The memoir widely viewed as the best account ever written of fighting in WW1
A memoir of astonishing power, savagery, and ashen lyricism, Storm of Steel illuminates not only the horrors but also the fascination of total war, seen through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier. Young, tough, patriotic, but also disturbingly self-aware, Junger exulted in the Great War, which he saw not just as a great national conflict but--more importantly--as a unique personal struggle. Leading raiding parties, defending trenches against murderous British incursions, simply enduring as...

"The purser took the last landing-card in his hand and watched the passengers cross the wet quay, over a wilderness of rails and points, round the corners of abandoned trucks."
As the Orient Express hurtles across Europe on its three-day journey from Ostend to Constantinople, its voyage binds together the lives of several of its passengers in a fateful interlock. The menagerie of characters includes Coral Musker, a beautiful chorus girl; Carleton Myatt, a rich Jewish businessman; Richard John, a mysterious and kind doctor returning to his native Belgrade; the spiteful journalist...

A selection of The Bard's greatest writings edited by the great Shakespearean Stephen Orgel
William Shakespeare's plays revolutionized the English language and created some of the most important scenes in Western literature: Hamlet contemplating his mortality, Romeo romancing Juliet, Lear railing against his insanity into the storm, and King Henry V wandering among his soldiers on the eve of battle. With introductions and context from leading Shakespearean scholar Stephen Orgel, the essential works of the most important figure in English literature are collected here: nine complete...

The first volume of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, in Lydia Davis's award-winning translation

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest novel of the twentieth century. But since its original prewar translation there has been no completely new version in English. Now, Penguin Classics brings Proust's masterpiece to new audiences throughout the world, beginning with Lydia Davis's internationally acclaimed translation of the first volume, Swann's...

"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses a moment of experience from which to look ahead..."

"This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The End of the Affair, and it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account of his adulterous affair with Sarah Miles. Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exorcise the persistence of his passion by retracing its course from obsessive love to love-hate. At first, he believes he hates Sarah and her husband, Henry....

"Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork..."

Graham Greene's masterpiece, The Heart of the Matter, tells the story of a good man enmeshed in love, intrigue, and evil in a West African coastal town. Scobie is bound by strict integrity to his role as assistant police commissioner and by severe responsibility to his wife, Louise, for whom he cares with a fatal pity.

When Scobie falls in love with the young widow Helen, he finds vital passion again yielding to pity, integrity giving way to deceit and...

MI6's man in Havana is Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. To keep his job, he files bogus reports based on Charles Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. Then his stories start coming disturbingly true...

First published in 1959 against the backdrop of the Cold War, Our Man in Havana remains one of Graham Greene's most widely read novels. It is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study, and a political satire of government intelligence that still...

Graham Greene's classic exploration of love, innocence, and morality in Vietnam

"I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," Graham Greene's narrator Fowler remarks of Alden Pyle, the eponymous "Quiet American" of what is perhaps the most controversial novel of his career. Pyle is the brash young idealist sent out by Washington on a mysterious mission to Saigon, where the French Army struggles against the Vietminh guerrillas.

As young Pyle's well-intentioned policies blunder into bloodshed, Fowler, a seasoned and cynical British reporter, finds it...

While best known for such novels as his monumental Moby-Dick, Herman Melville was also an extraordinarily gifted poet. This is the most complete anthology of Melville's poetry ever published in a single volume. It features a large selection from Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, along with Melville's own notes and prose supplement; cantos from all four books of Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land; selections from Melville's later books, Timoleon, John Marr and Other Sailors, and Weeds and Wildings, Chiefly, with a Rose or Two;...

Based on his own experience of the Great War, Henri Barbusse's novel is a powerful account of one of the greatest horrors mankind has inflicted on itself.
For the group of ordinary men in the French Sixth Battalion, thrown together from all over France and longing for home, war is simply a matter of survival, lightened only by the arrival of their rations or a glimpse of a pretty girl or a brief reprieve in the hospital. Reminiscent of classics like Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Under Fire (originally published...