Penguin Archive - Böcker

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books‘It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate’Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', The Fire Next Time is an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice, drawn from Baldwin's early life in Harlem and his experience as a prominent cultural figure of the civil rights movement.

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksWhat would happen if a doctor implanted the pituitary gland and testicles of a man into the body of a stray dog? In Mikhail Bulgakov’s topsy-turvy world, the dog starts to walk on two legs, drink, smoke, thieve, chase women and recite every swear word in Russian. The perfect candidate for a government official, in other words. This rude, riotous send-up of the Soviet Union, banned immediately on publication, is satire red in tooth and claw.

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksOn a military base in 1930s Georgia, Private Ellgee Williams catches sight of his captain’s wife in the nude and becomes obsessed with her. But Captain Penderton – unhappily married to the unfaithful Leonora – in turn erotically fixates on Williams. Spare, muscular and sensual, with the dramatic vision of a Greek myth, Carson McCullers’ novella is a timeless work about the alienation of forbidden desire.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksPlagued by ill-health, violently sick at sea, irritated by renovation costs: Seneca is never less than sympathetically human. In these letters written 2000 years ago, the ancient philosopher speaks to the reader today with lucidity and warmth. Whether advising on how to live a good life, spend time alone or free oneself from fears of death, Seneca is the wise and compassionate friend we all need now.

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksMy delight in playing turned to a lust for playing, my lust for playing into a compulsion to play, a mania, a frenetic fury that filled not only my waking hours but also came to invade my sleep. I could think of nothing but chess, I thought only in chess moves and chess problems . . .As a chess obsessive, what if you have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play the world champion, but it might send you to the edge of madness . . . and tip you over?

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksLuminous and intensely lyrical, Dylan Thomas’ works have captivated generations of readers, inspiring artists like The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Igor Stravinsky, and Phoebe Bridgers. This selection includes some of his best poetry, celebrating both inner and outer landscapes in the face of mortality, decay, human weakness, and beckoning readers to ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light.’ Together, they exemplify his legacy as the greatest Welsh poet of the twentieth century.

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksLet me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me . . .In this glittering new selection of Fitzgerald’s short stories, we meet Anson Hunter, ‘The Rich Boy’, whose opulent, haunting world paints a vivid portrait of the American elite. ‘Absolution’ offers a poignant glimpse into the soul of a young boy grappling with sin, whilst ‘May Day’ captures the whirling hysteria at the dawn of the Jazz Age.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksEdgar Allen Poe’s short stories have lost none of their power to horrify. He remains a destabilizingly terse sketcher out of ideas, a writer who allows the reader to fill in the many ghastly blanks in his narratives of violence, retribution and animalism. It is hard to recommend Hop-Frog wholeheartedly (its original subtitle was: Or, The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs) as it is such an affront to decency, but you will certainly never forget it.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksThe Time Machine is the great, gleeful anarchist novel of the 1890s. It is both a thrilling adventure story and a satire on religion, evolution and human hopes. With this book, Wells invented an entirely new genre and did it better than any of his imitators.An immediate bestseller, it has delighted and unnerved generations of readers, and will no doubt keep on doing so until some of the events predicted in the book make readers extinct.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books'All art,' Oscar Wilde once announced, 'is quite useless.' Selected here are some of his finest prose works on the subject of art – useless, illuminating, artificial, uplifting, radical, gorgeous, boring, sublime – and his most brilliant aphorisms on the creative life. Whether lamenting the crass urge to hold art to realist or natural standards or arguing against morality as a guiding principle, Wilde defends the artist while delighting the audience.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksThere are many great English ghost stories, but they appear flimsy and emotionally spectral compared to the works of M.R. James. This selection gives the reader a flavour of his strange gifts. Often, the ghost is barely glimpsed and yet somehow sticks with the reader for years, making ordinary rooms or gardens or churches uncanny and threatening. Is that the kitchen cat? And what is it that terrible thing stalking about in the dolls’ house?

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksShe drew a long, soft breath, as though the paper daffodils between them were almost too sweet to bearKatherine Mansfield was a magician of the short story, whose work was described by Virginia Woolf as ‘the only writing I have ever been jealous of’. These eight tales show her gift for transforming fleeting moments – a chance meeting, a letter received, a careless remark – into small miracles of language and feeling.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksYes, as my swift days near their goal,’Tis all that I implore;In life and death, a chainless soul,With courage to endure.In this new selection of Emily Brontë’s heart-rending poems, we uncover a soul unafraid to confront mortality, tragedy and the wild cruelty – and beauty – of nature. These verses capture her profound passion and indomitable spirit, plumbing the depths of the human heart and revealing the raw power of Brontë’s poetic genius.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksTrotty Veck, an elderly porter, has read so many newspaper reports about crime and immorality that he believes the working classes are irredeemable. But, on New Year’s Eve, summoned to the church tower by a mysterious chiming, Trotty witnesses his own death, and is taken on a ghostly journey that will force him to reassess his conviction. One of Dickens’ ‘Christmas stories’, The Chimes is charming and surprising manifesto for empathy for our fellow man.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksBeware the self-righteous man of faith, the wicked-eyed child, the jealous lover. For this is Salem, in 1691, where rumours fly on the wind and witchcraft is abroad. Lois Barclay, cursed in childhood, is a stranger in a strange land – and the devil will work his mischief on Lois’s neighbours before the season of madness is out.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksFollowing the death of his sister, middle-aged Dr Graesler leaves his winter home in Lanzarote for a health resort in Germany, where he practised medicine for many years. There he meets the Schleheim family, and is particularly drawn to their daughter Sabine. But a simple, stilted courtship soon unravels a web of hushed-up suicide and illicit sexual liaisons. Arthur Schnitzler’s tumultuous psychodrama remains as startling now as it did on first publication.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books'All Frenchmen know you have to become civilised between eighteen and twenty-three and that civilisation comes upon you by contact with an older woman, by revolution, by army discipline, by any escape or any subjection, and then you are civilised and life goes on normally in a latin way.' Gertrude Stein’s Paris France, published in 1940 on the day Paris fell to Nazi Germany, is a witty account of Stein’s life in France, and the perfect introduction to her work.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books‘I had rather die in the adventure of noble achievements, than live in obscure and sluggish security’In 1666, Margaret Cavendish had a vision: there was a crack in reality at the North Pole leading to a utopian parallel universe, where gender roles, scientific orthodoxy and political norms had been razed to the ground. She slipped through the portal and returned with the first science fiction novel in English – an explosive account of the Blazing World.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books'He stretched out his two long, lank arms, that looked like spider’s claws, and seemed to embrace with them the expanse before him'His inheritance squandered and engagement severed, Guido di Cortese stalks the desolate Genoese coast. A monstrous creature, shipwrecked by a ferocious storm, offers him unimaginable wealth to exchange bodies, entwining their fates. Transformation, with two further tales of striking and eerie power here, shows how Mary Shelley haunts us still.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books‘Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has befallen no man before’After five years of 'strange amnesia', Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee remains haunted by madness and memories that cannot be real. Desperate for answers he travels to Western Australia, joining an archaeological excavation into Earth’s deep past.Journey with Peaslee to discover his fate in the story described by author Lin Carter as ‘Lovecraft’s single greatest achievement in fiction’.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksNow you slip away in sleep.Your boat is sea-mist, dreaming, by the shore.Spain’s most beloved poet, Federico García Lorca brilliantly captures the beauty and brutality of the twentieth century. His creative imagination transcends his own experiences – be it from the perspective of an ant, a gypsy nun, or Socrates – to meditate on death, love and honour, and to interrogate the decay and pretence of his society. Lorca’s poetry excites, moves and disarms.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksMany years ago there lived an Emperor who was so terribly fond of beautiful new clothes that he spent all his money on dressing elegantly...Jewels in storytelling, these magical fairytales by Hans Christian Andersen were inspired by his own life as an outsider. From ‘The Little Mermaid’ to ‘The Red Shoes’, his fables show the ugliest of humanity – its power, greed, vanity – but also how suffering can lead to beauty.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksThere was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to nameNuns, maidens, adventurers – with electricity, The Story of an Hour brings together stories of female freedom, as Kate Chopin asks the question: what will emancipation feel like for women, looking at the horizon and the future, to the frontier?

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books'The body was cold as ice; the heart had long ceased to beat: yet there were no other signs of death.'The phantoms and ghouls of Japanese folklore are in this book driven back into the world of the living. Mysterious brides melt into mist, paintings come alive, and man-eating goblins barter for redemption. Traditional Japanese folktales and legends, infused with memories of Lafcadio Hearn’s own haunted childhood, are here masterfully retold.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksIt is 1837 and a brilliant German artist sets out to cross the mountains between Chile and Argentina. Perhaps nobody before him has been able to paint the sights that unfold: vast chasms, surreal plants and animals… But then something goes appallingly wrong.This is one of Aira’s great works, filled with his baffling ability to veer between grandeur and absurdity. Each page fails to provide clues as to what lies in wait for the reader on the next.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksNo thinking person can or does genuinely keep out of politics, in an age like the present oneUnfailingly wise and often startlingly prophetic, George Orwell’s essays are masterpieces of plain English prose. This stirring new collection brings together his most cherished pieces with lesser-known gems, ranging over everything from tree planting to living with the atom bomb, sleeping rough to the perils of getting what you want in politics.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksI am a ridiculous man. They call me mad now. That would be a promotion in rankA delusional man whose strange dream changes his life; a self-justifying husband who causes his wife’s suicide; a witness to a young girl’s ruin; a writer who stretches out on a gravestone and listens to the gossip of the dead … the narrators of these four confessional tales show how little we understand ourselves.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksThe whole town got involved with the hunger-artist; from day to day of his starving, people’s participation grew; everyone wanted to see the hunger-artist at least once a day; on the later days there were season-ticket holders who sat for days on end in front of his little cageReading these stories by the master of the absurd is like entering a dreamworld in which nothing, and yet somehow everything, makes sense.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books‘I’m not the sort of husband you dream of when you’re walking alone along the avenue in the evening, am I? And it would be a disaster, wouldn’t it?’How does love die? This question lies at the heart of Tolstoy’s desperately sad novella. It tells the story of seventeen-year-old Masha who, despite their differences, falls passionately in love with an older man, and marries him. Soon, however, the gap between them becomes unbridgeable.