Penguin Classics for Back to School
We’ve curated the following short list of Penguin Classics titles with a back-to-school spirit in mind. That is, these are books that speak to a timely issue, enlighten with diverse perspectives, and inform us with their enduring relevance in the world today.
-
1
Add to BookshelfPassing
by Nella Larsen
Nella Larsen’s powerful and tragic story about racial fluidity resonates deeply today and brings a lot of important questions to the table about what we think about in terms of whiteness and the complexity around passing.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$15.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
2
Add to Bookshelf
An Enemy of the People
by Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s classic drama is a classic in itself, a penetrating exploration of what happens when the truth comes up against the will of the majority.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$13.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
3
Add to Bookshelf
Eichmann in Jerusalem
by Hannah Arendt
Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism and “the banality of evil” illuminate current political debates with urgency, especially her controversial journalistic analysis of the mentality that fostered the Holocaust.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
4
Add to Bookshelf
The Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Many readers’ most recommended book for those new to sci-fi, and a pioneering feminist sci-fi masterpiece about a world where inhabitants can choose—and change—their gender.
Add to BookshelfHardcover
$26.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
5
Add to Bookshelf
Twelve Angry Men
by Reginald Rose
A memorable landmark American drama that examines the American melting pot and the judicial system that keeps it in check.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$14.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
6
Add to Bookshelf
The Light of Truth
by Ida B. Wells
The broadest and most comprehensive collection of writings including essays on the horrors of lynching by an early civil and women’s rights pioneer.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$20.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
7
Add to Bookshelf
We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin
The exhilarating dystopian novel that inspired George Orwell’s 1984 and foreshadowed the worst excesses of Soviet Russia.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$17.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
8
Add to Bookshelf
The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
The incomparable twentieth-century masterpiece of satire and fantasy, in a newly revised version of the acclaimed Pevear and Volokhonsky translation.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$19.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
9
Add to Bookshelf
The Diary of a Madman, the Government Inspector, and Selected Stories
by Nikolai Gogol
Author, dramatist and satirist, Nikolai Gogol deeply influenced later Russian literature with his powerful depictions of a society dominated by petty bureaucracy and base corruption.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$17.00Buy from Other Retailers:
