Books in the Penguin Modern Classics series

In these collection of nonfiction essays Bellow demonstrated his vigilance of and loyalty to his country over a span of 45 years.

In a small coastal community threatened by developers who would ravage their lands it is a time of fear and confusion and growing anger. The prophet child Tokowaru-i-te-Marama shares his people's struggles against bulldozers and fast money talk. When dramatic events menace the marae, his grief and rage threaten to burst beyond the confines of his twisted body. His all-seeing eye looks forward to a strange and terrible new dawn. Patrica Grace's second novel is a work of spellbinding power in which the myths of older times are inextricably woven into the political realities of today.

Shatters various images of Andre Gide as the querulous and impious Buddha to a quarter-century of intellectuals.

If you know London primarily through novels like WHITE FANG, these stories will provide a new perspective. Full of intriguing characters and snippets of pidgin, they also highlight London's concern with social issues.

Nataraj earns his living as a printer in the little world of Malgudi, an imaginary town in South India. He and his close friends, a poet and a journalist, find their congenial days disturbed when Vasu, a taxidermist, moves in with his stuffed hyenas and pythons, and brings his dancing-women up the printer's private stairs.

A widower of Gandhian principles, Jagan harbours affection for his son Mali. Yet even Jagan's patience begins to fray when Mali descends on the city of Malgudi full of modern notions. From different generations and different cultures, father and son are forced to confront each other, and are taken by surprise.

A collection of twelve stories written between 1907 and 1914. It ranges from the tale of a Prussian officer who drives his orderly towards a reckoning, to the elements of 'A Fragment of Stained Glass', and the divisions within society and conflicts of the heart that form the themes of 'Daughters of a Vicar'.

Collected together for the first time, this volume includes the complete text of THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER - Orwell's vivid and impassioned documentary of unemployment and proletarian life - as well as Orwell's best writing on the political and social condition of England.

Orwell's classic satire ANIMAL FARM continues to be an international best seller. For the first time ever, ORWELL AND POLITICS brings this major work together with the author's other works exploring the nature of politics and the Second World War.

This volume brings together Orwell's powerful writings of his personal exepriences of poverty and life outside mainstream society. The complete texts of DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON is included.

Set in England, Africa and Italy this collection of Steinbeck's World War II news correspondence was written for the New Yolk Herald Tribune in the latter part of 1943.

The 18 plays are: The Shadowy Waters; Cathleen in Houlihan; The Hour Glass; On Baile's Strabd; The Green Helmet; Deirdre; At the Hawk's Well; The Dreaming of the Bones; The Cat and the Moon; The Only Jealousy of Emer; Calvary; Sophocles' King Oedipus; The Resurrection; The Words Upon the Windwo-FPane; The King of the Great Clock Tower; The herne's Egg; Purgatory; The Death of Cuchulain.

Presents poetry drawn from the author's experiences, particularly of the war years and the loss of his parents in the death camps.

'The Adventures of Augie March is the Great American Novel. Search no further' Martin AmisA penniless and parentless Chicago boy growing up in the Great Depression, Augie March drifts through life latching on to a wild succession of occupations, including butler, thief, dog-washer, sailor and salesman. He is a 'born recruit', easily influenced by others who try to mould his destiny. Not until he tangles with the glamorous Thea, a huntress with a trained eagle, can he attempt to break free. A modern day everyman on an odyssey in search of reality and identity, Augie March is the star of star performer in a richly observed human variety show, a modern-day Columbus in search of reality and fulfilment.The Adventures of Augie March includes an introduction by Christopher Hitchens in Penguin Modern Classics.'Funny, poignant, crowded with carnivalesque types and yet narrated by a voice that is lonely and simple, it is Bellow's fat comic masterpiece' Observer

'Psychoanalytic treatment utilised the patient's capacity to love and desire as a means to an end. The stuff of romance became the stuff of cure. When Freud is writing about technique in psychoanalysis - and these papers [in Wild Analysis] represent his most significant contributions to the subject over three decades of work - it is important to remember that he is talking about what a couple, an analyst and a so-called patient, can do in a room together. For better or worse.' Adam Phillips

Wyndham Lewis can claim to be one of a tiny handful of British artists who had a European reach and ambition. This title displays his short fiction, mainly written around the time of "Blast".

'One of the greatest elegies in the English language, a book which transcends time' Margaret DrabbleTo the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family, the Ramseys, whose annual summer holiday in Scotland falls under the shadow of war, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. The novel's use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives it an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of all that had gone before.Edited by Stella McNichol with an Introduction and Notes by Hermione Lee

One of Evelyn Waugh's most exuberant comedies, Scoop is a brilliantly irreverent satire of Fleet Street and its hectic pursuit of hot news. Lord Copper, newspaper magnate and proprietor of The Daily Beast, has always prided himself on his intuitive flair for spotting ace reporters. That is not to say he has not made the odd blunder, however, and may in a moment of weakness make another. Acting on a dinner party tip from Mrs Algernon Stitch, he feels convinced that he has hit on just the chap to cover a promising little war in the African Republic of Ishmaelia. But for, pale, ineffectual William Boot, editor of the Daily Beast's 'nature notes' column, being mistaken for a competent journalist may prove to be a fatal error...If you enjoyed Scoop, you might like Waugh's Decline and Fall, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'Waugh at the mid-season point of his perfect pitch'Christopher Hitchens

Based on the brutal crimes of a real-life murderer, this work offers insights into the mind of a killer and the obsession of the man bringing him to justice. It also features six short stories and seven 'conversational portraits' including one of Marilyn Monroe, the 'beautiful child' and a dope-smoking cleaning lady doing her rounds in New York.

'One of those books that haunts you for the rest of your life' Sunday TimesWhen a freak cosmic event renders most of the Earth's population blind, Bill Masen is one of the lucky few to retain his sight. The London he walks is crammed with groups of men and women needing help, some ready to prey on those who can still see. But another menace stalks blind and sighted alike. With nobody to stop their spread the Triffids, mobile plants with lethal stingers and carnivorous appetites, seem set to take control.The Day of the Triffids is perhaps the most famous catastrophe novel of the twentieth century and its startling imagery of desolate streets and lurching, lethal plant life retains its power to haunt today.

Both devastating and funny, The Lonely Londoners is an unforgettable account of immigrant experience - and one of the great twentieth-century London novels. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Susheila Nasta.At Waterloo Station, hopeful new arrivals from the West Indies step off the boat train, ready to start afresh in 1950s London. There, homesick Moses Aloetta, who has already lived in the city for years, meets Henry 'Sir Galahad' Oliver and shows him the ropes. In this strange, cold and foggy city where the natives can be less than friendly at the sight of a black face, has Galahad met his Waterloo? But the irrepressible newcomer cannot be cast down. He and all the other lonely new Londoners - from shiftless Cap to Tolroy, whose family has descended on him from Jamaica - must try to create a new life for themselves. As pessimistic 'old veteran' Moses watches their attempts, they gradually learn to survive and come to love the heady excitements of London.Sam Selvon (b. 1923) was born in San Fernando, Trinidad. In 1950 Selvon left Trinidad for the UK where after hard times of survival he established himself as a writer with A Brighter Sun (1952), An Island is a World (1955), The Lonely Londoners (1956), Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958), I Hear Thunder (1963), The Housing Lark (1965), The Plains of Caroni (1970), Moses Ascending (1975) and Moses Migrating (1983).If you enjoyed The Lonely Londoners, you might like Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark or Shiva Naipaul's Fireflies, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'His Lonely Londoners has acquired a classics status since it appeared in 1956 as the definitive novel about London's West Indians'Financial Times'The unforgettable picaresque ... a vernacular comedy of pathos'Guardian

A collection of the stories of Damon Runyon who presents the 1950s world of guys and dolls on Broadway.

Auden, Lewis, MacNeice and other key poets of the 'Thirties' were children of the First World War, obsessed by war and by communalism and by the class-struggle. But from within their strongly defined unity of ideals, a varied body of poetry emerged. This book arranges the poetry to make a 'critical essay' of the period.

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World''Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.' Meet the gamblers, whores, drunks, bums and artists of Cannery Row in Monterey, California, during the Great Depression. They want to throw a party for their friend Doc, so Mack and the boys set about, in their own inimitable way, recruiting everyone in the neighbourhood to the cause. But along the way they can't help but get involved in a little mischief and misadventure. It wouldn't be Cannery Row if it was otherwise, now would it?Packed with a ramshackle joi de vivre, Cannery Row is Steinback's high-spirited tribute to his native California.'Uninhibited, bawdy, compassionate, inquisitive, deeply intelligent' Daily Telegraph

Empson has long been applauded for the dazzling intelligence and emotional passion of his poems. Praised in his lifetime by the likes of T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and John Betjeman, his reputation contines to be high. His poems take a wide range of themes from metaphysics to melancholy, social climbing to political satire, and from love to loss.

'It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known,' says Anna Morgan, eighteen years old and catapulted to England from the West Indies after the death of her beloved father. Working as a chorus girl, Anna drifts into the demi-monde of Edwardian London.

From hustling, drug addiction and armed violence in America's black ghettos Malcolm X turned to the puritanical fervour of the Black Muslims. He became identified in the white press as a teacher of race hatred. This autobiography reveals his integrity and the fierce idealism which led him to reject both liberal hypocrisies and black racialism.

Written in Berlin in 1934, Invitation to a Beheading contains all the surprise, excitement and magical intensity of a work created in two brief weeks of sustained inspiration. It takes us into the fantastic prison-world of Cincinnatus, a man condemned to death and spending his last days in prison not quite knowing when the end will come. Nabokov described the book as a violin in a void. The worldling will deem it a trick. Old men will hurriedly turn from it to regional romances and the lives of public figures The evil-minded will perceive in little Emmie a sister of little Lolita But I know a few readers who will jump up, ruffling their hair .

Subtly brilliant comedy of social rivalry between the wars. Emmeline Lucas (known universally to her friends as Lucia) is an arch-snob of the highest order. In Miss Elizabeth Mapp of Mallards Lucia meets her match. Ostensibly the most civil and genteel of society ladies, there is no plan too devious, no plot too cunning, no depths to which they would not sink, in order to win the battle for social supremacy. Using as their deadly weapons garden parties, bridge evenings and charming teas, the two combatants strive to outcharm each other - and the whole of Tilling society - as they vie for the position of doyenne of the town.