Coloured by poverty and horrifying brutality, Gorky's childhood equipped him to understand - in a way denied to a Tolstoy or a Turgenev - the life of the ordinary Russian. After his father, a paperhanger and upholsterer, died of cholera, five-year-old Gorky was taken to live with his grandfather, a polecat-faced tyrant who would regularly beat him unconscious, and with his grandmother, a tender mountain of a woman and a wonderful storyteller, who would kneel beside their bed (with Gorky inside it pretending to be asleep) and give God her views on the day's happenings, down to the last...
Coloured by poverty and horrifying brutality, Gorky's childhood equipped him to understand - in a way denied to a Tolstoy or a Turgenev - the life of ...
A genre-changing work of biography Eminent Victorians marked an epoch in the art of biography; it also helped to crack the old myths of high Victorianism and to usher in a new spirit by which chauvinism, hypocrisy and the stiff upper lip were debunked. In it, Strachey cleverly exposes the self-seeking ambitions of Cardinal Manning and the manipulative, neurotic Florence Nightingale; and in his essays on Dr Arnold and General Gordon, his quarries are not only his subjects but also the public-school system and the whole structure of nineteenth-century liberal values. For...
A genre-changing work of biography Eminent Victorians marked an epoch in the art of biography; it also helped to crack the old myths...
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. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by...
If you know London primarily through novels like White Fang, these stories will provide a new perspective. Full of intriguing characters and sn...
In July 1917, when the Provisional Government issued a warrant for his arrest, Lenin fled from Petrograd; later that year, the October Revolution swept him to supreme power. In the short intervening period he spent in Finland, he wrote his impassioned, never-completed masterwork The State and Revolution. This powerfully argued book offers both the rationale for the new regime and a wealth of insights into Leninist politics. It was here that Lenin justified his personal interpretation of Marxism, savaged his opponents and set out his trenchant views on class conflict, the lessons of earlier...
In July 1917, when the Provisional Government issued a warrant for his arrest, Lenin fled from Petrograd; later that year, the October Revolution swep...
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.
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 journal...
From master storyteller Graham Greene comes the tale of Anthony Farrant, who has boasted, lied and cheated his way through jobs all over the world. Then his adoring twin sister, Kate, gets him taken on as the bodyguard of Krogh, her lover and boss, a megalomaniac Swedish financier. All goes well until Krogh gives orders that offend Anthony's innate decency. Outraged and blind to risk, he leaks information to Minty, a shabby journalist and fellow victim of life, a decision that will lead to disastrous consequences. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of...
From master storyteller Graham Greene comes the tale of Anthony Farrant, who has boasted, lied and cheated his way through jobs all over the world. Th...
An immaculately-observed social comedy that explores the boundaries between personal freedom and the demands of love Katharine Hilbery is beautiful and privileged, but uncertain of her future. She must choose between becoming engaged to the oddly prosaic poet William Rodney, and her dangerous attraction to the passionate Ralph Denham. As she struggles to decide, the lives of two other women women's rights activist Mary Datchet and Katharine's mother, Margaret, struggling to weave together the documents, events and memories of her own father's life into a biography impinge on hers...
An immaculately-observed social comedy that explores the boundaries between personal freedom and the demands of love Katharine Hilbery is ...
These 30 short stories, comprising Somerset Maugham's first collection, are set in locations ranging from England, France and Spain to the silver sands of the South Pacific. They include "Rain," "The Three Fat Women of Antibes," "The Voice of the Turtle," and "Before the Party." For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide...
These 30 short stories, comprising Somerset Maugham's first collection, are set in locations ranging from England, France and Spain to the silver sand...
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."
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...
A definitive edition of perhaps the greatest short story collection in the English language
James Joyce's Dubliners is a vivid and unflinching portrait of "dear dirty Dublin" at the turn of the twentieth century. These fifteen stories, including such unforgettable ones as "Araby," "Grace," and "The Dead," delve into the heart of the city of Joyce's birth, capturing the cadences of Dubliners' speech and portraying with an almost brute realism their outer and inner lives. Dubliners is Joyce at his most accessible and most profound, and this edition is the definitive...
A definitive edition of perhaps the greatest short story collection in the English language