It's New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail hour till breakfast at Tiffany's. And nice girls don't, except, of course, Holly Golightly. Pursued by Mafia gangsters and playboy millionaires, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turned-up nose, a heart-breaker, a perplexer, a traveller, a tease. She is irrepressibly "top banana in the shock department", and...

Bigger Thomas, sullen young black boy, has to die in the electric chair before he can feel alive. He has to kill before he finds a reason to live - kill the only people who had ever reached for his lost soul, a rich white girl who believed in equality and a poor black girl who accepted that there was none. He ached and fought for something in his life, but never knew the words for what he sought,...

Andy Warhol kept these diaries faithfully from November 1976 right up to his final week, in February 1987. Written at the height of his fame and success, Warhol records the fun of an Academy Awards party, nights out at Studio 54, trips between London, Paris and New York, and surprisingly even the money he spent each day, down to the cent. With appearances from and references to everyone who was an...

Working as a lady's companion, our heroine's outlook is bleak until, on a trip to the south of France, she meets a handsome widower whose proposal takes her by surprise. She accepts but, whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory of his dead wife Rebecca is for ever kept alive by the forbidding housekeeper Mrs D...

When Beale and Ida Farange are divorced, the court decrees that their only child, the very young Maisie, will shuttle back and forth between them, spending six months of the year with each. The parents are immoral and frivolous, and they use Maisie to intensify their hatred of each other. Beale Farange marries Miss Overmore, Maisie's pretty governess, while Ida marries the likeable but weak S...

Lise has been driven to distraction by working in the same accountants` office for sixteen years. So she leaves everything behind her, transforms herself into a laughing, garishly-dressed temptress and flies abroad on the holiday of a lifetime. But her search for adventure, sex and the obsessional experience takes on a far darker significance.

"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it". Thus wrote Orwell following his experiences as a militiaman in the Spanish Civil War, chronicled in Homage to Catalonia. Here he brings to bear all the force of his humanity, passion and clarity, describing with bitter intens...

Reading Brodsky's essays is like a conversation with an immensely erudite, hugely entertaining and witty (and often very funny) interlocutor. This collection of forty-eight short pieces on Venice showcase Joseph Brodsky at his very best: witty, intelligent, moving and elegant. Looking at every aspect of Venice, from its waterways, streets and architecture to its food, politics and people, Bro...

A BREATH OF LIFE is Clarice Lispector's final novel, 'written in agony', which she did not live to see published. Sensual and mysterious, it is a mystical dialogue between a god-like author and the creation he breathes life into: the speaking, shifting, indefinable Angela Pralini. As he has created Angela, so, eventually, he must let her die, for life is merely 'a kind of madne...

Francois Besson listens to a tape-recording of a girl contemplating suicide. Drifting through the days in a provincial city, he thoughtlessly starts a fire in his apartment, attends confession, and examines, with great intentness but without affection, a naked woman he wakes beside. And, as Besson moves through an ugly and threatening rain, his thoughts eventually lead to violence, first turned ou...

A gangster is murdered during a blistering Manhattan heat wave. City cop Andy Rusch is under pressure solve the crime and captivated by the victim’s beautiful girlfriend. But it is difficult to catch a killer, let alone get the girl, in crazy streets crammed full of people. The planet’s population has exploded. The 35 million inhabitants of New York City run their TVs off pedal power, riot for wat...

With delicacy of perception and memory, humour and pathos, Carson McCullers spreads before us the three phases of a weekend crisis in the life of a motherless twelve-year-old girl. Within the span of a few hours, the irresistible, hoydenish Frankie passionately plays out her fantasies at her elder brother's wedding. Through a perilous skylight we look into the mind of a child torn between her...

"Against Interpretation" was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes some of Sontag's best-known works, among them "On Style", "Notes on 'Camp", and the titular essay "Against Interpretation", where Sontag argues that moder...

Covering some of the very best of F Scott Fitzgerald's short fiction, this collection spans his career, from the early stories of the glittering Jazz Age, through the lost hopes of the thirties, to the last, twilight decade of his life. It brings together his most famous stories, including "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz".

Told with great lyrical beauty and power, James Agee's novel is an exquisitely tender account of the pain and bewilderment of loss. Driving back home to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1915 after tending to a family emergency, Jay Follet is killed in a car accident. He leaves behind a wife and two small children, who must come to terms with his absence as the days after his death slowly unfold. "A Deat...

This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes "Metamorphosis", his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; "Meditation", a collection of his earlier studies; "The Judgement", written in a single night of frenzied creativity; "The Stoker", the first chapter of a no...

With these audacious and murderous witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupation of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings,...

Susan Sontag's third essay collection brings together her most important critical writing from 1972 to 1980. In these provocative and hugely influential works she explores some of the most controversial artists and think?ers of our time, including her now-famous polemic against Hitler's favourite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, and the cult of fascist art, as well as a dazzling analysis of...

Set against the backdrop of Europe's slide into Fascism, Blue of Noon is a blackly compelling account of depravity and violence. As its narrator lurches despairingly from city to city in a surreal sexual and mental nightmare of squalor, sadism and drunken encounters, his internal collapse mirrors the fighting and marching on the streets outside. Exploring the dark forces beneath the surface o...

George Orwell was an inveterate keeper of diaries. This book presents eleven of them, covering the period 1931-1949, and follows Orwell from his early years as a writer to his last literary notebook. An entry from 1931 tells of a communal shave in the Trafalgar Sguare fountains, while notes from his travels through industrial England show the development of the impassioned social commentator. T...

"Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account" is a shocking, controversial and heartbreaking look at one of humanity's darkest moments, through one man's honest report of his time there, assisting the very men who were responsible for the deaths of thousands.

With prose that is every bit as raw, intense and bitingly honest as the world it depicts, Barry Hines's A Kestrel for a Knave contains a new afterword by the author in Penguin Modern Classics. Life is tough and cheerless for Billy Casper, a troubled teenager growing up in the small Yorkshire mining town of Barnsley. Treated as a failure at school, and unhappy at home, Billy discovers a ne...

The air of Eastwick breeds witches - women whose powerful longings can stir up thunderstorms and fracture domestic peace. Jane, Alexandra and Sukie, divorced and dangerous, have formed a coven. Into the void of Eastwick breezes Darryl Van Horne, a charismatic magus of a man who entrances the trio, luring them to his mansions...

A complete collection of short fiction by one of the masters of twentieth-century American literature.

In free-spirited Paris, Jules and Jim live a carefree, bohemian existence. They write in cafes, travel when the mood takes them, and share the women they love without jealousy. Women like Lucie, flawless, an abbess, and Odile, impulsive, mischievous, almost feral. But it is Kate - with a smile the two friends had determined to always follow before they even met her, but capricious enough to jump i...