of God, the downfall of the Ancient Greeks and the melancholy baseness of all existence, Cioran's pieces are pessimistic in the extreme, but also display a beautiful certainty that renders them delicate, vivid, and memorable. Illuminating and brutally honest,...
Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes some of Sontag's best-known works, among them 'On Style', 'Notes on 'Camp'', and the titular essay 'Against Interpretation', where Sontag argues that modern cultural conditions have given way to a new critical approach to aesthetics.
Despised for his weakness and regarded by his family as little more than a stammering fool, the nobleman Claudius quietly survives the intrigues, bloody purges and mounting cruelty of the imperial Roman dynasties. In I, Claudius he watches from the sidelines to record the reigns of its emperors: from the wise Augustus and his villainous wife Livia to the sadistic Tiberius and the insane excesses of Caligula. Written in the form of Claudius' autobiography, this is the first pa...
