Penguin Archive – serie

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 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 BooksMuriel Spark claimed The Driver's Seat to be her best and creepiest novel. Once you have met her heroine Lise - heading for the holiday of a lifetime in an extraordinarily garish dress and with violence on her mind - you will understand why.

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 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 BooksOne of the finest poets of the Victorian age, Christina Rosetti is known today for the directness, clarity and unmatched lyricism of her works. This selection brings together some of her finest verses, love lyrics and sonnets for the contemporary reader. Spanning themes like love, death, loss, womanhood and devotion to pleasures both earthly and divine, these are poems of startling beauty, as evocative and relevant today as when they were first published.

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksFabien tonight was wandering over the vast splendour of a sea of clouds, but below him lay eternity.Inspired by his career as an aviator, Saint-Exupéry’s soaring novel follows the journeys of three pilots delivering mail overnight. The author’s beautiful, weightless prose is as haunting as his own disappearance in flight, eerily foreshadowed by his protagonist Fabien, who becomes lost in otherworldly darkness. Letter to a Hostage, Saint-Exupéry’s meditation on displacement and friendship, also explores solitude and questions the human condition.

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 BooksA young writer leaves the city to complete her manuscript in a small coastal town, but finds herself writing about the lives of its inhabitants instead – their occupation with memory and tradition, their vibrant female friendships, and the idyll of the landscape that informs their sense of togetherness. A classic of American fiction adored by Willa Cather and Henry James, The Country of the Pointed Firs seems woven from the fabric of community itself.

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 BooksI went down, I climbed back up into the light of the jaguar sun – into the sea of the green sap of the leaves. The world spun, I plunged down, my throat cut by the knife of the king-priest … The solar energy coursed along dense networks of blood and chlorophyll; I was living and dying in all the fibers of what is chewed and digested and in all the fibres that absorb the sun

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksJourney into space with Polish scifi master Stanislaw Lem. The whimsical time-loops of Ijon Tichy’s cosmic adventure in ‘The Seventh Voyage’ are reminiscent of Douglas Adams, while the spectral whispers haunting Pirx the Pilot as he navigates his spaceship to Mars in ‘Terminus’ echo the author’s masterpiece Solaris. Finally, ‘The Mask’ introduces a perfect robot assassin and asks, can AI fall in love, or refuse its programming? What if the target of its affections is also its prey?

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 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.

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksIn October Nights, Gerard de Nerval takes us on a gentle meander through nighttime Paris – a dreamlike journey towards getting lost. Also included in this volume is Sylvie, his haunting novella of love and memory, the ‘masterpiece’ that inspired Proust to write In Search of Lost Time. Together, these works by the French poet, visionary and pioneering modernist are a testament to the power of jewelled thinking, and an inspiration for flaneurs and romantics everywhere.

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksBest known for his existentialist novel The Outsider, set in French-occupied Algeria, Albert Camus was profoundly influenced by the landscapes, towns and traditions of his youth. Selected here are some of his finest personal essays about Algeria and its environs, including the luminous ‘Nuptials at Tipasa’, one of his earliest works where he developed the themes that would inform his later philosophy: to thrive now, without hope for paradise, as mortal life alone can be worthwhile.

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksNo author perfected the twist in the tale better than Roald Dahl. His stories – many of which were filmed as Tales of the Unexpected – take us into a world that is shocking, funny and always has a sinister edge. What if plants could feel pain? What kind of father would bet his daughter in a wager? And what is the secret behind that delicious lamb dinner…?

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksOn the fields of Troy, war is raging. At its centre is Achilles: godlike, swift-footed, the greatest champion of the Greeks. But when his pride is wounded and he refuses to fight, the thread of fate begins to spin . . . From frenzied rampages to intimate moments of grief, this selection from Homer’s Iliad traces the tale of a warrior whose name echoes through the ages, and whose story remains as powerful as ever.

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksSaadat Hasan Manto, the most widely read and translated writer in the Urdu language, captured the devastation and absurdity of the partition of India and Pakistan like no other. The Price of Freedom brings together ten of his best stories, focusing on human voices from the religious fracture that forever unhinged two newly independent nations. Powerful, piercing and deeply moving, Manto’s works are key to understanding this bloody chapter in South Asian history.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksKikuji has been invited to a tea ceremony by a mistress of his dead father, only to find that the mistress’ rival and successor is also present. He falls for her, with devastating consequences. By 1949 Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, felt that the tradition of the tea ceremony had been degraded. In this delicate novella he uses the ceremony as a powerful vehicle for loneliness, yearning and loss of history.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksLay down all hope, you that go in by me . . .Through the gates of Hell, past whirling hurricanes, leering devils and rivers of blood, lies the ultimate evil: Satan himself. Masterfully translated by Dorothy L. Sayers, this first instalment of The Divine Comedy tells the captivating tale of Dante and Virgil’s arduous journey through the nine circles of the underworld, and remains one of the most influential works in literary history.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books'When I decide to escape I shall want nobody’s assistance.’ In this thrilling collection, we meet Arsène Lupin, a brilliant, alluring master of disguise – or, as some would have it, a notorious criminal. We follow him on a series of high-stakes adventures, from ingenious heists of invaluable paintings to daring escapes, each one showcasing his intellect, charm, and extraordinary ability to stay one step ahead of the law.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books‘People should fall in love with their eyes closed. Just close your eyes. Don’t look.’From Warhol’s romantic relationships to his thoughts on interior design, these candid, highly entertaining musings - on love, sex, beauty, work and space – give an intimate glimpse into the mind of one of the most iconic figures in twentieth-century culture.

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksDuring his reign, Lord Cobham was burnt alive, but I forget what for. In Jane Austen’s breezy and entirely biased telling of English history, Mary, Queen of Scots is a scandalously wronged victim, Elizabeth I is a wicked villain and most historical facts and dates are cheerfully disregarded. It is accompanied here by other riotous early pieces in which young women steal money, escape from prison, agree to marry two men at once, faint and repeatedly ‘run mad’.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books‘we are the ones we have been waiting for’These poems of radical love, urgency and global consciousness reach across borders to break open the silence of oppression and the taboo, liberating both body and soul.Lively and enigmatic, Passion is June Jordan’s most accomplished and animated collection. Her virtuosic, resolute words have inspired generations of readers and activists across the world, from Nobel Laureates to US Presidents.

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 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 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.