A new translation by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait based on the updated and expanded text On 26 April 1986, at 1.23am, a series of explosions shook the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Flames lit up the sky and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and...

In Gulliver's Travels, the narrator represents himself as a reliable reporter of the fantastic adventures he has just experienced. But how far can we rely on a narrator who has been impersonated by someone else? The work purports to be a travel book, and describes...

Hard Times--Dickens's shortest novel and one of his triumphs--tells the tragic story of Louisa Gradgrind and her father and has had lasting appeal to generations of readers.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the...

'The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts'The greatest 'state of the nation' novel in English, Middlemarch addresses ordinary life at a moment of great social change, in the years leading to the Reform Act of 1832. Through her portrait of a...

The first modern tale of alien invasion, H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds remains one of the most influential science fiction novels ever published.The night after a shooting star is seen streaking through the sky from Mars, a cylinder is discovered on Horsell...

The Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the works for modern readers.- a new, modern-spelling text, collated and edited from all existing printings- on-page and facing-page commentary and notes explain language and allusions- detailed introductions...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman’s deferred American dream Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding...

'no one pitied him as he would have liked to be pitied'As Ivan Ilyich lies dying he begins to re-evaluate his life, searching for meaning that will make sense of his sufferings. In 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich' and the other works in this...

'The man's become inhuman ... He has cut himself off from his kind. His blood be upon his own head.'One night in the depths of winter, a bizarre and sinister stranger wrapped in bandages and eccentric clothing arrives in a remote English village. His...

A stunning collection of all 80 exquisite Little Black Classics from PenguinThis spectacular box set of the 80 books in the Little Black Classics series showcases the many wonderful and varied writers in Penguin Black Classics. From India to Greece, Denmark to Iran, the...

From the New York Times bestselling author of You Should Have Known and Admission, a twisty new novel about a college president, a baffling student protest, and some of the most hot-button issues on today's college campuses.   Naomi Roth is the first female president of Webster College, a...

After a miserable childhood, the offer of a job at Thornfield Hall seems to promise Jane Eyre a brighter future. But joyless laughter echoes along its corridors. Strange things happen in the dead of night. Secrets lurk in the attic. When Jane meets the...

Maggie, a young girl from the Bowery, is driven to unfortunate circumstances by poverty and solitude.

The night that Heathcliff, an unkempt orphan, arrives at the Heights, Cathy's life will change for ever but theirs will not be a happy love story. From a harsh childhood to a foolish marriage, a troubled path of pain and punishment lies ahead. Yet...

"A breathless, exhilarating crash course in the low morality of high finance" (Independent) Serious Money is perhaps Caryl Churchill's most notorious play. A satirical study of the effects of the Big Bang, it premiered at the Royal Court in 1987 and transferred to the...

“This richly filled Norton Critical Edition contains a reliably edited and annotated text of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; extracts from some of Joyce’s other works; historical, religious, aesthetic, and literary writings from the novel’s time period; and recent critical essays...

Befriend a budding poet and his adoring mother in this seductive early novel - winner of the Prix Médicis - by the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 'An artist, clearly one of the greatest to be found anywhere.' Salman Rushdie 'Kundera's achievement has...

A heady, existential tale of seduction and romance by the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being. ‘An artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere.’ Salman Rushdie‘Kundera designs fictions of the highest order.’ Ian McEwan‘Audacity, wit and sheer brilliance.’ New York Times Book...

“A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight-errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.” In this thought-provoking, endlessly enlightening, and entertaining essay on the...

'Your bed shall be the moorcock's, and your life shall be like the hunted deer's, and ye shall sleep with your hand upon your weapons.'Tricked out of his inheritance, shanghaied, shipwrecked off the west coast of Scotland, David Balfour finds himself fleeing for his...

'One of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century' Michael CunninghamClarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Warren Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink...

In 1836 the 23-year-old Dickens was invited by his publishers to write `a monthly something' illustrated by sporting plates. Thus the Pickwick Club was born: its supposed `papers' soom outgrew their origins and became a brilliantly comic novel, still among Dicken's most popular works....

The wise writer, I think, writes for the youth of his own generation, the critic of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.Following the education and young life of Amory Blaine, from indulged only child to disillusioned war veteran, This Side of Paradise is a...

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes are overshadowed by the event with which they close - the meeting of the great detective and Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime. Their struggle, seemingly to the death, was to leave many readers desolate at the loss of Holmes, but...

'Where is my nephew?, asked Mr Jasper, wildly. 'Where is your nephew?' repeated Neveille. 'Why do you ask me?' 'I ask you,' retorted Jasper, 'because you were the last person in his company, and he is not to be found.'  The Mystery of Edwin...

Victory, don't forget, has come out of my innermost self.Victory was the last of Conrad's novels to be set in the Malay Archipelago. Sub-titled 'An Island Tale', it tells the story of Axel Heyst who, damaged by his dead father's nihilistic philosophy, has retreated from...

'The last man! I may well describe that solitary being's feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.' Mary Shelley, Journal (May 1824).Best remembered as the author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley wrote The Last Man eight years later, on returning to...

Our hero confronts a large and varied cast, including Wackford Squeers, the fantastic ogre of a schoolmaster, and Vincent Crummles, the grandiloquent ham actor, on his comic and satirical adventures up and down the country. Punishing wickedness, befriending the helpless, strutting the stage, and...

This authoritative edition was first published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Yeats's poetry and prose - all the major poems, complemented by plays, critical writings, and letters - to...

'The creatures I had seen were not men, had never been men. They were animals, humanised animals...'A shipwrecked Edward Prendick finds himself stranded on a remote Noble island, the guest of a notorious scientist, Doctor Moreau. Disturbed by the cries of animals in pain,...

The Professor (1845-6), written before Jane Eyre, challenged contemporary expectations of the novel by its brevity, realism, and insistence on a working career both before and after marriage for its hero and heroine. Strikingly up to date for its period, the action begins against a background...

'Was her life to be always like this? - always bringing some new source of inward strife?'When the miller Mr Tulliver becomes entangled in lawsuits, he sets off a chain of events that will profoundly affect the lives of his family and bring into...

In The Sea-Wolf, London's most gripping novel, Humphrey Van Weyden is rescued from the freezing waters of San Francisco Bay by a demonic sea captain and introduced to fates far worse that death. Through this story London recalls his own adventures on a sealing vessel...

'She looked absolutely pure. Nature, in her fantastic trickery, had set such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess's countenance that he gazed at her with a stupefied air: "Tess- say it is not true! No, it is not true!"'Young Tess Durbeyfield attempts to restore...

`the ordinary laws of Nature are suspended. The various checks with influence the struggle for existence in the world at large are all neutralized or altered. Creatures survive which would otherwise disappear.'Headed by the larger than life figure of Professor Challenger, a scientific expedition...

'I regret to see that my book has turned out un fiasco solenne'James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting their demands to remove swear words, real place names and much else,...

[T]he present groundwork is nothing more than the identification and vindication of the supreme principle of morality.'In the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Immanuel Kant makes clear his two central intentions: first, to uncover the principle that underpins morality, and secondly to defend its...

'What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages — oh, here is Jacob's room.'Who is Jacob Flanders? Virginia Woolf's third novel, published in 1922 alongside James Joyce's Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, follows this elusive title character from a sunlit...

'We pretended we had each a large island inhabited by people 6 miles high.'In their collaborative early writings the Brontës created and peopled the most extraordinary fantasy worlds, whose geography and history they elaborated in numerous stories, poems, and plays. Together they invented characters...

'those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means'Mahatma Gandhi was a profound and original thinker as well as one of the most influential figures in the history of the twentieth century. A religious and social...

'- What is your nation if I may ask, says the citizen.- Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.'Ulysses, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, has had a profound influence on modern fiction. In a series of episodes covering the...

Her grand attempt to tell what she felt was the story of Jane Eyre's 'madwoman in the attic', Bertha Rochester, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea is edited with an introduction and notes by Angela Smith in Penguin Classics. Born into the oppressive, colonialist society of 1930s Jamaica, white...

A lawyer by day and a creator of a world of fantasy by night, Hoffman (1776-1822) lived a Jekyll and Hyde existence. Many of the characters in his stories are subject to a similar split personality. The duality of his nature is frequently reflected in...

This authoritative edition was originally published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique selection from the full range of Swift's fifty-year career - prose, poetry, and letters - to give the essence of...

A Limited Edition from the Cranford Collection! Beautifully embossed with a gold gilding on a hardback cloth binding for the cover.When the Countess Ellen Olenska returns from Europe, fleeing her brutish husband, her rebellious independence and passionate awareness of life stir the educated sensitivity...

A Limited Edition from the Cranford Collection! Beautifully embossed with a gold gilding on a hardback cloth binding for the cover.The four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, live in Concord, Massachussetts, with their beloved mother while their father is stationed far away...

A Limited Edition from the Cranford Collection! Beautifully embossed with a gold gilding on a hardback cloth binding for the cover.Eight years ago, Anne Elliot followed the advice of Lady Russell, her only true friend, and broke off her engagement to the dashing young...

A Limited Edition from the Cranford Collection! Beautifully embossed with a gold gilding on a hardback cloth binding for the cover.Thomas Hardy's novel of swift passion and slow courtship is imbued with evocative descriptions of rural life, and with unflinching honesty about sexual relationships....

A Limited Edition from the Cranford Collection! Beautifully embossed with a gold gilding on a hardback cloth binding for the cover.Through Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, Jane Austen views the social mores of her day and contemplates human nature itself. A shy...

A Limited Edition from the Cranford Collection! Beautifully embossed with a gold gilding on a hardback cloth binding for the cover.Orphaned Mary Lennox is sent to live in her uncle's house on the Yorkshire moors, and the house is an unhappy one. And full...