'The train ran on without a driver, on and on, like some mindless, unseeing beast...' - One of Zola's darkest and most violent works - a tense thriller of political corruption and a graphic exploration of the criminal mind, as a murder is committed on the new railways of the Second Empire.

Sparkling, darkly humorous tales of high society, playboys, courtesans, peasants, sex and savagery in nineteenth-century France, from the father of the short story.

Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in the provincial town of 'N',visiting a succession of landowners and making each a strange offer. Heproposes to buy the names of dead serfs still registered on the census,saving their owners from paying tax on them, and to use these 'souls' as collateral to re-invent himself as a gentleman. In this ebullient masterpiece, Gogol created a grotesque gallery of human types, from the bear-like Sobakevich to the insubstantial fool Manilov, and, above all, the devilish con man Chichikov. Dead Souls, Russia's first major novel, is one of the most unusual works of nineteenth-century fiction and a devastating satire on social hypocrisy.

'Now, ill-lit, almost in darkness, the windows of the houses shuttered, the water dank, the scene appeared altogether different, neglected, poor, and the long narrow boots moored to the slippery steps of cellar entrances looked like coffins.' - A slow-burning masterpiece of horror recounting a grieving couple's fateful visit to Venice, Don't Look Now is accompanied here by further short tales of desire and dread.

'Her fragrant body and burning red lips' - A married couple reveal their darkest sexual fantasies to each other, in this erotic psychodrama of infidelity, transgression and decadence in early twentieth-century Vienna.

' Me have that golden gown! ' - A blameless girl and her monstrous relatives clash over love and money in Balzac s matchless portrayal of greed in a French provincial town.

'Aristocracy, liberalism, progress, principles...useless words! A Russian doesn't need them' This humane, moving masterpiece of families, love, duels, heartache, failure and the clash between generations caused a scandal in nineteenth-century Russia with its portrayal of youthful nihilism.

Saved, rescued, fished-up, half-drowned, out of the deep, dark river, dry clothes, hair shampooed and set... - Set in a 1930s Paris of shabby hotel rooms, seedy bars and drunken encounters, Jean Rhys's semi-autobiographical portrayal of a young woman's sexual encounters is a searingly honest exploration of loneliness and yearning.

A gripping, intensely atmospheric story of love, espionage and betrayal in wartime Shanghai, Lust, Caution is accompanied here by four more shimmering tales of Chinese life.
In 1940s Shanghai, beautiful young Jiazhi spends her days playing mahjong and drinking tea with high society ladies. But China is occupied by invading Japanese forces and things are not always what they seem in wartime . . .
A passionate tale of espionage, deception and love, Lust, Caution is accompanied here by four further dazzling short stories by Eileen Chang.

'I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.' - Featuring an ordinary man who wakes up to find himself turned into a giant cockroach, Kafka's masterpiece of unease and black humour, Metamorphosis, is brought together here with the best of his short stories.

Monkey depicts the adventures of Prince Tripitaka, a young Buddhist priest on a dangerous pilgrimage to India to retrieve sacred scriptures accompanied by his three unruly disciples: the greedy pig creature Pipsy, the river monster Sandy - and Monkey. Wu Ch'êng-ên wrote Monkey in the mid-sixteenth century, adding his own distinctive style to an ancient Chinese legend, and in so doing created a
dazzling combination of nonsense with profundity, slapstick comedy with spiritual wisdom.

On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party and remembering her past. Elsewhere in London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge as the party reaches its glittering climax in Woolf's great novel of time, memory, war and the city.

'There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.'This dreamlike meditation on being young and alone in Paris is a feverish work of nerves, angst and sublime beauty from one of the twentieth
century's greatest poets.

One of the most moving accounts of being a boy ever written, My Childhood is a both wonderful and harrowing memoir - and one of the great works of Russian literature.

'I could hear the frost crackling outside. Greenish moonbeams shone through windows covered with patterns of ice...' - One of the most moving accounts of being a boy ever written, My Childhood is a both wonderful and harrowing memoir - and one of the great works of Russian literature.

'The train ran on without a driver, on and on, like some mindless, unseeing beast...' - One of Zola's darkest and most violent works - a tense thriller of political corruption and a graphic exploration of the criminal mind, as a murder is committed on the new railways of the Second Empire.

'When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find that it is the same in all her music.' - In one of the most passionate memoirs ever written, Karen Blixen recalls running a farm in Africa at the start of the twentieth century, and the love affair that changed her life.

'The hideous, then unfamiliar shriek of the air-raid sirens sang out over London.' - Upper-class rogues, bohemians, dowagers, socialites, bureaucrats and delinquent evacuees prepare for England to change forever, in this hilarious and deadly serious 1942 satire on the 'phoney war'.

'Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head. Don't ever surrender yourself - not to Japan, not to anything' - A shy, unworldly young student has his eyes opened to Tokyo's bustling metropolis, in this delicate, bitter-sweet work of innocence and experience from Japan's foremost modern novelist.

'As though walking through a deep dream, I saw steel helmets approaching through the craters. They seemed to sprout from the fire-harrowed soil like some iron harvest.' - A memoir of astonishing power, savagery and ashen lyricism, Storm of Steel depicts Ernst Jünger's experience of combat on the front line - leading raiding parties, defending trenches against murderous British incursions, and
simply enduring as shells tore his comrades apart. One of the greatest books to emerge from the catastrophe of the First World War, it
illuminates like no other book not only the horrors but also the fascination of a war that made men keep fighting for four long years.

'It flashed upon me suddenly: they were going to shoot me!' - This electrifying eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution, written by an American journalist in St Petersburg as the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, is an unsurpassed record of history in the making.

Following a Parisian philosophy teacher through the cafés and bars of Montparnasse over two days in the sweltering summer of 1938, Sartre's searing novel explores what it truly means to be free.

'I pity this house; the curse of God is hanging over it' Two lovers must face tyrants, war, riots, plague and famine as they struggle to be together, in this teeming panorama of seventeenth-century Italian life - the original historical novel.

'What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise...' - Mad, macabre tales of demonic spirits, hideous rites, ancient curses and alien entities lurking beneath the surface of rural New England, from the man who created the modern horror story.

'He said that Shamil had ordered Hadji Murat to be taken dead or alive....' - Two masterly Russian tales of freedom, fighting and great warriors in the majestic mountains of the Caucasus, inspired by Tolstoy's years as a soldier living amid the Cossack people.

'40000 francs which lay before him in a heap of gold and banknotes.' - Written in twentysix days to pay off Dostoyevskys own roulette debts The Gambler is a graphic psychological study of addiction accompanied here by a brilliant short story of excruciating social embarrassment.

'All the world was mad around her and she herself, agonized, took on the complexion of a mad woman; of a woman very wicked.' - In the saddest story I have ever heard', a naïve American abroad unfolds a devastating tale of two seemingly respectable Edwardian marriages
destroyed by infidelity and lies.

'Listen, Švejk, are you really God's prize oaf?''Humbly report, sir,' Švejk answered solemnly. 'I am!' - Drunkard, malingerer, oaf and possible genius - the story of Czech soldier Svejk and his misadventures in the First World War is one of the most hilarious and subversive satires on war ever written.

'The way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear' - Making its twenty-three-year-old author an overnight literary sensation, this storyof isolated, lost lives intersecting in a small town in the American South is a masterpiece of humane sensitivity.

Set in a crumbling Spanish mansion, The House of Ulloa follows innocent and timid Father Julián Alvarez as he tries to turn the aristocratic owner away from drinking, womanizing and emptying the last of the family coffers. But his attempts end in disgrace and disaster in Emilia Pardo Bazán's brilliant novel, which seamlessly mixes realism with the gothic, and pathos with a rich vein of humour.

They say that terror is a disease... - A shipwrecked man finds himself, after various twists of Fate, on a lonely tropical island. From a locked enclosure the cries of animals in pain can be heard, and there is a stink of chemicals in the air. Bestial faces stare out of the forests and grotesque, misshaped creatures move in the gloom. In this island paradise, the horrific experiments of the infamous Doctor Moreau will reach their inevitable conclusion.

'He too began to chase the great pierrot through the corridors of the château...' - A novel of desperate yearning and vanished adolescence, the story of Meaulnes and his restless search for a lost, enchanted world has the atmosphere of a dream and the purity of a fairy tale.

Set in the vanished world of the shtetl of nineteenth-century eastern Europe, this spellbinding fable tells the story of Yasha: magician, mesmerist, juggler, sword swallower, master of escape - and breaker of hearts.

'I slept very comfortably with half a dozen smoke-dried human skulls suspended over my head' The great Victorian scientist's heroic adventures across South-East Asia, from Singapore to the wilds of New Guinea, encountering head-hunters, jungles, birds of paradise and new discoveries that would change the world.

'Manuscripts don't burn' This ribald, carnivalesque satire - featuring the Devil, true love and a gun-toting cat - was written in the darkest days of the Soviet Union and became an underground sensation.

'There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.'This dreamlike meditation on being young and alone in Paris is a feverish work of nerves, angst and sublime beauty from one of the twentieth
century's greatest poets.

'So Ursula became the child of her father's heart.' - The Rainbow tells the story of three generations of the Brangwen family and their struggles with each other and themselves. Beautiful, strange and with a power all its own, The Rainbow redefined the English novel.

'The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket.' - Set in an Edwardian London underworld of terrorist bombers, spies, grotesques and fanatics, Conrad's dark, unsettling masterpiece asks if we ever really know others, or ourselves.

'Twenty-three dagger thrusts went home as he stood there. Caesar did not utter a sound...' - This vivid, racy account of the men who wielded absolute power over ancient Rome - including maniacs, tyrants, warriors, sadists and murderers - is the source for nearly everything we know about one of the most dramatic periods in history.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Inspiring, brilliantly written, cantankerous and funny - Walden is both a very specific story about one man's attempt to live the simple life in the wilderness, and the great, founding text both for the environmental movement and the entire counter-culture

'It was a dark night, with only occasional scattered lights glittering like stars on the plain' - The aviator and author of The Little Prince describes vast, otherworldly landscapes, crash landings and magical encounters in his transcendent account of flying over the Sahara and the Andes. Ten new titles in the colourful, small-format, portable new Pocket Penguins series