Three of Elizabeth Gaskell's best-loved novels— Cranford, Mr Harrison's Confessions, and My Lady Ludlow—are combined in this witty and poignant look at the market town of Cranford. The railway is pushing its way relentlessly towar...

A 50th-anniversary edition of the landmark novel about three "gone girls" that inspired the acclaimed 1975 film and an upcoming TV series starring Natalie DormerWith a foreword by Maile Meloy, author of Do Not Become Alarme...

Banned in America for almost thirty years because of its explicit sexual content, this companion volume to Miller's Tropic of Cancer chronicles his life in 1920s New York City. Famous for its frank portrayal of life in Brooklyn's ethn...

Hailed by the Washington Post Book World as "a modern classic," Robertson Davies's acclaimed Deptford Trilogy is a glittering, fantastical, cunningly contrived series of novels, around which a mysterious death is woven. Worl...

Translated by John Davie with an Introduction and Notes by Richard Rutherford.

'To me,' D. H. Lawerence once wrote to E. M. forster, 'you are the last Englishman.' Indeed, Forster's novels offer contemporary readers clear, vibrant portraits of life in Edwardian England. Published in 1908 to both critical and pop...

First published in 1850, "The Scarlet Letter" is the work that would establish Nathaniel Hawthorne's literary legacy. It is the story of Hester Prynne, a young attractive woman who has been convicted of the crime of adultery...

Large Format for easy reading. A classic French Canadian novel. A harsh, realistic story of pioneer life in Quebec, it profoundly influenced subsequent Canadian authors.

[T]he main success of the novel lies in the creation of Bok, free of any false pathos or any false grandeur...a kind of Jewish everyman....In 'The Fixer', Malamud has demonstratively staked a claim in the territory of the great 'class...

Evelyn Waugh's 1934 novel is a bitingly funny vision of aristocratic decadence in England between the wars. It tells the story of Tony Last, who, to the irritation of his wife, is inordinately obsessed with his Victorian Gothic countr...

A collection of four plays from the master of twentieth-century American drama includes Orpheus Descending, in which a nomadic guitar player falls in love with a storekeeper's wife only to find his life plagued by violence when the to...

The Girl from Hollywood is a 1923 novel by acclaimed science fiction writer Edgar Rice Burroughs. The story revolves around a California ranching family and a young woman with aspirations to be a Hollywood star who comes to stay with ...

A Breathtaking adventure of the high seas—and a true story In 1834, Richard Henry Dana went from Harvard student to common seaman, sailing from California to Cape Horn. This journal survives as one of the most vivid accounts of the ...

The narrator and protagonist of Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent (first published in English as A Raw Youth) is Arkady Dolgoruky, a na•ve 19-year-old boy bursting with ambition and opinions. The illegitimate son of a diss...

Here are Masters's dramatic monologues written in free verse about a fictional Midwestern town called Spoon River. The dead, 'sleeping on the hill' in their village cemetery, awaken to tell the truth about their lives, toppling the m...

America and Americans is a representative, noteworthy collection of John Steinbeck's journalism, including the title piece, actually his last book. Editors Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson J. Benson, who provide an able, informative intr...

Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures. We have begun publishing his many works for the first time as blackspine Penguin Classics fea...

The essential, classic text of Taoism. These 81 poems comprise an Eastern classic, the mystical and moral teachings of which have profoundly influenced the sacred scriptures of many religions.

Tolstoy's great novel, one of his last works of fiction, tells the story of a harmless flirtation that gradually develops into a destructive passion: the love affair between Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky. Anna turns to Vronsky, a da...

Vladimir Nabokov’s notorious, hilarious erotic murder mystery takes the form of a monologue by his hero, Humbert Humbert, as he attempts to justify his love for and obsession with the barely adolescent Dolores Haze, known as Lol...

Joe Christmas does not know whether he is black or white. Faulkner makes of Joe's tragedy a powerful indictment of racism; at the same time Joe's life is a study of the divided self and becomes a symbol of 20th century man.

Louisa May Alcott’s little–known novella is an ingenious study of deception, betrayal, and the ruthless power of a woman scorned. Foreword by Doris Lessing. When demure Scottish governess Jean Muir arrives at a wealthy ho...

Second in the trilogy that began with The Good Earth, Buck's classic and starkly real tale of sons rising against their honored fathers tells of the bitter struggle to the death between the old and the new in China. Revolutions sweep ...

'Flamboyant fin-de-siecle literary figure Oscar Wilde was a dazzling personality, a master of wit, and a dramatic genius whose sparkling comedies contain some of the most brilliant dialogue ever written for the English stage.Here in o...

Louisa May Alcott's semiautobiographical story of a nurse's experiences in the Civil War. Alcott, most famous for her 'Little Women' novel, weaves a light but fulfilling story.

For more than a century, L. Frank Baum’s kingdom of Oz and its delightful denizens have enchanted readers of all ages. In this illustrated Modern Library edition, the bestselling novelist and children’s book writer Gregory...

Helen Keller at age 12 was like a wild animal. Deaf, blind and utterly unable to communicate, she went through her young life alienated and terrified, struggling against all who tried to help her. Annie Sullivan was half-blind herself...

"Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel—a black man charged w...

For the condemned nobles during the French Revolution, there is a ray of hope: rescue by the Scarlet Pimpernel. His identity remains a mystery to his sworn enemy, the ruthless Chauvelin, and to his devoted admirer, the beautiful Lady ...

From a swashbuckling pirate fantasy to a meditation on American morality—two classic Steinbeck novels make their black spine debutsIN AWARDING John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with T...