One night in the reform club, Phileas Fogg bets his companions that he can travel across the globe in just eighty days. Breaking...

Anton Chekhov's only full-length novel, this Penguin Classics edition of The Shooting Party is translated and edited by Ronald...

Containing an enchanting mix of familiar favourites and hidden gems, the Penguin Classics edition of Hans Christian Andersen's...

Set at the height of the "tulipomania" that gripped Holland in 17th century, this is the story of Cornelius van Baerle, a humble...

'I hope my passion for Rome's past has not impaired my judgement; for I do honestly believe that no country has ever been greater...

The Satyricon is one of the most outrageous and strikingly modern works to have survived from the ancient world. Most likely...

First published in 1877, these three stories are dominated by questions of doubt, love, loneliness and religious experience, and...

The Steppe and Other Stories 1887-91 is a collection that reveals Anton Chekhov's evolution from a novice writer to a master of...

The Ladies' Delight is the glittering Paris department store run by Octave Mouret. He has used charm and drive to become director...

The Saga of the Greenlanders and Eirik the Red's Saga contain the first ever descriptions of North America, a bountiful land of...

The action of the saga takes place at the end of the tenth century, at about the time Scandinavia was converting from worship of...

Joris-Karl Huysmans' shocking novel of an innocent's descent into a world of depraved, blasphemous rituals, The Damned (La-Bas)...

Telling the tragic tale of a socially advantageous but emotionally ruinous match, Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest is translated...

Infamous as the inspiration for the novel which slowly corrupts Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, Joris-Karl Huysmans' Against Nature (A...

Created by an Irish clergyman, Melmoth is one of the most fiendish characters in literature. In a satanic bargain, Melmoth...

Considered by Andre Gide to be one of the ten greatest novels in the French language, Emile Zola's Germinal is a brutal depiction...

The Strange Tales of Pu Songling (1640-1715) are exquisite and amusing miniatures that are regarded as the pinnacle of classical...

The epic Viking Age stories that inspired J. R. R. Tolkien and Wagner's Ring cycle

Written in thirteenth-century Iceland but...

One of the foundation-stones of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes' Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings is translated from...

One of the central texts of the Middle Ages, The Golden Legend deeply influenced the imagery of poetry, painting and stained...

During his decades of world fame as a novelist, Tolstoy also wrote prolifically in a series of essays and polemics on issues of...

Tomcat Murr is a loveable, self-taught animal who has written his own autobiography. But a printer's error causes his story to be...

Aristotle's probing inquiry into some of the fundamental problems of philosophy, The Metaphysics is one of the classical Greek...

Michel de Montaigne was one of the most influential figures of the Renaissance, singlehandedly responsible for popularising the...

Set towards the end of the reign of Henry II of France, The Princesse de Cleves (1678) tells of the unspoken, unrequited love...

Alphonse, a young Walloon officer, is travelling to join his regiment in Madrid in 1739. But he soon finds himself mysteriously...

Written during the winter of 1857-8, the Grundrisse was considered by Marx to be the first scientific elaboration of communist...

The dazzling and exuberant moral stories of Rabelais (c. 1471-1553) expose human follies with their mischievous and often obscene...

Turgenev's first major prose work is a series of twenty-five Sketches: the observations and anecdotes of the author during his...

A key work in the German 'Sturm und Drang' movement, Johann Goethe's autobiographical epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young...