Fiction Classics Books

Alfred Kazin has aptly remarked that the greatest story Jack London ever wrote was the story he lived. Newsboy, factory work beast, gang member, hobo, sailor, Klondike argonaut, socialist crusader, war correspondent, utopian farmer, and world-famous adventurer: London is the closest thing America has...

W. Somerset Maugham's first novel is about the gloomy, poverty-stricken world of South London in the 1890s and how it affects one young girl who tries to escape from it.Author: W. Somerset MaughamISBN-10: 0140185933ISBN-13: 9780140185935Publisher: Penguin GroupLanguage: EnglishPublished: 09/01/1992Pages: 128Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.55lbsSize: 7.60h x...

Eighty short stories by a master of the genre O. Henry's comic eye and unique, ironic approach to life's realities are unmatched. These stories--about con men and tricksters and innocent deceivers, about fate, luck, and coincidence--have delighted generations of readers. Set in New York...

Based on the only authoritative surviving manuscript of the 1921 novel, this Cambridge edition restores many passages censored from previous editions in its depiction of Everyman's quest for a meaningful existence. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic...

The masterpiece of Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis A Penguin Classic George F. Babbitt, a conniving, prosperous real estate man from Zenith, Ohio, revels in his popularity, his success, and, especially, in the material rewards they bring. He bullies his wife, flirts with other...

Powerful, poetic realism...makes the tired old subject of life in a mental hospital into an absorbing Orwellian microcosm of all humanity.--Life.An international bestseller and the basis for a hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was one of the defining...

Mrs Gereth is convinced that Fleda Vetch would make the perfect daughter-in-law. Only the dreamy, highly-strung young woman can genuinely appreciate, and perhaps eventually share, Mrs Gereth's passion for her 'things' - the antique treasures she has amassed at Poynton Park in the south...

Charles Dickens's first book, complete with all the pathos and comic invention of his later masterpieces Published under the pen-name 'Boz', Charles Dickens's first book Sketches by Boz (1836) heralded an exciting new voice in English literature. This richly varied collection of observation, fancy...

Plantaganet Palliser, Prime Minister of England - a man of power and prestige, with all the breeding and inherited wealth that goes with it - is appalled at the inexorable rise of Ferdinand Lopez. An exotic impostor, seemingly from nowhere, Lopez has society at...

These three works of fiction - two by Mary Wollstonecraft, the radical author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and one by her daughter Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein - are powerfully emotive stories that combine passion with forceful feminist argument. In...

Mr Peacocke, a Classical scholar, has come to Broughtonshire with his beautiful American wife to live as a schoolmaster. But when the blackmailing brother of her American first husband appears at the school gates, their dreadful secret is revealed, and the county is scandalized....

Despite the grave misgivings of both their families, Valeria Brinton and Eustace Woodville are married. But before long the new bride begins to suspect a dark secret in her husband's past and when she discovers that he has been living under a false name,...

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) made her fictional debut when SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE appeared in 'Blackwood's Magazine' in 1857. These stories contain Eliot's earliest studies of what became enduring themes in her great novels: the impact of religious controversy and social change in...

Questing after Pancho Villa's revolutionary forces, Ambrose Bierce rode into Mexico in 1913 and was never seen again. He left behind him theDevil's Dictionary and a remarkable body of short fiction.This new collection gathers some of Bierce's finest stories, including the celebrated Civil War...

First published in 1873, The Gilded Age is both a biting satire and a revealing portrait of post-Civil War America-an age of corruption when crooked land speculators, ruthless bankers, and dishonest politicians voraciously took advantage of the nation's peacetime optimism. With his characteristic wit...

In 1758 Diderot's friend the Marquis de Croismare became interested in the cause c l bre of a nun who was appealing to be allowed to leave a Paris convent. Less than a year later, in an affectionate attempt to trick his friend, Diderot...

Young, attractive and very ambitious, George Duroy, known to his friends as Bel-Ami, is offered a job as a journalist on La Vie francaise and soon makes a great success of his new career. But he also comes face to face with the realities...

Balzac is concerned with the choice between ruthless self-gratification and asceticism, dissipation and restraint, in a novel that is powerful in its symbolism and realistic depiction of decadence. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the...

Prose writings from one of Russia's greatest poets These stories are wonderful in their purity of form, humor, and understatement. This collection also contains a selection of other Pushkin writings, including the fragment Roslavlev, Egyptian Nights, and the autobiographical Journey to Arzrum. For more...

Sunjata Keita was the founder of one of the greatest empires of Western Africa. These two epic accounts of his life portray a greedy, slow-witted child - said to have crawled until the age of seven - who grew up as prophecy foretold to...