This new edition of Thornton Wilder's renowned 1967 National Book Award-winning novel features a new foreword by John Updike and an afterword by Tappan Wilder, who draws on such unique sources as Wilder's unpublished letters, handwri...

Drawing on such unique sources as the author's unpublished letters,business records, and obscure family recollections, Tappan Wilder'sAfterword adds a special dimension to the reissue of this hilarious tale about goodness in a fallen ...

Set in Appalachia, Kingsolver's very pastoral novel tells the stories of three women who live close to the land. A wildlife biologist studying coyotes is fascinated by a young man with a passion for hunting. An intellectually inclined...

Joanie's ex-husband is having a baby with his new girlfriend. Joanie won't be having more babies, since she's decided never to have sex again. But she still has her teenaged daughter Caroline to care for. And thanks to the recession,...

The Optimist's Daughter is a compact and inward-looking little novel, a Pulitzer Prize winner that's slight of page yet big of heart. The optimist in question is 71-year-old Judge McKelva, who has come to a New Orleans hospital fro...

The first annotated edition of the Irish master of fantasy, 'who imagined colors, ceremonies and incredible processions that never passed before the eyes of Edgar Allan Poe or of De Quincey' (W. B. Yeats). Lord Dunsany has gained a cu...

'Examining the scope and richness of African-American literature, this landmark collection gathers the first three novels written by African Americans in the 1850s. Includes "The Heroic Slave" by Frederick Douglass, "Cl...

Considered an idiot because of his physical infirmities, Claudius survived the intrigues and poisonings of the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and the Mad Caligula to become emperor in 41 A.D. A masterpiece.

Although the different things in the book are by no means on the same level, the title story seems to me the most moving single piece of fiction that this young author has as yet written. It is all the more interesting because there i...

The famous 'Nick Adams' stories show a memorable character growing from child to adolescent to soldier, veteran, writer, and parent -- a sequence closely paralleling the events of Hemingway's life.

Peter Camenzind, a young man from a Swiss mountain village, leaves his home and eagerly takes to the road in search of new experience. Traveling through Italy and France, Camenzind is increasingly disillusioned by the suffering he dis...

Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of his spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham's most brilliant characters - his fiancee Isabel whose choice between love and wealth have lifelong r...

'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...

Before electric lights and telephones, there were only candles and, at last, gas lights, to banish the darkness. And in that darkness might lurk - who knows? Ghosts, werewolves, vampires, witches, or even the Devil himself! Such st...

Ann Radcliffe's orphaned heroine Emily St. Aubert finds herself imprisoned in her evil guardian Count Montoni's gloomy medieval fortress in the remote Apennines. Terror is the order of the day inside the walls of Udolpho, as Emily str...

This volume includes three of Capote's best-known stories, 'House of Flowers, ' 'A Diamond Guitar, ' and 'A Christmas Memory, ' in addition to his bestselling novel, Breakfast at Tiffany, the popular story of Holly Golightly--'a cross...

A magnificent reconstruction of Napoleon's life and legend written by a distinguished Oxford scholar.

Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women. In the mid-1860s, Alcott wrote passionate, fiery novels and sensational stories. She also produced wholesome stories for children, and after th...

In Theatre, W. Somerset Maugham–the author of the classic novels Of Human Bondage and Up at the Villa–introduces us to Julia Lambert, a woman of breathtaking poise and talent whose looks have stood by her forty-six years. ...

A superb new translation of one of the most intense and explicit works of the nineteenth-century French master Émile Zola considered The Beast Within-also known as La Bête Humaine-to be his "most finely worked" novel. This...

Three of the finest horror novels of all time come together in an omnibus edition that explores the dark sides of human nature in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker's vampire classic Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Je...

Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, The Continental Op. In his novels and stories, Dashiell Hammett created some of the most memorable characters--detectives, dames, and assorted miscreants--in twentieth-century fiction. It is nearly im...

Edited with an Introduction by Larzer Ziff.

Now a major motion picture from USA Films starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Sean Penn, and director Philip Haas (director of Angels and Insects).In Up at the Villa, W. Somerset Maugham portrays a wealthy young English woman who finds ...

A fiftieth anniversary edition of Catch-22, one of the twentieth century's most revered novels.

The story of a lay community of mixed-up people encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an enclosed order of nuns, follows the lives of Dora Greenfield, an erring wife who returns to her husband, and Michael Meade, who is confronted by...

The collection that established O’ Connor’ s reputation as one of the american masters of the short story. The volume contains the celebrated title story, a tale of the murderous fugitive The Misfit, as well as “ The...

Set in 1831, The Confessions Of Nat Turner tells--in his own words--of a black man who awaits death in a Virginia jail cell. His name is Nat Turner and he is a slave, a preacher, and the leader of the only effective slave revolt in th...

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...

A House and Its Head is Ivy Compton-Burnett's subversive look at the politics of family life, and perhaps the most unsparing of her novels. No sooner has Duncan Edgeworth's wife died than he takes a new, much younger bride whose wil...