A collection of Steinbeck's dispatches filed for the New York Herald Times at the height of World War II. He begins in England, recounting the courage of the bomber crews, the tragic air-raids and the strangeness of the British, before being sent to Africa and joining a special-operations unit off the coast of Italy. Eating, drinking, talking and fighting alongside the soldiers, Steinbeck's empathy for the common man is always in evidence in these pieces, as he evokes the human side of an inhuman war.

A fascinating insight into the vibrant culture of Modernism, and the rich artistic world of Paris's Left Bank, Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas includes an introduction by Thomas Fensch in Penguin Modern Classics. For Gertrude Stein and her wife Alice B. Toklas, life in Paris was based upon the rue de Fleurus and the Saturday evenings and 'it was like a kaleidoscope slowly turning'. Picasso was there with 'his high whinnying Spanish giggle', as were Cezanne and Matisse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. As Toklas put it - 'The geniuses came and talked to Gertrude Stein and the...

The new Penguin Freud, under Adam Phillips' general editorship, offers a fantastic opportunity to see Freud in a fresh light. This endlessly beguiling, suggestive, thought-provoking writer can be appreciated nowhere more vividly than in The Case Histories: 'Little Hans', 'The Rat Man', 'The Wolf Man' and 'Some Character Types Met within Psychoanalytic Work.'

Explores the line between principled defiance and blind fanaticism. This book follows the fortunes of Jim Nolan, disenfranchised and alone, his family destroyed by the system. It is an observation of social and political turmoil and a moving story of a young man's struggle for identity.

Empson's poetry occupies a central place in 20th century literature. Acclaimed as the author of Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). William Empson was applauded also for the dazzling intelligence and emotional passion of his poems. T.S. Eliot praised the brain power and intense feeling of his poetry; F.R. Leavis hailed him as the first true successor to John Donne. Other writers as diverse as W.B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas and John Betjeman have admired his elegant, humane and moving work. Robert Lowell told Empson: I think you are the most intelligent poet writing in our language and perhaps the...

This is the autobiography of Woody Guthrie, the founder of modern American folk music. It is a funny, cynical, earthy and tragic account of his life in an Oklahoma oil-boom town, of the Depression, and of his subsequent travels in, on and under trains, in stolen cars and on his feet round America.

A collection of plays including Lucifer and the Lord, Huis Clos, and The Respectable Prostitute.

This epoch-making book cuts through confused thinking and forces us to re-examine many cherished ideas about knowledge, imagination, consciousness and the intellect. The result is a classic example of philosophy.

Hailed as the greatest modern lyrical poet of Germany, Rainer Maria Rilke s genius lies in his passion for perfection, artistic integrity and willingness to remain a perpetual beginner . The verse contained in this selection ranges from the objective, naturalistic descriptions of his earliest works to the increasingly effusive outpourings of half-religious ecstasy and anguish that characterize his later poems and culminates in the overwhelmingly personal vision of the famous Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, in which his most intense experiences of living and being find their noblest...

Her grand attempt to tell what she felt was the story of Jane Eyre's 'madwoman in the attic', Bertha Rochester, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea is edited with an introduction and notes by Angela Smith in Penguin Classics. Born into the oppressive, colonialist society of 1930s Jamaica, white Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent beauty and sensuality. After their marriage, however, disturbing rumours begin to circulate which poison her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is...