Penguin Classics

<p>Pride And Prejudice: Penguin English Library</p>

<p>The new paperback series- Penguin English Library</p>

<p>'No sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes ... '</p>

<p>When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen shows the folly of judging by first impressions and superbly evokes the friendships, gossip and snobberies of provincial middle-class life.</p>

<p>One of the most extraordinary literary works of the twentieth century,&nbsp;Lady Chatterley's Lover&nbsp;was banned in England and the United States after its initial publication in 1928. The unexpurgated edition did not appear in America until 1959, after one of the most spectacular legal battles in publishing history.&nbsp;

With her soft brown hair, lithe figure and big, wondering eyes, Constance Chatterley is possessed of a certain vitality. Yet she is deeply unhappy; married to an invalid, she is almost as inwardly paralyzed as her husband Clifford is paralyzed below the waist. It is not until she finds refuge in the arms of Mellors the game-keeper, a solitary man of a class apart, that she feels regenerated. Together they move from an outer world of chaos towards an inner world of fulfillment.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700&nbsp;titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the&nbsp;series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date&nbsp;translations by award-winning translators.</p>

<p>The Song Of Kieu: A New Lament (Penguin Classics)</p>

<p>'An essential book for anyone invested, not only in Vietnamese literature, but the historic power of the national epic . . . and its perennial place in our species' efforts toward self-knowledge. Tim Allen's new translation offers clean fluidity while honouring the original's varied rhythms and jagged lyricism. A luminous feat.' Ocean Vuong, winner of the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize</p>

<p>Ever since it exploded into Vietnam's cultural life two centuries ago,&nbsp;The Song of Kieu&nbsp;has been one of that nation's most beloved and defining central myths. It recounts the tragic fate of the beautiful singer and poet Kieu, who agrees to marry to save her family from debt but is tricked into working in a brothel. Over the course of a swift-moving story involving kidnap, war, jealous wives and rebel heroes, she will become a queen, wife, nun, slave, victim and avenger, surviving through the strength of her words and her wits alone.</p>

<p>Translated with an introduction by Timothy Allen</p>

<p>The Great Gatsby (Penguin Modern Classics)</p>

<p>Now the subject of a major new film from director Baz Luhrmann (Romeo+Juliet,&nbsp;Moulin Rouge!), starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan,&nbsp;The Great Gatsby&nbsp;is F. Scott Fitzgerald's brilliant fable of the hedonistic excess and tragic reality of 1920s America. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by Tony Tanner.</p>

<p>Young, handsome and fabulously rich, Jay Gatsby is the bright star of the Jazz Age, but as writer Nick Carraway is drawn into the decadent orbit of his Long Island mansion, where the party never seems to end, he finds himself faced by the mystery of Gatsby's origins and desires. Beneath the shimmering surface of his life, Gatsby is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. And soon, this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel.

In&nbsp;The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald brilliantly captures both the disillusionment of post-war America and the moral failure of a society obsessed with wealth and status. But he does more than render the essence of a particular time and place, for - in chronicling Gatsby's tragic pursuit of his dream - Fitzgerald re-creates the universal conflict between illusion and reality.</p>

<p>Like Jay Gatsby,&nbsp;F. Scott Fitzgerald&nbsp;(1896–1940) has acquired a mythical status in American literary history, and his masterwork&nbsp;The Great Gatsby&nbsp;is considered by many to be the 'great American novel'. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre, dubbed 'the first American Flapper', and their traumatic marriage and Zelda's gradual descent into insanity became the leading influence on his writing. As well as many short stories, Fitzgerald wrote five novels This Side of Paradise,&nbsp;The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and the Damned, Tender is the Night and, incomplete at the time of his death, The Last Tycoon. After his death The New York Times said of him that 'in fact and in the literary sense he created a "generation" '.</p>

<p>'A classic, perhaps the supreme American novel'

&nbsp;&nbsp; John Carey, Sunday Times Books of the Century</p>

<p>In Love (Penguin Modern Classics)</p>

<p>Hayes's masterpiece is an exquisite depiction of a doomed love affair set in noirish, 1950s New York.</p>

<p>In a Manhattan bar, a middle-aged man tells a pretty girl a story: of how he fell into a relationship with a lonely young divorcee; of how one night she was offered a thousand dollars to sleep with a stranger; and of how he and she would subsequently betray each other in turn. In Alfred Hayes's exquisite novella, love - in all its bewildering turns of longing, elation, heartbreak and regret - is dissected with unforgettable honesty and heartbreaking clarity.</p>

<p></p><p>Original, experimental, and unparalleled in their charm, Lewis Carroll’s&nbsp;Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland&nbsp;and&nbsp;Through the Looking-Glass&nbsp;and&nbsp;What Alice Found There&nbsp;have enchanted readers for generations. The topsy-turvy dream worlds of Wonderland and the Looking-Glass realm are full of the unexpected: A baby turns into a pig, time stands still at a “mad” tea-party, and a chaotic game of chess turns seven-year-old Alice into a queen. These unforgettable tales—filled with sparkling wordplay and unbridled imagination—balance joyous nonsense with poignant moments of longing for the lost innocence of childhood.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.</p><p></p>

<p>The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series, now in a dazzling new series design

This edition of&nbsp;Romeo and Juliet&nbsp;is edited with an introduction by Peter Holland&nbsp;and was recently repackaged with cover art by Manuja Waldia.&nbsp;Waldia received a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators for the Pelican Shakespeare series.

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The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare’s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With stunning new covers, definitive texts, and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.</p>

<p>The Great Gatsby (The Penguin English Library)</p>

<p>'It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life'</p>

<p>Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will always be out of his reach ... Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby - young, handsome, fabulously rich - always seems alone in the crowd, watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. Beneath the shimmering surface of his life he is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. And soon this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel.</p>

<p>The Penguin English Library - collectable general readers' editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War.</p>

<p>Beauty And Sadness</p>

<p>The successful writer Oki has reached middle age and is filled with regrets. He returns to Kyoto to find Otoko, a young woman with whom he had a terrible affair many years before, and discovers that she is now a painter, living with a younger woman as her lover. Otoko has continued to love Oki and has never forgotten him, but his return unsettles not only her but also her young lover. This is a work of strange beauty, with a tender touch of nostalgia and a heartbreaking sensitivity to those things lost forever.</p>

<p>Thousand Cranes (Penguin Modern Classics)</p>

<p>Kikuji has been invited to a tea ceremony by a mistress of his dead father. He is shocked to find there the mistress's rival and successor, Mrs. Ota, and that the ceremony has been awkwardly arranged for him to meet his potential future bride. But he is most shocked to be drawn into a relationship with Mrs. Ota - a relationship that will bring only suffering and destruction to all of them. Thousand Cranes reflects the tea ceremony's poetic precision with understated, lyrical style and beautiful prose.</p>

<p>The Idiot</p>

<p>The most autobiographical novel by the author of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov—and the namesake of Elif Batuman’s debut novel, The Idiot</p>

<p>Returning to St Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, the gentle and naïve epileptic Prince Myshkin— known as the “idiot”—pays a visit to his distant relative General Yepanchin and proceeds to charm the General and his family. But his life is thrown into turmoil when he chances on a photograph of the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna. Utterly infatuated, he soon finds himself caught up in a love triangle and drawn into a web of blackmail, betrayal, and finally, murder. In Prince Myshkin, Dostoyevsky portrays the purity of “a truly beautiful soul” and explores the perils that innocence and goodness face in a corrupt world.</p>

<p>David McDuff’s translation brilliantly captures the novel’s idiosyncratic and dream-like language and the nervous, elliptic flow of the narrative. This edition also contains an introduction by William Mills Todd III, which is a fascinating examination of the pressures on Dostoyevsky as he wrote the story of his Christ-like hero.</p>

<p>Six Memos For The Next Millennium</p>

<p>'Words connect the visible track to the invisible thing ... like a fragile makeshift bridge cast across the void'</p>

<p>With imagination and wit, Italo Calvino sought to define the virtues of the great literature of the past in order to shape the values of the future. His effervescent last works, left unfinished at his death, were the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, which he was due to deliver at Harvard in 1985-86. These surviving drafts explore the literary concepts closest to his heart: Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude and Visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth), in serious yet playful essays that reveal his debt to the comic strip and the folktale. This collection, now in a fluent and supple new translation, is a brilliant précis of a great writer whose legacy will endure through the millennium he addressed.</p>

<p>Translated by Geoffrey Brock</p>

<p>'The book I give most to people is Six Memos for the Next Millennium' Ali Smith</p>

<p>'Wonderful . . . full of wit and erudition' Daily Telegraph</p>