Conrad's aim was 'by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel . . . before all, to make you see' Heart of Darkness, his exploration of European colonialism in Africa and of elusive human values, embodies more profoundly than almost any other modern fiction the difficulty of 'seeing', its relativity and shifting compromise....

Anthony Powell's brilliant twelve-novel sequence chronicles the lives of over three hundred characters, and is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England. It is unrivalled for its scope, its humour and the enormous pleasure it has given to generations. Volume 2 contains the second three novels in the sequence: At Lady Molly's; Casanova's Chinese Restaurant; The Kindly Ones ...

The philosophy of La Rochefoucauld, which influenced French intellectuals as diverse as Voltaire and the Jansenists, is captured here in more than 600 penetrating and pithy aphorisms. ...

Edited by the author's grandson, the novelist Matthew Yorke, and with an Introduction by John Updike, this book is an excellent selection of Henry Green's uncollected writings. It includes a number of outstanding stories never previously published, written during the '20s and '30s (Bees, Saturday, Excursion, and the remarkable Mood among them). It contains a highly entertaining account of Green's...

Not just any fantasy, horror, and science fiction author could impress H. P. Lovecraft into calling him 'unexcelled by any other writer, dead or living'. Clark Ashton Smith - autodidact, prolific poet, amateur philosopher, bizarre sculptor, and unmatched storyteller - simply wrote like no one else, before or since. This new collection of his very best tales and poems is...

Ernest Hemingway’s literary apprenticeship was served in journalism, a career that he pursued for over four decades. From his early work as a correspondent for the Toronto Star in Europe during the 1920s, through his inimitable articles for Esquire and his first-hand reports of the Spanish Civil War, to the mellow, ironic chronicle of his last African adventures, few correspondents...

‘To read through A Barthes Reader is finally to be left with the image of Barthes as one of the great public teachers of our time’ New Republic Edited by Susan Sontag, A Roland Barthes Reader offers a definitive selection of works by the French intellectual Roland Barthes, including seminal essays, such as 'Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives'...

Sense and Sensibility | Pride and Prejudice | Mansfield Park | Emma | Northanger Abbey | Persuasion | Love and Freindship Few novelists have conveyed the subtleties and nuances of their own social milieu with the wit and insight of Jane Austen. Through her vivacious and spirited heroines and their circle, she paints vivid portraits of English middle-class life as...

An indelible portrait of one of the most famous and beloved authors in the canon of American literature – a collection of letters between Harper Lee and one of her closest friends that reveals the famously private writer as never before, in her own words. The violent racism of the American South drove Wayne Flynt away from his home in...

Jonathan Safran Foer has long had a passion for the work of the twentieth-century American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell. Inspired by Cornell’s avian-themed boxes, and suspecting that they would be similarly inspiring to others, Foer began to write letters. The responses he received from luminaries of American writing were nothing short of astounding. Twenty writers generously contributed pieces of prose...

Brought to you by Penguin. After reading Christmas Carol, the notoriously reculsive Thomas Carlyle was seized with a perfect convulsion of hospitality and threw not one but two Christmas dinner parties. The impact of the story may not always have been so dramatic but, along with Dickens other Christmas writings, it has had a lasting and significant influence upon our...

A brilliant new anthology that shows how fiction was reinvented in the twelfth century after an absence of hundreds of years. Essential for all students of medieval literature, Early Fiction in England includes extracts by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Marie de France, Chaucer and many others, in new translations and with illuminating introductions. Before the twelfth century, fiction had completely...

Samuel Beckett is the greatest Irish novelist of the later twentieth century, and this trilogy of novels is his masterpiece -which makes it perhaps the outstanding literary work of our time. Because Beckett has a reputation for being difficult, even obscure, readers of the trilogy are bound to be struck not only by the verbal brilliance and inventiveness of the...

This new edition of Brian Aldiss’s classic anthology brings together a diverse selection of science fiction spanning over sixty years, from Isaac Asimov’s ‘Nightfall’, first published in 1941, to the 2006 story ‘Friends in Need’ by Eliza Blair. Including authors such as Clifford Simak, Harry Harrison, Bruce Sterling, A. E. Van Vogt and Brian Aldiss himself, these stories portray struggles...

A TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 'Lovers of word games and literary puzzles will relish this indispensable anthology' The Guardian 'At times, you simply have to stand back in amazement' Daily Telegraph 'An exhilarating feat, it takes its place as the definitive anthology in English for decades to come' Marina Warner Brought together for the first time,...