Essential Penguin Classics

For Roxane Gay, a feminist canon is subjective and always evolving. A feminist canon represents a long history of feminist scholarship, embraces skepticism, and invites robust discussion and debate. Selected writings by ancient, historic, and more recent feminist voices include Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Anna Julia Cooper, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Eileen Myles, Mona Eltahawy, bell hooks, Sara Ahmed, Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, The Guerrilla Girls, and many more.

When brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov is murdered, the lives of his sons are changed irrevocably: Mitya, the sensualist, whose bitter rivalry with his father immediately places him under suspicion for parricide; Ivan, the intellectual, whose mental tortures drive him to breakdown; the spiritual Alyosha, who tries to heal the family’s rifts; and the shadowy figure of their bastard half-brother Smerdyakov. As the ensuing investigation and trial reveal the true identity of the murderer, Dostoyevsky’s dark masterpiece evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur, and everyone’s faith in humanity is tested.

Every year, three to four million people move to a new country. From war refugees to corporate expats, migrants constantly reshape their places of origin and arrival. This selection of works, collected together for the first time, brings together the most compelling literary depictions of migration. With 30 carefully selected poems, short stories, and excerpts spanning 300 years and 25 countries, the collection brings together luminaries, emerging writers, and others who have earned a wide following in their home countries but have been less recognized in the Anglophone world.

Since the launch of Penguin Classics in 1946, innovative cover design has been one of its defining aspects. Today, Penguin Classics remains at the leading edge of the book-design world. In this curated tour featuring illuminating commentary by artists and writers, including Malika Favre, Mike Mignola, James Franco, Jessica Hische, Jillian Tamaki, and many more, Penguin creative director Paul Buckley showcases more than a decade of stunning cover designs and the stories behind them. For lovers of classic literature, book design, and all things Penguin, Classic Penguin has you covered.

Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next 12 years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation. After his rescue, Northup published this exceptionally vivid and detailed account of slave life.

Written by one of the greatest Iranian writers of the 20th century, Blind Owl tells a two-part story of an isolated narrator with a fragile relationship with time and reality. In a new translation that reflects Hedayat’s conversational, confessional tone, Blind Owl joins the ranks of classics by Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky that explore the dark recesses of the human psyche.

In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to play mah jong, remember the past, and gossip into the night. United in unspeakable loss and new hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the memories that display these women’s strength, worries, and determination. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of the matriarchal ties that they believe have stymied their ability to face the uncertainties of the future.

Describing Dante’s descent into Hell with Virgil as a guide, Inferno depicts a cruel underworld in which desperate figures are condemned to eternal damnation for committing one or more of the seven deadly sins. As he descends through nine concentric circles of increasingly agonizing torture, Dante encounters doomed souls. Led by leering demons, the poet must ultimately journey with Virgil to the deepest level of all. For it is only by encountering Satan, in the heart of Hell, that he can truly understand the tragedy of sin.

A compelling exploration of racial identity, adapted into a film that is now streaming on Netflix and still deeply resonant today. Clare Kendry is living on the edge. Light-skinned, elegant, and ambitious, she is married to a racist white man unaware of her African American heritage, and has severed all ties to her past after deciding to “pass” as a white woman. Clare’s childhood friend, Irene Redfield, just as light-skinned, has chosen to remain within the African American community. Clare’s interest in Irene turns into a longing for Irene’s black identity that she can never embrace again, and is forced to grapple with her decision to pass for white in a way that is both tragic and telling.

Few have failed to be charmed by the witty and independent spirit of Elizabeth Bennet in Austen’s beloved classic Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth’s early determination to dislike Mr. Darcy is a prejudice only matched by the folly of his arrogant pride. Their first impressions give way to true feelings in a comedy profoundly concerned with happiness and how it might be achieved.

The Stonewall uprising is considered the most significant event in the gay liberation movement and the catalyst for the modern fight for LGBTQ+ rights in the United States. Drawing from the New York Public Library’s archives, The Stonewall Reader is a collection of first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ+ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots. Most importantly, the anthology spotlights both iconic activists who were pivotal in the movement, such as Sylvia Rivera, co-founder of Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR), as well as forgotten figures like Ernestine Eckstein, one of the few out, African American, lesbian activists in the 1960s.

When The Souls of Black Folk was first published in 1903, it had a galvanizing effect on the conversation about race in America — and it remains both a touchstone in the literature of African Americans and a beacon in the fight for civil rights. Believing that one can know the “soul” of a race by knowing the souls of individuals, W. E. B. Du Bois combines history and stirring autobiography to reflect on the magnitude of American racism and to chart a path forward against oppression, and introduces the now-famous concepts of the color line, the veil, and double-consciousness.

A beautiful collectible hardcover edition of the father of Korean American literature’s “wonderfully resplendent evocation of a newcomer’s America” (Chang-rae Lee, author of Native Speaker). Part picaresque adventure, part shrewd social commentary, East Goes West casts a sharply satirical eye on the demands and perils of assimilation. It is a masterpiece not only of Asian American literature but also of American literature.

The prose short story arrived in Bengal in the wake of British colonizers, and Bengali writers quickly made the form their own. By the 20th century, a profusion of literary magazines and journals meant millions were avidly reading them. Writers responded to this hunger for words with a ferocious energy that reflected the turmoil of their times: these stories covered land wars, famine, the caste system, religious conflict, patriarchy, Partition, and the liberation war that saw the emergence of the independent country of Bangladesh. Across these shifting geographical borders, writers also looked inward, evolving new literary styles and stretching the possibilities of social realism, political fiction, and intimate domestic tales.

Zitkala-Sa (also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) wrestled with the conflicting influences of American Indian and white culture throughout her life. Raised on a Sioux reservation, she was educated at boarding schools that enforced assimilation and was witness to major events in white-Indian relations in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Tapping her troubled personal history, Zitkala-Sa created stories that illuminate the tragedy and complexity of the American Indian experience. In evocative prose laced with political savvy, she forces new thinking about the perceptions, assumptions, and customs of both Sioux and white cultures and raises issues of assimilation, identity, and race relations that remain compelling today.

When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific discoveries about his client. Soon afterwards, various bizarre incidents unfold in England. In Dracula, Bram Stoker created one of the great masterpieces of the horror genre, brilliantly evoking a nightmare world of vampires and vampire hunters and also illuminating the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire.

First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers — and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

Mary Shelley’s haunting adventure about ambition and modernity run amok. Obsessed by creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life by electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear. This chilling gothic tale has become the world’s most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity.

In a house haunted by memories, the past is everywhere … As darkness falls, a man caught in a snowstorm is forced to shelter at the strange, grim house Wuthering Heights. It is a place he will never forget. There he will come to learn the story of Cathy: How she was forced to choose between her well-meaning husband and the dangerous man she had loved since she was young. How her choice led to her betrayal and terrible revenge — and continues to torment those in the present. How love can transgress authority, convention, even death.

A collectible hardcover edition of our greatest African American poet’s award-winning first novel, about a black boy’s coming of age in a largely white Kansas town, featuring an introduction by National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy.

Kim Ronyoung (Gloria Hahn, 1926–1987) tells the story of Haesu and Chun, immigrants who fled Japanese-occupied Korea for Los Angeles in the decade prior to World War II, and their American-born children. First published in 1986, Clay Walls offers a portrait of what being Korean in California meant in the first half of the 20th century and how these immigrants’ nationalist spirit helped them withstand racism and poverty. Kim explores the tensions within a family of immigrants and new Americans and brings to the forefront the themes of Korean immigration, U.S. racism, generational trauma, and the early decades of Los Angeles’s Koreatown from a Korean American woman’s point of view.

The classic story of the March family, Little Women has been adored for generations. The novel follows the lives of four sisters — tomboyish Jo, beautiful Meg, fragile Beth, and romantic Amy — as they come of age while their father is fighting in the Civil War. Since 1868, readers have rooted for Laurie in his pursuit of Jo’s hand, cried over the family’s tragedy, and dreamed of traveling through Europe with old Aunt March and Amy. In this simple, enthralling tale, Louisa May Alcott has created four of American literature’s most beloved women.

Charlotte Brontë’s first published novel, Jane Eyre was immediately recognized as a work of genius when it appeared in 1847. How Jane takes up the post of governess at Thornfield Hall, meets and loves Mr. Rochester and discovers the impediment to their lawful marriage are elements in a story that transcends melodrama to portray a woman’s passionate search for a wider and richer life than that traditionally accorded to her sex in Victorian society.

The great Kenyan writer and Nobel Prize nominee’s novel that he wrote in secret, on toilet paper, while in prison — featuring an introduction by Namwali Serpell, the author of the novel The Old Drift. An impassioned cry for a Kenya free of dictatorship and for African writers to work in their own local dialects, Devil on the Cross has had a profound influence on Africa and on post-colonial African literature.

James Joyce’s Dubliners is a vivid and unflinching portrait of “dear dirty Dublin” at the turn of the 20th century. These 15 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 text, authorized by the Joyce estate and collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author’s original wishes.

In an unnamed country, an egomaniacal dictator schemes to dispose of a political adversary and maintain his grip on power. As tyranny takes hold, everyone is forced to choose between compromise and death. Inspired by life under the regime of President Manuel Estrada Cabrera of Guatemala, where it was banned for many years, and infused with exuberant lyricism, Mayan symbolism, and Guatemalan vernacular, Nobel Prize winner Miguel Ángel Asturias’s magnum opus is at once a surrealist masterpiece, a blade-sharp satire of totalitarianism, and a gripping portrait of psychological terror.

Lady Nijo’s A Tale Unasked (Towazugatari) is the last, and arguably the finest, among classical Japanese literature’s famous “women’s diaries.” Thought to have been completed around 1307, when the author was in her late forties, the first two-thirds of this autobiographical work document in rich and compelling detail the experiences of an imperial concubine whose time at court was ruled and finally ruined by her passionate and complicated love life. The final third of the work equally memorably describes her peripatetic life after the emperor expelled her from the court in her mid-twenties and she became a nun, wandering the roads of Japan as a form of Buddhist austerity.

It’s the early 1920s in Paris, and Jake, a wounded World War I veteran working as a journalist, is hopelessly in love with charismatic British socialite Lady Brett Ashley. Brett, however, settles for no one: an independent, liberated divorcée, all she wants out of life is a good time. When Jake, Brett, and a crew of their expatriate friends travel to Spain to watch the bullfights, both passions and tensions rise. Amid the flash and revelry of the fiesta, each of the men vies to make Brett his own, until Brett’s flirtation with a confident young bullfighter ignites jealousies that set their group alight.

Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantès is confined to the grim fortress of the Château d’If. There, he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo, and he becomes determined not only to escape but also to use the treasure to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. Robin Buss’s lively translation is complete and unabridged, and remains faithful to the style of Dumas’s original. This edition includes an introduction, chronology, explanatory notes, and suggestions for further reading.

Visiting Florence with her prim and proper cousin Charlotte as a chaperone, Lucy Honeychurch meets the unconventional, lower-class Mr. Emerson and his son, George. Upon her return to England, Lucy becomes engaged to the supercilious Cecil Vyse, but she finds herself increasingly torn between the expectations of the world in which she moves and the passionate yearnings of her heart. More than a love story, A Room with a View (1908) is a penetrating social comedy and a brilliant study of contrasts – in values, social class, and cultural perspectives – and the ingenuity of fate.

A 1946 Filipino American social classic about the United States in the 1930s from the perspective of a Filipino migrant laborer who endures racial violence and struggles with the paradox of the American dream.

Originally published in 1971, Merle Miller’s On Being Different is a pioneering and thought-provoking book about being homosexual in the United States. Just two years after the Stonewall riots, Miller wrote a poignant essay for the New York Times Magazine entitled “What It Means To Be a Homosexual.” Described as “the most widely read and discussed essay of the decade,” it carried the seed that would blossom into On Being Different — one of the earliest memoirs to affirm the importance of coming out.

Considered the greatest literary achievement in Vietnamese, The Song of Kieu tells the story of the beautiful Vuong Thuy Kieu, who agrees to a financially profitable marriage to save her family from ruinous debts, but is tricked into working in a brothel. Her tragic life involves jealous wives, slavery, war, poverty, and time as a nun. Adapted from a 17th-century Chinese novel, Jin Yun Qiao, written by an unknown writer under the pseudonym Qingxin Cairen, author Nguyen Du upended the plot’s traditional love story by conveying the social and political upheavals at the end of the 18th century in Vietnam.

Written in 1920, Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a time and place long gone by — 1870s New York City — beautifully captures the complexities of passion, independence, and fulfillment, and how painfully hard it can be for individuals to truly see one another and their place in the world.

The Odyssey is literature’s grandest evocation of everyman’s journey through life. In the myths and legends that are retold here, renowned translator Robert Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer’s original in a bold, contemporary idiom and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery.

No collection of Japanese literature is complete without Natsume Sõseki’s Kokoro, his most famous novel and the last he completed before his death. Published here in the first new translation in more than fifty years, Kokoro — meaning “heart” — is the story of a subtle and poignant friendship between two unnamed characters, a young man and an enigmatic elder whom he calls “Sensei,” and the profound cultural shift from one generation to the next that characterized Japan in the early twentieth century.

Don Quixote has become so entranced reading tales of chivalry that he decides to turn knight errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, these exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote’s fancy often leads him astray — he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants — Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together — and together they have haunted readers’ imaginations for nearly four hundred years.

Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life; indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence …

One of Egypt’s most acclaimed and well-known authors, Yusuf Idris, is heralded as a “renovator and genius of the short story” whose signature stylistic device, the combination of literary and colloquial language à la Huckleberry Finn, transformed Arabic literature. The Cheapest Nights is a collection of some of his most important works, the title story of which follows a man who, unable to sleep, angrily meditates on the state of his life and the extreme poverty in which he finds himself. With compassion, astute observational skills, and biting humor, Idris explores the fraught lives of the Egyptian working class, all the while turning a critical eye on the power structures that oppress them.

Claude McKay’s first novel, Home to Harlem, was published in 1928 during the height of the Harlem Renaissance. McKay portrays Harlem post-WWI through two Black migrants to New York: Jake, a Southern-born African American longshoreman who deserts the U.S. army and returns to his home in Harlem; and Ray, an educated Haitian immigrant. With his innovative use of Black dialects, McKay portrays a complex world of Black people, both native-born and immigrant, who navigate a dynamic society in the midst of radical change.

A Room of One’s Own is a landmark in feminist thought in which Woolf imagines the fictional Judith Shakespeare, sister to William and equally gifted but lost to history. How much genius has gone unexpressed, Woolf wonders, because women are not afforded the same privileges as men? A hundred years later, her brilliant polemic reverberates into our own time.

A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early-twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence. Through a series of letters spanning nearly thirty years, first from Celie to God, then from the sisters to each other, the novel draws readers into a rich and memorable portrayal of Black women — their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery.

Young, handsome, and fabulously rich, Jay Gatsby seems to have everything. But at his mansion east of New York City, where the party never seems to end, one thing will always be out of reach: The married Daisy Buchanan, whose house is visible from Gatsby’s just across the bay. A brilliant evocation of the Roaring Twenties and a satire of postwar America obsessed with wealth and status, The Great Gatsby is a novel whose power remains undiminished after a century.

Eight-year-old Kahu craves her great-grandfather’s love and attention. But he is focused on his duties as chief of a Mãori tribe in Whangara, on the East Coast of New Zealand — a tribe that claims descent from the legendary ‘whale rider.’ Kahu should be next in line as chief, but her great-grandfather is blinded by tradition and sees no use for a girl. Kahu will not be ignored. And in her struggle, she has a unique ally: The whale rider himself.

In 1915, Puerto Rican activist Luisa Capetillo was arrested and acquitted for being the first woman to wear men’s trousers publicly. While this act of gender-nonconforming rebellion elevated her to feminist icon status in modern pop culture, it also overshadowed the significant contributions she made to the women’s movement and anarchist labor movements of the early 20th century, both in her native Puerto Rico and in the migrant labor belt in the eastern United States. At once a sharp critique and a celebration of the gathering fervor of world politics, A Nation of Women embraces the humanistic thinking of the early 20th century and envisions a world in which economic and social structures can be broken down, allowing both the worker and the woman to be free.

The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare’s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. With stunning new covers, definitive texts, and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come.

This fantastically varied and exciting collection celebrates the art of the Japanese short story, from its origins in the nineteenth century to the remarkable practitioners writing today. Edited by acclaimed translator Jay Rubin, who has himself freshly translated some of the stories, and with an introduction by Haruki Murakami, this book is a revelation.

This compact volume offers a comprehensive course on the remarkable, diverse career of Frederick Douglass, allowing us to hear once more a necessary historical figure whose guiding voice is needed now as urgently as ever. Edited by renowned scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Pulitzer Prize–nominated historian John Stauffer, The Portable Frederick Douglass includes the full range of Douglass’s works.

At a glittering society party in St. Petersburg in 1805, conversations are dominated by the prospect of war. Terror swiftly engulfs the country as Napoleon’s army marches on Russia, and the lives of three young people are changed forever. In War and Peace, Tolstoy entwines grand themes — conflict and love, birth and death, free will and fate — with unforgettable scenes of nineteenth-century Russia, to create a magnificent epic of human life in all its imperfection and grandeur.