modern classics

Modern Classics

Modern ClassicsConversations With StalinMilovan Djilas

Written by a Communist insider, a candid portrait of one of the most dangerous men in history

This extraordinarily vivid and unnerving book recounts three meetings with Stalin during and after the Second World War. Djilas brilliantly describes the dictator in his lair cunning, cruel, enormously talented. Few books give as clear a sense of what made Stalin such a compelling figure and how he was able to hypnotize and terrify those around him. Djilas also describes the key members of Stalin's court: Beria, Malenkov, Zhukov, Molotov and Khruschchev. The result is a gripping account of the ruler at the height of his fame and power.

Pub Date January 2014ISBN 9780141393094Price £9.99Extent 176pp

The SundialShirley Jackson

Fans of Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House will enjoy this disquieting tale of people awaiting the end of the world in a large, isolated house

Mrs Halloran has inherited the great Halloran house upon the death of her son, much to the disgust of her daughterinlaw, the delight of her wicked granddaughter and the confusion of the rest of the household. But when the original owner long dead arrives to announce the world is ending and only the house and its occupants will be saved, they find themselves in a nightmare of strange marble statues, mysterious house guests and the beautiful, unsettling Halloran sundial which seems to be at the centre of it all.

Pub Date March 2014ISBN 9780141391960Price £9.99Extent 240pp

Modern Classics

On LeaveDaniel AnselmeA lost classic lays bare the darkest moment of France's post-war history

First published in Paris in 1957, as France's engagement in Algeria became ever more bloody, On Leave received a handful of reviews and soon disappeared from view. Through David Bellos's translation, this lost classic has been rediscovered. Spare, forceful and moving, the novel describes a week in the lives of a sergeant, a corporal and a private, home on leave in Paris. Informed by the many hours Anselme spent talking to conscripts in Paris, On Leave is a timeless evocation of what the history books can never record: the shame and alienation felt by men returning home from an unpopular war.

Pub Date March 2014 ISBN 9780141393872 Price £16.99 Extent 224pp

Daniel Anselme was born Daniel Rabinovitch in 1927, and adopted the name Anselme while in the French Resistance. He travelled widely as a journalist, and was known as a regular at Left Bank cafés. He published his first novel On Leave in 1957, a second, Relations, in 1964, and a semiautobiographical account of his wartime experiences called The Secret Companion in 1984.

David Bellos is Director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University, where he is also Professor of French and Comparative Literature. He has won many awards for his translations.

Modern Classics

Pub Date January 2014ISBN9780141394374Price £0.99Extent 64pp

Such, Such Were the JoysGeorge Orwell

Orwell reflects on his experiences at preparatory school with unflinching realism in this autobiographical essay

In this bitingly honest autobiographical essay, Orwell recounts his days as a pupil at St Cyprian's preparatory school in Eastbourne, Sussex. He reflects on a 'world of force and fraud and secrecy', where the actual 'pattern of school life' was played out as a continuous triumph of the strong over the weak.

Pub Date March 2014ISBN9780141198477Price £12.99Extent 704pp

The Art of JoyGoliarda Sapienza

The posthumous masterpiece that is now considered to be amongst the most distinctive European voices of the twentieth century

This epic Sicilian novel, which follows its main character, Modesta, through nearly the entire span of the 20th century, is at once a comingofage novel, a tale of sexual discovery, a fictional autobiography, and a sketch of Italy's sociopolitical past.


Selected and Last Poems 1931-2004Czeslaw Milosz

Milosz opens our eyes to the joy-bringing potential of the poetry to which he gave his life

This selection brings together the most beautiful and powerful of Czeslaw Milosz's poems, spanning his writing life. He considers the upheaval, revolutions and two world wars he witnessed and reflects on the loyalty he felt to his native Polish language.


Native RealmA Search for Self-DefinitionCzeslaw Milosz

The memoir of the Nobel laureate, and one of the twentieth century's greatest poets

After the Second World War, Czeslaw Milosz was exiled for many years from Poland. In Native Realm, he recounts the years away from his homeland and how its divisions and destruction shaped a generation.

Pub Date June 2015ISBN9780141194202Price £20.00Extent 416pp

Raising A SmileSelected Non-fictionKingsley Amis

Devastatingly witty, offensive and wonderfully irreverent: this new selection of non-fiction reveals Amis at his most cantankerous and astute

This vast and hugely entertaining collection is vintage Amis from a succession of good years. All of his best nonfiction pieces have been gathered together to reveal Kingsley Amis at his most typically robust and incisive.

Pub Date June 2015ISBN9780141194219Price £12.99Extent 224pp

Collected PoemsKingsley Amis

'One of the very best of our poets' Anthony Powell

Although best known for his comic novels, Kingsley Amis wrote poetry throughout his career. Collected Poems spans subjects from nature and cricket to love, ageing and literature, brimming with his characteristic wit and irreverence, yet full of compassion.

Modern ClassicsTales from the UnderworldSelected Shorter FictionHans Fallada

Searingly honest short stories from Hans Fallada, in new translation by Michael Hofmann

In these stories, criminals lament how hard it is to scrape a living by breaking and entering; families measure their daily struggles in marks and pfennigs; a convict makes a desperate leap from a moving train; a ring and with it a marriage is lost in a basket of potatoes.

Fallada is by turns tough, darkly funny, streetwise and effortlessly engaging, writing with acute feeling about ordinary lives shaped by forces larger than themselves: addiction, love, and money.

Pub Date February 2014ISBN 9780141392851Price £9.99Extent 320pp

Iron GustavA Berlin Family ChronicleHans Fallada

A powerful story of the shattering effects of the First World War on both a family and a country - from the author of the bestselling Alone in Berlin

Intransigent, deeply conservative coachman Gustav Hackendahl rules his family with an iron rod, but in so doing loses his grip on the children he loves. Meanwhile, the First World War is destroying his career, his country and his pride in the German people. As Germany and the Hackendahl family unravel, Gustav has to learn to compromise if he is to hold onto anything he holds dear.

Pub Date July 2014ISBN 9780141196534Price £9.99Extent 464pp

The Time Regulation InstituteAhmet Hamdi Tanpinar

A forgotten masterpiece of Turkish literature, championed by Orhan Pamuk and translated into English for the first time

One of the greatest and most overlooked novels of the twentieth century, The Time Regulation Institute appears here in English for the first time. Hayri Irdals, an unforgettable antihero, along with an eccentric cast of characters, founds The Time Regulation Institute, whose quixotic quest it is to set all the clocks in Turkey to Western time. This is a brilliant satire about the calamitous arrival of Western values in traditionbound Turkey and an uproarious tragicomedy that is still startlingly relevant.

Pub Date April 2014ISBN 9780141195759Price £9.99Extent 432pp

Modern ClassicsThe Middle Parts of FortuneSomme And Ancre, 1916Frederic Manning, Niall Ferguson

A moving, raw and powerful novel about fighting on the front, re-issued to tie in with the WW1 centenary

Bourne is a private fighting on the front. He is under pressure to accept a commission and become an officer, but he prefers to be among the ranks, drawn into the universal struggle for survival in a world gone mad.

Manning's startling work is unlike any other First World War novel in its portrayal of the lives of ordinary British soldiers: the trauma of the Somme; the moments of bloodlust; the camaraderie, rivalry, alcohol and boredom.


Under FireHenri Barbusse

A searing, unflinchingly realist novel about life at war, written from personal experiences

'Men are made to be husbands, fathers – men, in short! Not animals that hunt one another down'

Under Fire follows the fortune of a French battalion during the First World War. For this group of ordinary men, thrown together from all over France and longing for home, war is simply a matter of survival, and the arrival of their rations, a glimpse of a pretty girl or a brief reprieve in hospital is all they can hope for.


Good-bye to All ThatThe Original EditionRobert Graves

The powerful original version of Graves's seminal autobiographical account of the First World War

This is the original version of Robert Graves's intense memoir of the First World War. It restores the raw, emotionally truthful, darkly comic work to the way it was first written by a young man still reeling from the trenches.

This special edition of the most famous autobiography of the First World War is being published to coincide with the 100 year anniversary of the start of the war.

Pub Date May 2014ISBN 9780141392660Price £8.99Extent 288pp

Modern ClassicsThe Bird's NestShirley Jackson

The unsettling story of a young woman's descent into mental illness, from the author of The Haunting of Hill House

Elizabeth Richmond is almost too quiet to be believed, with no friends, no parents, and a job that leaves her strangely unnoticed. But soon she starts to behave in ways she can neither control nor understand. As a tormented Elizabeth becomes two people, then three, then four, each wilder and more wicked than the last, a battle of wills threatens to destroy the girl and all who surround her.


The Haunted LifeJack Kerouac

The lost novella from Jack Kerouac, published for the first time 70 years after it was written

The Haunted Life is the comingofage story of Peter Martin, a college track star determined to idle away what he knows will be one of his last innocent summers in his tranquil New England home town. But with the war escalating in Europe and his two closest friends both plotting their escapes, he realizes how sheltered his upbringing has been. As he surveys the competing influences of his youth, he struggles to determine what might lead to an intellectually authentic life.

The Haunted Life is ultimately a meditation on intellectual truth, male friendship and the desire for movement all themes that would dominate Kerouac's later work.


Modern ClassicsThe Diary of a Provincial LadyE.M. Delafield

The much-loved comic masterpiece of domestic life, new to Penguin Modern Classics with an introduction by Rachel Johnson

A classic of English humour and domestic satire, this hilarious fictional diary of a 1930s Provincial Lady provides an entire masterclass in how to juggle grumpy husband, demanding children, help, garden, meals, rainy holidays, picnics, hats, frocks, conversation and correspondence. E.M. Delafield paints the daily grind in sparkling colours, and illustrates with wit and charm how a woman of this era might manage to use her own skills to escape domesticity.


LiveforeverAndrés Caicedo

This hypnotic Colombian novel is a wild celebration of youth, hedonism and the transforming power of music

María del Carmen Huerta lives a respectable bourgeois life in Colombia. One day she misses class, and discovers she cannot return to her ordinary existence but must pursue her passion for dancing across the city. We follow her from rumbas in car parks to concerts in shantytowns as she gives in to every desire however dark.

Published in 1977, Liveforever was its young author's masterpiece and final work. Andrés Caicedo took his life the day it was published, and it has been recognized as a landmark in Colombian literature ever since.


The Futurist CookbookFilippo Tommaso Marinetti

Marinetti's exuberant and entertaining book has been described as one of 'the best artistic jokes of the century'

Part manifesto, part artistic joke, this is a provocative work about art disguised as an easytoread cookbook. Here are recipes for ice cream on the moon; candied atmospheric electricities; nocturnal love feasts; sculpted meats. Marinetti also sets out his argument for abolishing pasta as illsuited to modernity, and advocates a style of cuisine that will increase creativity. The Futurist Cookbook is funny, provocative, whimsical, disdainful of sluggish traditions and delighted by the velocity and promise of modernity.


Modern Classics

Letters to VéraVladimir NabokovVladimir Nabokov's letters to his beloved wife, new to Penguin Modern Classics

No marriage of a major twentiethcentury writer lasted longer than Vladimir Nabokov's. Véra Slonim shared his delight in life's trifles and literature's treasures, and he rated her as having the best and quickest sense of humour of any woman he had met. From their meeting in 1921, Vladimir's letters to his beloved Véra form a narrative arc that tells a fortysixyearlong love story. Almost always playful, romantic, and pithy, the letters tell us as much about the man as the writer; we see that Vladimir observed everything, from animals, faces, speech, and landscapes with genuine fascination.

Pub Date June 2014 ISBN 9780141192239 Price £25.00 Format UNKNOWN Extent 640pp Territory 1BKZ

Vladimir Nabokov (18991977) was born in St Petersburg. He wrote his first literary works in Russian, but rose to international prominence as a masterly prose stylist for the novels he composed in English, most famously, Lolita. Between 1923 and 1940 he published novels, short stories, plays, poems and translations and established himself as one of the most outstanding Russian émigré writers of all time.

Modern ClassicsA Fire on the MoonNorman Mailer

As great a book as Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff - Norman Mailer's epic account of the first landing on the Moon

Armstrong: 'Houston, Tranquility Base here. The eagle has landed'.

A Fire on the Moon tells the scarcely credible story of the Apollo 11 mission. It is suffused with Mailer's obsession both with the astronauts themselves and with his own anxieties about the extremity of what they were trying to achieve. Mailer is at once admiring and appalled, resulting in a gripping narrative and a brilliant depiction of the nowforgotten technical issues and uncertainties around the mission.

Pub Date June 2014ISBN 9780141394961Price £10.99Extent 480pp

Mind of an OutlawSelected EssaysNorman Mailer

The definitive Norman Mailer collection, as he writes on Marilyn Monroe, culture, ideology, boxing, Hemingway, politics, sex, celebrity and - of course - Norman Mailer

From his early 'A Credo for the Living', published in 1948, when the author was 25, to his final writings in the year before his death, Mailer wrestled with the big themes of his time. He was one of the most astute cultural commentators of the postwar era, a swashbuckling intellectual provocateur who never pulled a punch and was rarely anything less than interesting. Mind of an Outlaw spans the full arc of Mailer's evolution as a writer.


Letters 1941–1985Italo Calvino

A rich selection of the letters of one of Italy's greatest modern writers, in their first English translation

This is the first, comprehensive translation of Calvino's letters into English, by Martin McLaughlin. They cover virtually all of Calvino's adult life, from shortly after the outset of WWII until his sudden death in 1985. These letters paint a remarkable portrait of one of the twentieth century's most original and extraordinary writers.


Modern ClassicsThe CyberiadFables for the Cybernetic AgeStanislaw Lem

Most cosmic civilizations long for things, in the depths of their souls, that they would never openly admit to

Trurl and Klapaucius are 'constructors' they travel around the universe creating machines of astonishing inventiveness and power and visiting a bewildering variety of violent, peculiar and morose civilizations. The Cyberiad is oddly reminiscent of Gulliver's Travels, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Phantom Tollbooth and Alice in Wonderland. Charming, mindbending and anarchic, it is perhaps Lem's greatest work. This edition includes all of Daniel Mroz's hallucinatory original illustrations.


The Thin Red LineJames Jones

James Jones' classic of combat literature: a brutal and devestating portrait of the senselessness of war

The soldiers of CforCharlie Company are not cast from the heroic mould. The unit's captain is too intelligent and sensitive for the job, his first sergeant is psychotic, and the enlisted men are gripped by cowardice. But they will all discover the thin red line that divides the sane from the mad and the living from the dead when they arrive on the island of Guadalcanal. Based on James Jones' experience in the Pacific Theatre during World War II, The Thin Red Line is a raw and unsparing depiction of the senselessness and brutalizing impact of war.


The Well of LonelinessRadclyffe Hall

The seminal work of gay literature that sparked an infamous legal trial for its obscenity and became a bestseller, new to Penguin Modern Classics

The Well of Loneliness tells the story of tomboyish Stephen, who hunts, wears trousers and cuts her hair short and who gradually comes to realize that she is attracted to women. Charting her romantic and professional adventures during the First World War and beyond, the novel provoked a furore upon publication in 1928 for its lesbian theme and led to a famous legal trial for obscenity. It is recognized today as a landmark work of gay fiction.

Pub Date February 2015ISBN 9780141191836Price £8.99Extent 466pp

Modern Classics

Half a Lifelong RomanceEileen ChangA love story set in 1930s Shanghai from the author of Lust, Caution, appearing in English for the first time in a translation by Karen Kingsbury

Manjing is a young worker in a Shanghai factory, where she meets Shujun, the son of wealthy Nanjing merchants. Despite family objections and complications, they fall in love and begin to dream of a shared life together. But disaster strikes, and the couple are torn apart. When they are reunited after a separation of many years, can they start their relationship again or is their love destined to be the romance of only half a lifetime? This affectionate and captivating novel tells the moving story of an enduring love affair, and offers a fascinating window onto Chinese life in the first half of the twentieth century.

Pub Date July 2014 ISBN 9780141189390 Price £8.99 Extent 320pp

Eileen Chang (19201995) was born in Shanghai. She studied literature at the University of Hong Kong but returned to Shanghai in 1941 during the Japanese occupation, where she published two works, Romances(1944) and Written on Water (1945), that established her reputation as a literary star. She moved to Hong Kong in 1952 and to America in 1955, where she continued to write. She died in Los Angeles in 1995.

Karen S. Kingsbury taught and studied in Chinesespeaking cities for nearly two decades, and currently lives in Pennsylvania, USA. She has translated Love in a Fallen City for Penguin Classics, as well as other essays and stories by Chang. 'A giant of modern Chinese literature' The New York Times

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