‚‚Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.‚‚ Waugh begins his story with heredity, writing of the energetic, literary and sometimes eccentric men and women who, unknown to themselves, contributed to his genius. Save for a few pale shadows, his childhood was warm, bright and serene. The Hampstead and Lancing schooldays which followed were sometimes agreeable, but often not. His ...

Whether celebrating Hogarth or savaging Hollywood, mocking modern manners or inviting readers to ''come inside'' the Catholic Church, Evelyn Waugh was incapable of writing a dull sentence. Although he loved to play up to his image as an arch-reactionary, his defence of traditional English architecture and his contempt for party politics, modish Marxism and American-style religion, contain as much good sense as bad temper. In this wonderful selection, he explores ...

In one of the finest autobiographies to come out of the First World War, the acclaimed poet Edmund Blunden records his devastating experiences in France and Flanders. Enlisting at the age of twenty, he took part in the disastrous battles of the Somme, Ypres and Passchendale, describing the latter as ''murder, not only to the troops but to their singing faiths and hopes''. In his compassionate yet unsentimental prose, he tells of the endurance, heroism - and despair - among ...

The play, written during Brecht''s exile to the United States and set in pre-Communist China, is a parable of a young woman torn between obligation and reality, between love and practicality, and between her own needs and those of her friends and neighbours.

Joe Keller and Steve Deever, partners in a machine shop during World War II, turned out defective airplane parts, causing the deaths of many men. Deever was sent to prison while Keller escaped punishment and went back to business, making himself very wealthy in the ensuing years. In Miller’s  work of tremendous power, a love affair between Keller''s son, Chris, and Ann Deever, Steve’s daughter, the bitterness of George Keller, who returns from ...

Is Moses Herzog losing his mind? His formidable wife Madeleine has left him for his best friend and he is left alone with his whirling thoughts, yet he still sees himself as a survivor, raging against private disasters and those of the modern age. His head buzzing with ideas, he writes frantic, unsent letters to friends and enemies, colleagues and famous people, the living and the dead, revealing the spectacular workings of his labyrinthine mind and the innermost secrets of ...

In the spring of 1948 Arthur Miller retreated to a log cabin in Connecticut with the first two lines of a new play already fixed in his mind. He emerged six weeks later with the final script of Death of a Salesman - a painful examination of American life and consumerism. Opening on Broadway the following year, Miller''s extraordinary masterpiece changed the course of modern theatre. In creating Willy Loman, his destructively insecure anti-hero, Miller himself ...

July 2005. In the Pyrenees mountains near Carcassonne, Alice, a volunteer at an archaeological dig, stumbles into a cave and makes a startling discovery-two crumbling skeletons, strange writings on the walls, and the pattern of a labyrinth.

Eight hundred years earlier, on the eve of a brutal crusade that will rip apart southern France, a young woman named Alais is given a ring and a mysterious book for safekeeping by her father. The book, he says, contains the ...

In his classic existentialist novel Camus explores the predicament of the individual who is prepared to face the benign indifference of the universe courageously and alone. Meursault leads an apparently unremarkable bachelor life in Algiers until he commits an act of violence. His response to the incident challenges the fundamental values of society, a set of rules so binding that any person breaking them is condemned as an alien, an outsider. For Meursault it is an ...

Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang''s achievement is her short fiction – tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life.
Written when she was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual ...

An elegant edition of Nobel Prize-winner Herman Hesse''s most beloved work - now in Penguin Classics
Siddhartha is perhaps the most important and compelling moral allegory our troubled century has produced. Integrating Eastern and Western spiritual traditions with psychoanalysis and philosophy, this strangely simple tale, written with a deep and moving empathy for humanity, has touched the lives of millions since its original publication in 1922. ...

''Snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.'' From a child grappling with the death of a fallen priest, to a young woman''s dilemma over whether to elope to Argentina with her lover, to the dance party at which a man discovers just how little he really knows about his wife, these fifteen stories ...

At first sight Harry Haller seems like a respectable, educated man. In reality he is the Steppenwolf: wild, strange, alienated from society and repulsed by the modern age. But as he is drawn into a series of dreamlike and sometimes savage encounters - accompanied by, among others, Mozart, Goethe and the bewitching Hermione - the misanthropic Haller discovers a higher truth, and the possibility of happiness.

This haunting portrayal of a man who feels he is ...

A masterpiece of modern fiction, James Joyces semiautobiographical first novel follows Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive and creative youth who rebels against his family, his education, and his country by committing himself to the artists life. I will not serve, vows Dedalus, that in which I no longer believe.and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can.To Dedalus, the artist is like Godone who remains within or behind or beyond or above his ...

Literature, as Joyce tells us through the character of Stephen Dedalus, ''is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man''. Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, Ulysses has survived bowderlization, legal action and bitter controversy. An undisputed modernist classic, its ceaseless verbal inventiveness and astonishingly wide-ranging allusions confirm its standing as an imperishable monument to the human condition. Declan Kiberd says in his ...

Malcolm Pasley''s translations, together with those in a forthcoming companion volume, The Transformation (''Metamorphosis'') and Other Stories, are distinctive in that they illuminate Kafka''s life as well as his art by presenting the works in the sequence in which they were written. Unlike other editions popularly available, this one has been prepared directly from the author''s manuscripts. In its fidelity to the text it vastly alters our received versions of ...

The story of K., the unwanted Land Surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, and yet cannot go home, seems to reveal an inexplicable truth about the nature of existence. In his introduction, Idris Parry shows that duality – to Kafka a perpetual human condition – lies at the heart of this great work: dualities of certainty and doubt, hope and fear, reason and nonsense, harmony and disintegration.
The Castle, ...

''Somebody must have laid false information against Josef K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.'' From this first sentence onwards, Josef K. is on trial for his right to exist in a novel which, more than any other, is infinitely perceptive about the nature of terror. Idris Parry introduces his remarkable translation with an essay in which he points to the autobiographical elements in The Trial, in particular Kafka''s broken ...

For Chancelade, the world is teeming with beauty, wonder and possibilities. From a small boy playing on the beach, through his adolescence and his first love, to the death of his father and on to the end of his own life, he relishes the most minute details of his physical surroundings - whether a grain of sand, an insect or a blade of grass - as he journeys on a sensory adventure from cradle to grave. Filled with cosmic ruminations, lyrical description and virtuoso games of ...

Famously associated with the term ‘magical realism’, Marquez is probably South America’s most famous literary export. Equally tragic, joyful and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude inhabits a strange dream-like space where very little makes real sense, but everything is mysteriously and vividly alive nonetheless. Blending fantasy and reality seamlessly, the characters struggle hopelessly against a merciless backdrop of ...