'People get out of prison, and when they get out, and their name is Edmond Dantès, they take their revenge!'Falsely accused of treason, the young sailor Edmond Dantès is arrested on his wedding day and imprisoned in the island fortress of the Château d'If....

'My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that really so little for the whole of a man's life?' A poignant tale of love and loneliness from Russia's foremost writer. One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate...

'About things that are within our power and those that are not.'Epictetus's Discourses have been the most widely read and influential of all writings of Stoic philosophy, from antiquity onwards. They set out the core ethical principles of Stoicism in a form designed to help people...

As the the bicentennary of the French Revolution draws near, Dickens' historical novel serves as a timely reminder of nineteenth-century reactions to that great upheaval. Set between 1757 and 1793, A Tale of Two Cities views the causes and effects of the Revolution from an essentially...

This authoritative edition was formerly published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Wordsworth's poetry and prose - all the major poems, complemented by important letters, prefaces, and essays - to...

'You expected bread, and you have got a stone; break your teeth on it, and don't shriek...you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob.'Shirley is Charlotte Brontë's only historical novel and her most topical one. Written at a time of...

'I shall do one thing in this life - one thing for certain - that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die.'Gabriel Oak is only one of three suitors for the hand of the beautiful and spirited Bathsheba Everdene....

'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...

In 1872 the mistress of a neighbouring landowner threw herself under a train at a station near Tolstoy's home. This gave Tolstoy the starting point he needed for composing what many believe to be the greatest novel ever written.In writing Anna Karenina he moved away from...

'The profoundest book there is, born from the innermost richness of truth, an inexhaustible well into which no bucket descends without coming up with gold and goodness.'Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885) was Nietzsche's own favourite among all his books and has proved to be his most popular, having...

'I wonder what will become of her!'So speculate the friends and neighbours of Emma Woodhouse, the lovely, lively, wilful,and fallible heroine of Jane Austen's fourth published novel. Confident that she knows best, Emma schemes to find a suitable husband for her pliant friend Harriet,...

The Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the plays for modern readers.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable...

Before the war! How long shall we go on saying that, I wonder? How long before the answer will be 'Which war?'The approach of the Second World War finds suburban insurance agent George Bowling in a reflective mood. As he thinks back to the...

Four of Ibsen’s most important plays in superb modern translations, part of the new Penguin Ibsen series. With her assertion that she is “first and foremost a human being,” rather than a wife, mother or fragile doll, Nora Helmer sent shockwaves throughout Europe when she...

"Poverty is what I am writing about".In the late 1920s, Eric Blair resigned his post as a colonial policeman in Burma, immersed himself in the slums of Paris and London, and reinvented himself as George Orwell, one of the most revered prose stylists in...

What is poetry, how many kinds of it are there, and what are their specific effects?'Aristotle's Poetics is the most influential book on poetry ever written. A founding text of European aesthetics and literary criticism, from it stems much of our modern understanding of the creation...

One of France's best-selling writers at the time of the novel's composition, Dumas here combines what he considered to be life's essentials - `l'action et l'amour'. This historical romance is the climax of his epic of chivalry and valour that began with The Three Musketeers,...

'Someone must have been telling tales about Josef K. for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.'A successful professional man wakes up one morning to find himself under arrest for an offence which is never explained. The mysterious court which conducts...

'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...

'You said I killed you - haunt me, then!'Wuthering Heights is one of the most famous love stories in the English language. It is also one of the most potent revenge narratives. The intense and unbreakable bond between the fiery Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling...

'The love of repetition is in truth the only happy love'So says Constantine Constantius on the first page of Kierkegaard's Repetition. Life itself, according to Kierkegaard's pseudonymous narrator, is a repetition, and in the course of this witty, playful work Constantius explores the nature of...

'I am not a man, I am dynamite.'Ecce Homo is an autobiography like no other. Deliberately provocative, Nietzsche subverts the conventions of the genre and pushes his philosophical positions to combative extremes, constructing a genius-hero whose life is a chronicle of incessant self-overcoming. Written in...

Turgenev's masterpiece about the conflict between generations is as fresh, outspoken, and exciting today as it was in when it was first published in 1862. The controversial portrait of Bazarov, the energetic, cynical, and self-assured `nihilist' who repudiates the romanticism of his elders, shook...

'A good essay must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.'According to Virginia Woolf, the goal of the essay 'is simply that it should give pleasure...It should lay us under a spell with its...

Harper Lee's Pulitzer prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep south—and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages,...

For all men are persuaded by considerations of where their interest lies...Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric is the earliest systematic treatment of the subject, and it remains among the most incisive works on rhetoric that we possess. In it, we are asked: What is a good speech?...

Jules Verne’s timeless underwater adventure story in a stunning Hardcover Classics edition with the original illustrations In this thrilling adventure tale by the father of science fiction, three men embark on an epic journey under the sea with the mysterious Captain Nemo aboard his submarine,...

'If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: "To fight against Fascism," and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: "Common decency."'Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's account of the Spanish...

'Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.'F. Scott Fitzgerald's first story collection, Flappers and Philosophers, appeared in 1920 on the heels of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, and immediately established him as a master of popular fiction.Love stories such as 'The...

'I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I have been reading Villette, a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre.'Lucy Snowe, in flight from an unhappy past, leaves England and finds work as a teacher in Madame Beck's...

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 story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse...

'There was a rumour, too, that he was a devil-worshipper, or something of that sort, and also that he had the evil eye...'Arthur Conan Doyle was the greatest genre writer Britain has ever produced. Throughout a long writing career, he drew on his own...

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...

'She sees, coming up a second time,Earth from the ocean, eternally green;the waterfalls plunge, an eagle soars above them,over the mountain hunting fish.'After the terrible conflagration of Ragnarok, the earth rises serenely again from the ocean, and life is renewed. The Poetic Edda begins with The Seeress's...

It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.George Orwell was one of the most celebrated essayists in the English language, and there are quite a few of his essays which...

Following his father's death John Harmon returns to London to claim his inheritance, but he finds he is eligible only if he marries Bella Wilfur. To observe her character he assumes another identity and secures work with his father's foreman, Mr Boffin, who is...

This profound analysis of the nature of art is the culmination of a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice, and religion. Considering and rejecting the idea that art reveals and reinvents through beauty, Tolstoy perceives the question of the...

A realistic and emotional novel about a woman battling mental illness and societal pressures written by the iconic American writer Sylvia Plath. “It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath’s voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal.”...

'Fitzgerald has solved virtually every problem that has plagued translators of Homer.' Atlantic MonthlyThe Iliad is the story of a few days' fighting in the tenth year of the legendary war between the Greeks and the Trojans, which broke out when Paris, son of King Priam of...

'War, the bringer of tears...'For 2,700 years the Iliad has gripped listeners and readers with the story of Achilles' anger and Hector's death. This tragic episode during the siege of Troy, sparked by a quarrel between the leader of the Greek army and its mightiest warrior,...

'I have so much and my feeling for her devours everything, I have so much and without her everything is nothing.'The Sorrows of Young Werther propelled Goethe to instant fame when it first appeared in 1774. Goethe drew on his own unhappy experiences to tell...

Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy’s romance comes to life once more, in a stunning and truly accessible retelling of Austen’s beloved classic - from bestseller Laura Wood. Witty, intelligent Elizabeth Bennet has no desire for a marriage of convenience. And when she meets the...

'I, who would wish to feel close over me the protective waves of the ordinary, catch with the tail of my eye some far horizon.'Intensely visionary yet absorbed with the everyday; experimental, daring and challenging, The Waves is regarded by many as Virginia Woolf's greatest achievement....

'What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.'Always provocative, the Friedrich Nietzsche of Beyond Good and Evil (1886) is at once sceptical psychologist and philosopher-seer, passionately unmasking European society with his piercing insights and uncanny prescience. This masterpiece of his maturity...

Notes from the Underground (1864) is one of the most profound works of nineteenth-century literature. A probing, speculative book, often regarded as a forerunner of the Existentialist movement, it examines the important political and philosophical questions that were current in Russia and Europe at the...

'K. kept feeling that he had lost himself, or was further away in a strange land than anyone had ever been before'A remote village covered almost permanently in snow and dominated by a castle and its staff of dictatorial, sexually predatory bureaucrats - this...

'In recent decades, interest in hunger artists has greatly diminished.'Kafka published two collections of short stories in his lifetime, A Country Doctor: Little Tales (1919) and A Hunger Artist: Four Stories (1924). Both collections are included in their entirety in this edition, which also contains other, uncollected stories...

'I tender these tales of the Jazz Age into the hands of those who read as they run and run as they read.'Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) was Fitzgerald's second collection of short stories, and it contains some of the best examples of his...

Jack Orion is a tormented soul. His childhood companion, and one true love, has been cruelly snatched away from him and now nothing matters to him but being reunited with her.From the goatherd's shack to the court of King Henry VIII, Jack will not...

'...behind them all was New York, looking at Karl with the hundred thousand windows of its skyscrapers'Entering New York harbour, the young immigrant Karl Rossmann sees the Statue of Liberty, 'her arm with the sword stretched upward'. This forbidding introduction sets the tone for...