Classic Literature
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
$26.00
Written by Lewis Carroll
488 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2010
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Canterbury Tales
$25.00
In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer created one of the great touchstones of English literature, a masterly collection of chivalric romances, moral allegories, and low farce. A storytelling competition between a group of pilgrims from all walks of life is the occasion for a series of tales that range from the Knight’s account of courtly love and the ebullient Wife of Bath’s Arthurian legend, to the ribald anecdotes of the Miller and the Cook. Nevill Coghill’s masterly and vivid modern English verse translation is rendered with consummate skill to retain all the vigor and poetry of Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Middle English.
Written by Geoffrey Chaucer
528 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2015
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Confessions of Saint Augustine
$20.00
The son of a pagan father and a Christian mother, Saint Augustine spent his early years torn between conflicting faiths and worldviews. His Confessions, written when he was in his forties, recount how, slowly and painfully, he came to turn away from his youthful ideas and licentious lifestyle, to become instead an ardent devotee of Christianity and one of its most influential thinkers. A remarkably honest and revealing spiritual autobiography touching on issues relevant to people of all faiths, the Confessions also address fundamental issues of Christian doctrine, and many of the prayers and meditations it includes are still an integral part of the practice of Christianity today. In his insightful introduction, R. S. Pine-Coffin discusses Saint Augustine’s intentions in writing his Confessions and issues of translation. This edition also includes a list of dates of events recorded in the Confessions.
Written by Augustine of Hippo576 pages
Published by Penguin Classics
Hardcover
4.13 x 6.67 inches
David Copperfield
$30.00
This is the novel Dickens regarded as his “favourite child” and is considered his most autobiographical. As David recounts his experiences from childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist, Dickens draws openly and revealingly on his own life. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters are Rosa Dartle, Dora, Steerforth, and the ‘umble Uriah Heep, along with Mr. Micawber, a portrait of Dickens’s own father that evokes a mixture of love, nostalgia, and guilt.
Written by Charles Dickens
1024 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2016
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Don Quixote
$30.00
The canonical Spanish classic, now in a beautiful hardcover edition designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith
Don Quixote has become so entranced reading tales of chivalry that he decides to turn knight errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, these exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote's fancy often leads him astray--he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants--Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together-and together they have haunted readers' imaginations for nearly four hundred years.
With its experimental form and literary playfulness, Don Quixote has been generally recognized as the first modern novel. This Penguin Classics edition includes John Rutherford's masterly translation, which does full justice to the energy and wit of Cervantes's prose.
Translated by John Rutherford
1056 pages
Published by Penguin Random House, 2018
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Dracula
$25.00
When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific discoveries about his client. Soon afterwards, various bizarre incidents unfold in England: an apparently unmanned ship is wrecked off the coast of Whitby; a young woman discovers strange puncture marks on her neck; and the inmate of a lunatic asylum raves about the 'Master' and his imminent arrival. In Dracula, Bram Stoker created one of the great masterpieces of the horror genre, brilliantly evoking a nightmare world of vampires and vampire hunters and also illuminating the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire.
Written by Bram Stoker512 pages
Published by Penguin Random House, 2011
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Frankenstein
$25.00
352 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2014
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Great Expectations
$25.00
Pip doesn’t expect much from life…His sister makes it clear that her orphaned little brother is nothing but a burden on her. But suddenly things begin to change. Pip’s narrow existence is blown apart when he finds an escaped criminal, is summoned to visit a mysterious old woman and meets the icy beauty Estella. Most astoundingly of all, an anonymous person gives him money to begin a new life in London. Are these events as random as they seem? Or does Pip’s fate hang on a series of coincidences he could never have expected?
Written by Charles Dickens544 pages
Published by Penguin Classics
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Hard Times
$23.00
Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school headmaster and model of Utilitarian success. Feeding both his pupils and family with facts, he bans fancy and wonder from any young minds. As a consequence his obedient daughter Louisa marries the loveless businessman and ‘bully of humanity’ Mr Bounderby, and his son Tom rebels to become embroiled in gambling and robbery. And, as their fortunes cross with those of free-spirited circus girl Sissy Jupe and victimized weaver Stephen Blackpool, Gradgrind is eventually forced to recognize the value of the human heart in an age of materialism and machinery.
Written by Charles Dickens368 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2011
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Inferno: The Divine Comedy I
$30.00
Describing Dante’s descent into Hell midway through his life with Virgil as a guide, Inferno depicts a cruel underworld in which desperate figures are condemned to eternal damnation for committing one or more of seven deadly sins. As he descends through nine concentric circles of increasingly agonising torture, Dante encounters doomed souls including the pagan Aeneas, the liar Odysseus, the suicide Cleopatra, and his own political enemies, damned for their deceit. Led by leering demons, the poet must ultimately journey with Virgil to the deepest level of all. For it is only by encountering Satan, in the heart of Hell, that he can truly understand the tragedy of sin.
By Dante Alighieri576 pages
Published by Penguin Random House
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Jane Eyre
$24.00
Charlotte Brontë’s first published novel, Jane Eyre was immediately recognised as a work of genius when it appeared in 1847. Orphaned into the household of her Aunt Reed at Gateshead, subject to the cruel regime at Lowood charity school, Jane Eyre nonetheless emerges unbroken in spirit and integrity. How she takes up the post of governess at Thornfield Hall, meets and loves Mr Rochester and discovers the impediment to their lawful marriage are elements in a story that transcends melodrama to portray a woman’s passionate search for a wider and richer life than that traditionally accorded to her sex in Victorian society.
Written by Charlotte Bronte624 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2009
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Madame Bovary
$24.00
Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment and devastating consequences. Flaubert’s erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” One of the greatest novels of the 19th century, Flaubert’s torrid debut lives on in Geoffrey Wall’s brilliant translation. This edition features an introduction by Wall, and a preface on Emma Bovary’s femininity and modernity by novelist Michèle Roberts.
Written by Gustave Flaubert
384 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2015
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Mansfield Park
$25.00
Taken from the poverty of her parents' home in Portsmouth, Fanny Price is brought up with her rich cousins at Mansfield Park, acutely aware of her humble rank and with her cousin Edmund as her sole ally. During her uncle's absence in Antigua, the Crawford's arrive in the neighborhood bringing with them the glamour of London life and a reckless taste for flirtation. Mansfield Park is considered Jane Austen's first mature work and, with its quiet heroine and subtle examination of social position and moral integrity, one of her most profound.
Written by Jane Austen, edited by Kathryn Sutherland; illustrated by Coralie Bickford-Smith, introduction by Tony Tanner
560 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2012
Hardcover
5.3 x 1.4 x 8 inches
Moby Dick or, The Whale
$30.00
In part, Moby-Dick is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopedia of whaling lore and legend, Moby-Dick is a haunting, mesmerizing, and important social commentary populated with several of the most unforgettable and enduring characters in literature. Written with wonderfully redemptive humor, Moby-Dick is a profound and timeless inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.
This edition contains the definitive text of Moby-Dick based on the Northwestern-Newberry edition. It also features an introduction by Andrew Delbanco and explanatory commentary by Tom Quirk.
Written by Herman Melville
720 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2015
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Paradise Lost
$25.00
In Paradise Lost, Milton produced a poem of epic scale, conjuring up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos ranging across huge tracts of space and time. And yet, in putting a charismatic Satan and naked Adam and Eve at the center of this story, he also created an intensely human tragedy on the Fall of Man. Written when Milton was in his fifties—blind, bitterly disappointed by the Restoration, and briefly in danger of execution—Paradise Lost’s apparent ambivalence toward authority has led to intense debate about whether it manages to “justify the ways of God to men,” or exposes the cruelty of Christianity.
Written by John Milton512 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2016
Cloth Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Persuasion
$26.00
At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank. What happens when they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane Austen’s last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, but, above all,it is a love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities.
Written by Jane Austen
288 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2012
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
The Count of Monte Cristo
$30.00
A beautiful new clothbound edition of Alexandre Dumas’ classic novel of wrongful imprisonment, adventure and revenge. Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of the Château d’If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and becomes determined not only to escape but to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. A huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s, Dumas was inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment when writing his epic tale of suffering and retribution.
Written by Alexandre Dumas1312 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2013
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
The Iliad
$25.00
The Iliad is the first and the greatest literary achievement of Greek civilization—the cornerstone of Western culture and an epic poem without rival in world literature. The story centers on the critical events in the last year of the Trojan War, which lead to Achilles's killing of Hector and the fall of Troy. But Homer’s theme is not simply war or heroism. With compassion and humanity, he presents a universal and tragic view of the world: human life lived under the shadow of suffering and death set against a vast and largely unpitying divine background.
Written by Homer, Translated by E. V. Rieu
560 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2015
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
The Odyssey
$25.00
The epic tale of Odysseus and his ten-year journey home after the Trojan War forms one of the earliest and greatest works of Western literature. Confronted by natural and supernatural threats – shipwrecks, battles, monsters and the implacable enmity of the sea-god Poseidon – Odysseus must use his wit and native cunning if he is to reach his homeland safely and overcome the obstacles that, even there, await him.
Written by Homer
416 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2010
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
The Sonnets & A Lover's Complaints
$23.00
When this volume of Shakespeare’s poems first appeared in 1609, he had already written most of the great plays that made him famous. The 154 sonnets – all but two of which are addressed to a beautiful young man or a treacherous ‘dark lady’ – contain some of the most exquisite and haunting poetry ever written, and deal with eternal subjects such as love and infidelity, memory and mortality, and the destruction wreaked by Time. Also included is A Lover’s Complaint, originally published with the sonnets, in which a young woman is overheard lamenting her betrayal by a heartless seducer.
Written by William Shakespeare
272 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2010
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
The Turn of the Screw
$26.00
In "The Turn of the Screw," one of the most famous ghost stories of all time, a
governess becomes obsessed with the belief that malevolent forces are stalking
the children in her care. It is accompanied here by several more of the very best of
Henry James's short stories, all exploring ghosts and the uncanny.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 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.
By Henry James
384 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2022
Hardcover
5.44 x 1.27 x 8.06 inches
Treasure Island
$23.00
The story grew out of a map that led to imaginary treasure, devised during a holiday in Scotland by Stevenson and his nephew. The tale is told by an adventurous boy, Jim Hawkins, who gets hold of a treasure map and sets off with an adult crew in search of the buried treasure. Among the crew, however, is the treacherous Long John Silver who is determined to keep the treasure for himself. Stevenson’s first full-length work of fiction brought him immediate fame and continues to captivate readers of all ages.
Written by Robert Louis Stevenson240 pages
Published by Penguin Classics
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Woman in White
$22.00
The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright’s eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his ‘charming’ friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.
Written by Wilkie Collins, Illustrated by Coralie Bickford-Smith
720 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2010
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Wuthering Heights
$24.00
In a house haunted by memories, the past is everywhere … As darkness falls, a man caught in a snowstorm is forced to shelter at the strange, grim house Wuthering Heights. It is a place he will never forget. There he will come to learn the story of Cathy: how she was forced to choose between her well-meaning husband and the dangerous man she had loved since she was young. How her choice led to betrayal and terrible revenge – and continues to torment those in the present. How love can transgress authority, convention, even death.
Written by Emily Bronte
416 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2009
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
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