Vintage Classics – serie

Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian classic Brave New World predicts – with eerie clarity – a terrifying vision of the future, which feels ever closer to our own reality.'The best science fiction book ever, definitely the most prescient…’ Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and Homo Deus ‘A masterpiece of speculation... As vibrant, fresh, and somehow shocking as it was when I first read it’ Margaret Atwood Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free. A visit to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations where the old, imperfect life still continues, may be the cure for his distress...Huxley's ingenious fantasy of the future sheds a blazing light on the present and is considered to be his most enduring masterpiece. WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY MARGARET ATWOOD AND DAVID BRADSHAWA grave warning... Provoking, stimulating, shocking and dazzling' Observer

Discover this profound account of Huxley's famous experimentation with mescalin that has influenced writers and artists for decades.‘Concise, evocative, wise and, above all, humane, The Doors of Perception is a masterpiece’ Sunday TimesIn 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers, was transformed. Huxley described his experience with breathtaking immediacy in The Doors of Perception. In its sequel Heaven and Hell, he goes on to explore the history and nature of mysticism. Still bristling with a sense of excitement and discovery, these illuminating and influential writings remain the most fascinating account of the visionary experience ever written.WITH A FOREWORD J.G. BALLARD

Solzhenitsyn spent eleven years in labour camps and in exile.This book is his masterwork, based on his own experiences as well as the testimony of some 200 survivors. A vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, it chronicles the story of those who dared to oppose Stalin, and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. A thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power, this edition of The Gulag Archipelago was abridged into one volume at the request of the author.'Helped to bring down an empire. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated' Doris Lessing, Sunday Telegraph'Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece...helped create the world we live in today' Anne ApplebaumWITH AN AFTERWORD BY JORDAN B. PETERSONTHE OFFICIALLY APPROVED ABRIDGEMENT OF THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO VOLUMES I, II & III

A masterwork by the incomparable, genre-defying, wondrous Italo Calvino. You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You like it. But there is a printer's error in your copy. You take it back to the shop and get a replacement. But the replacement seems to be a totally different story. You try to track down the original book you were reading but end up with a different narrative again. This remarkable novel leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary and a quest. But the real hero of them all is you, the reader.'Breathtakingly inventive' David Mitchell'A writer of dizzying ambition and variety, each of his stories is a fresh adventure into the possibilities of fiction' Guardian

This is the story of a quiet man, destined to be a farmer but who becomes an academic. It is book in which nothing and everything happens and is possibly the greatest novel you've never read.'It's simply a novel about a guy who goes to college and becomes a teacher. But its one of the most fascinating things that you've ever come across' Tom Hanks, TimeWilliam Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death, his colleagues remember him rarely.Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value - of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history - and in doing so reclaims the significance of an individual life.'A beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life' Ian McEwan'A brilliant, beautiful, inexorably sad, wise and elegant novel' Nick HornbyINTRODUCED BY JOHN McGAHERN

This is a volcanic journey into the soul of a winged red monster named Geryon. It is queer coming-of-age love story, a Greek myth retold, and a modern classic.Tormented as a boy by his brother, Geryon escapes to a parallel world of photography. He falls deeply in love with Herakles, a golden young man, who deserts him at the peak of infatuation. So Geryon retreats ever further into the world created by his camera, fascinated by his wings, his redness and the fantastic accident of who he is. But all is suddenly and irrevocably shattered by Herakles’ return.Autobiography of Red is a deceptively simple narrative filled with currents of meaning, emotion, and the truth about what it’s like to be red. An extraordinary, modern epic poem - moving, disturbing and delightful.'Totally engrossing' Ocean Vuong'This book is amazing - I haven't discovered any writing in years that's so marvellously disturbing' Alice Munro‘A profound love story...sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender’ Ruth Padel, New York Times Book Review

**NOW A MAJOR FILM**BY THE AUTHOR OF STONERWill Andrews is no academic. He longs for wildness, freedom, hope and vigour. He leaves Harvard and sets out for the West to discover a new way of living.In a small town called Butcher's Crossing he meets a hunter with a story of a lost herd of buffalo in a remote Colorado valley, just waiting to be taken by a team of men brave and crazy enough to find them. Will makes up his mind to be one of those men, but the journey, the killing, harsh conditions and sheer hard luck will test his mind and body to their limits.

'The novel that I love the most is The Quiet American' Ian McEwan, Sunday Times bestselling author of LessonsInto the intrigue and violence of 1950s Saigon comes CIA agent Alden Pyle, a young idealistic American sent to promote democracy through a mysterious 'Third Force'.As Pyle's naive optimism starts to cause bloodshed, his friend Fowler, a cynical foreign correspondent, finds it hard to stand aside and watch. But even as Fowler intervenes he wonders why: for the greater good, or something altogether more complicated?WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ZADIE SMITH**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

ENTER THE CRUMBLING WORLD OF GORMENGHAST...'A modern classic' Anthony Burgess'A gorgeous volcanic eruption... A work of extraordinary imagination' New Yorker'A perfect creation' Neil Gaiman Gormenghast is the vast, crumbling castle to which the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, is lord and heir. Titus is expected to rule this gothic labyrinth of turrets and dungeons (and his eccentric and wayward subjects) according to strict age-old rituals, but things are changing in the castle. Titus must contend with treachery, manipulation and murder as well as his own longing for a life beyond the castle walls.'Peake's books are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before' C. S. Lewis

The unparalleled short story collection by the great Raymond Carver, master of spare, powerful prose and one of the great American short story writers. This powerful collection of stories is set in the mid-West among the lonely men and women who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time. In the opening story a man whose wife and children have left him, rearranges all his furniture on the lawn. And in each subsequent story sadness, pain and drudgery propel the characters towards their fate. But through the darkness, vivid colloquial narration and a razor-sharp sense of how people really communicate illuminate all the comedy and tragedy of ordinary life.‘The master craftsman of the modern American short story’ Daily Telegraph‘One of America's most original, truest voices’ Salman Rushdie'The most celebrated story collection from one of the true American masters' New York Review of Books

The book that won Ernest Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature'It's silly not to hope. It's a sin he thought'Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the tale of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. This story of heroic endeavour won Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. It stands as a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements.'The best story Hemingway has written. No page of this beautiful master-work could have been done better or differently' Sunday Times'The writing is as taut, and at the same time as lithe and cunningly played out, as the line on which the old man plays the fish' Guardian

Oedipa Maas has been made executrix of her former lover’s estate.The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oedipa in isolation on the threshold of revelation, awaiting the crying of lot 49.Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humour, The Crying of Lot 49 is by far the shortest of Pynchon’s great, dazzling novels – and one of his most iconic.‘The best American novel I have read since the war’ Frank Kermode‘Remarkable... The Crying of Lot 49 resembles metaphysical poetry in the range of its allusions and the curiosity of its creator’ Washington Post

The brilliant graphic memoir of growing up in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution.Marjane Satrapi lived through the Iranian Revolution as a little girl. This is her classic memoir-in-comic-strips, the story of a child entangled in the history and politics of her country. It paints an unforgettable portrait of growing up in revolutionary and war-torn Iran, in a family that was both outrageous and ordinary, beset by tragedy and yet buffered by love. Funny, wise, ultimately heartbreaking and told with unforgettable pictures.‘A revelation...you will remember it for a very long time’ Mark Haddon‘The magic of Marjane Satrapi’s work is that it can condense a whole country’s tragedy into one poignant, funny scene after another’ Independent on SundayTHE COMPLETE PERSEPOLIS VOLUMES I & II: Includes The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a ReturnTRANSLATED BY ANJALI SINGH**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

The inspiration for One Battle After AnotherThomas Pynchon's wretchedly funny dystopian thriller, sending up the end days of the American dreamVineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc.Full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs, movie spoofs, and illicit sex, Vineland is vintage Pynchon.'That rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years' Salman Rushdie

The classic political study of how elite forces shape mass media.Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky investigate how an underlying elite consensus structures mainstream media. Here they skilfully dissect the way in which the marketplace and the economics of publishing significantly shape the news.This book reveals how issues are framed and topics chosen, and the double standards underlying accounts of free elections, a free press, and governmental repression between Nicaragua and El Salvador; between the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the American invasion of Vietnam; between the genocide in Cambodia under a pro-American government and genocide under Pol Pot.What emerges from this ground-breaking work is an account of just how propagandistic our mass media can be, and how we can learn to read them and see their function in a radically new way.

Geoffrey Braithwaite is a retired doctor haunted by an obsession with the French literary genius, Gustave Flaubert.As Geoffrey investigates the mystery of the stuffed parrot Flaubert borrowed from the Museum of Rouen to help research one of his novels, we learn an enormous amount about the writer’s work, family, lovers, thought processes, health and obsessions. But we also gradually come to learn some important and shocking details about Geoffrey himself.A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert's Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour-de-force of seductive originality.‘Unputdownable... A mesmeric original’ Philip Larkin‘Delightful and enriching...a book to revel in!’ Joseph Heller‘A wry and graceful book... Unfailingly sharp and often very funny’ Sunday TimesWITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR TO MARK THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF FIRST PUBLICATION

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY EVIE WYLD 'There is not a page in this first novel which does not prove that its author is a master storyteller' New York TimesWeird, withdrawn, and unloved, Fred is a young collector of butterflies. One day his eye alights on a beautiful stranger, the art student Miranda, and an obsession starts to form. So when Fred wins some money he decides to use the money to compensate for his unfair start and to get what he really wants - Miranda. If she could only get to know him she might start to love him. And so with the meticulous attention to detail of an experienced collector he calmly plans her abduction.

Were it not for shadows there would be no beauty.Nothing evokes the calm and nuance of the traditional Japanese aesthetic more profoundly than this book. Tanizaki’s eye ranges over architecture, jade, food, even toilets, examining the design and feel of the intimate places we inhabit. His acute sense of the use of space in buildings, his poetic descriptions of lacquerware under candlelight and his appreciation for natural materials suggest the possibility of a simpler, more beautiful life – one in which the softness of shadows is shielded from the dazzling light of modernity.‘Tanazaki suggests an attitude of appreciation and mindfulness, especially mindfulness of beauty, as central to life lived well’ AC Grayling, Guardian‘That it is a work of art can never be in doubt’ New Statesman'Elegant...a delight to read' Independent on Sunday

'You are the knife I turn inside myself'Franz Kafka's letters to his one-time muse, Milena Jesenska - an intimate window into the desires and hopes of the twentieth-century's most prophetic and important writerKafka first made the acquaintance of Milena Jesenska in 1920 when she was translating his early short prose into Czech. Their relationship quickly developed into a deep attachment. Such was his feeling for her that Kafka showed her his diaries and, in doing so, laid bare his heart and his conscience.While at times Milena's 'genius for living' gave Kafka new life, it ultimately exhausted him, and their relationship was to last little over two years. In 1924 Kafka died in a sanatorium near Vienna, and Milena died in 1944 at the hands of the Nazis, leaving these letters as a moving record of their relationship.

Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio. Unloved, unseen, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes. In this way she dreams of becoming beautiful, of becoming someone – like her white schoolfellows – worthy of care and attention. Immersing us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression Ohio, Toni Morrison’s indelible debut reveals the nightmare at the heart of Pecola’s yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfilment.**AS FEATURED IN OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB**'She revealed the sins of her nation, while profoundly elevating its canon. She suffused the telling of blackness with beauty, whilst steering us away from the perils of the white gaze. That's why she told her stories. And why we will never, ever stop reading them' Afua Hirsch'Discovering a writer like Toni Morrison is rarest of pleasures' Washington Post'When she arrived, with her first novel, The Bluest Eye, she immediately re-ordered the American literary landscape' Ben OkriWinner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

The first collection of stories by the great master of the short story form, Raymond Carver. In the title story a man starts to suspect his wife has been unfaithful to him and his delicate grip on normality begins to disintegrate. In ‘Fat’ a waitress at a diner is changed by the large man she serves. In each story in this collection ordinary characters reveal themselves, sounding and feeling as real as living, breathing humans. Carver’s magnificently simple prose gives us mini worlds with great power, as full of pain, heart and feeling as real life. This, his first collection, transformed the American short story.'Carver has made himself the natural successor to his true mentor, Chekhov' Financial Times‘Carver is a master of the clear, sharp, resonant detail’ Daily Telegraph‘Carver's stories conjure up a quality of fellow feeling which gives the stories a compelling, dry-eyed poignancy, a melancholy but intensely moving authenticity’ William Boyd

The death and burial of Addie Bundren is told by members of her family, as they cart the coffin to Jefferson, Mississippi, to bury her among her people. And as the intense desires, fears and rivalries of the family are revealed in the vernacular of the Deep South, Faulkner presents a portrait of extraordinary power - as epic as the Old Testament, as American as Huckleberry Finn.

‘Black satire of the highest polish’ GuardianWhilst awaiting trial for war crimes in an Israeli prison, Howard W. Campbell Jr sets down his memoirs on an old German typewriter. He has used such a typewriter before, when he worked as a Nazi propagandist under Goebbels. Though that was before he agreed to become a spy for US military. Is Howard guilty? Can a black or white verdict ever be reached in a world that’s a gazillion shades of grey?‘After Vonnegut, everything else seems a bit tame’ Spectator

In a future London, governed by genetic engineering , Bernard Marx begins to question a society that has abolished family, privacy, and history in the name of stability.In the World State, citizens are conditioned from birth and kept docile through consumerism and the drug, Soma. But when Bernard encounters John, a man raised outside this system, the fragile logic of enforced happiness begins to fracture.Through Bernard Marx and John, Huxley examines freedom, moral responsibility, and the human need for meaning.This classic work of dystopian literary fiction explores identity, alienation, and the suppression of individuality within a world engineered for obedience.'A masterpiece of speculation... As vibrant, fresh, and somehow shocking as it was when I first read it' Margaret Atwood'A grave warning... Provoking, stimulating, shocking and dazzling' Observer.**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

‘Readers accustomed to the precision and elegance of Edward Said's analytical prowess will not be disappointed . . . Those discovering Said for the first time will be profoundly impressed’ Toni MorrisonFollowing his profoundly influential study Orientalism, Edward W. Said turned his attention to the Western world, tracing the connections between imperialism and European art, literature and music. From Jane Austen to Salman Rushdie, from Yeats to media coverage of the Gulf War, Culture and Imperialism initiates a dialogue between culture and the political and economic fabric of its time. Vast in its scope and stunning in its erudition, this collection of essays remains as urgent today as it was on first publication.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

Haruki Murakami's third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase is the mystery hybrid which completes the odyssey begun in Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973.The man was leading an aimless life, time passing, one big blank. His girlfriend has perfectly formed ears, ears with the power to bewitch, marvels of creation. The man receives a letter from a friend, enclosing a seemingly innocent photograph of sheep, and a request: place the photograph somewhere it will be seen.Then, one September afternoon, the phone rings, and the adventure begins. Welcome to the wild sheep chase.'Mr. Murakami's style and imagination are closer to that of Kurt Vonnegut, Raymond Carver and John Irving' New York Times

Charles Arrowby has determined to spend the rest of his days in hermit-like contemplation.He buys a mysteriously damp house on the coast, far from the heady world of the theatre where he made his name, and there he swims in the sea, eats revolting meals and writes his memoirs. But then he meets his childhood sweetheart Hartley, and memories of her lovely, younger self crowd in – along with more recent lovers and friends – to disrupt his self-imposed exile. So instead of ‘learning to be good’, Charles proceeds to demonstrate how very bad he can be.‘It isn’t all brainy fantasising in Murdochland; there’s wild swimming, appalling sandwiches, death, madness and sex’ Guardian‘Dazzlingly entertaining and inventive’ The TimesWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAISY JOHNSON**WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE**

An exhilarating satire of Eighties excess that captures the effervescent spirit of New York, from one of the greatest writers of modern American proseSherman McCoy is a WASP, bond trader and self-appointed 'Master of the Universe'. He has a fashionable wife, a Park Avenue apartment and a Southern mistress. His spectacular fall begins the moment he is involved in a hit-and-run accident in the Bronx. Prosecutors, newspaper hacks, politicians and clergy close in on him, determined to bring him down. Exuberant, scandalous and exceptionally discerning, The Bonfire of the Vanities was Tom Wolfe's first venture into fiction and cemented his reputation as the foremost chronicler of his age.‘The air of New York crackles with an energy that causes the adrenalin to pump… The feeling is perfectly reproduced in Wolfe's novel… Electric’ – Sunday Times‘The quintessential novel of The Eighties’ – The Guardian

Informed by traditional African storytelling, discover Ngugi wa Thiong'o's masterpiece.To honour the Ruler's birthday, the Free Republic of Aburiria set out to build a tower; a modern wonder of the world that will reach the gates of Heaven. But behind this pillar of unity a battle for control of the Aburirian people rages. Among the contenders: the eponymous Wizard, an avatar of folklore and wisdom; the corrupt Christian Ministry; and the nefarious Global Bank.'Mythological but also cheerfully disenchanted; political and playful; cartoonish but also epical... the African novel may well have delivered its greatest masterpiece' Sunday Herald