You must be Odysseus, man of twists and turns...'The tales of Odysseus's struggle with a man-eating Cyclops and Circe, the beautiful enchantress who turns men into swine.Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.Next to nothing is known about Homer's life. His works available in Penguin Classics are The Homeric Hymns, The Iliad and The Odyssey.

'I truly thought I'd never make it back.'Ten of the most memorable and most terrifying cantos from Dante's Inferno.

'It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spreadbefore you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met...'Moonlight, sake, spring blossom, idle moments, a woman's hair - these exquisite reflections on life's fleeting pleasures by a thirteenth-century Japanese monk are delicately attuned to nature and the senses.

'An ass, clothed in the skin of a lion...'Aesop's animal fables are someof the earliest stories ever told, thought to have been composed by a slave in Greek antiquity and giving glimpses of a world that is harsh, pitiless and yet also eerily familiar.

'Hoodwink'd in faery fancy...'This volume contains a selection of Keats's greatest verse - including his gothic story in verse, 'The Eve of St Agnes', and the mysterious 'Lamia' - exploring themes of love, enchantment, myth and magic.

'But I ran up the broken stairway, and came out suddenly, as if bya miracle, clean on the platform of my San Tommaso, in the tremendous sunshine.' - Four personal, sun-drenched sketches of Lawrence's experiences in Italy.

' "She's an adventuress. Yes, an adventuress, but an end-of-the-century one. She doesn't travel for profit, but for pleasure."' - Offering an entertaining introduction to the fin-de-siècle, this selection from the notorious magazine The Yellow Book includesstories and poems by famous writers such as Arnold Bennett and John Buchan, brilliant pieces by lesser-known writers such as Ada Leverson and Ella D'Arcy, and illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley.

'Mind you, it was a pukka, respectable opium-house, and not one of those stifling, sweltering chandoo-khanas that you can find all over the City.'Kipling first became famous for his pungent, harsh and shocking stories of northwest India, where he grew up. This is just a small selection from his inexhaustibly contentious and various early work.

He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension praeternatural.

'All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages...'A selection taken from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass

'It's you who are the dogs...' What makes us happy? For over 800 years the Cynic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome argued that the answer lay in a simple, self-sufficient life.

'Tonight he noticed how the women's eyesPassed from him to the strong men that were whole.'The true horror of the trenches is brought to life in this selection of poetry from the front line.

'It's a dreadful thing to yield...but resist now?Lay my pride bare to the blows of ruin?That's dreadful too.'The remarkable story of Greek tragedy's most intrepid heroine.

'We must learn to love, learn to be kind, and this from our earliest youth ... Likewise, hatred must be learned and nurtured, if one wishes to become a proficient hater'This volume contains a selection of Nietzsche's brilliant and challenging aphorisms, examining the pleasures of revenge, the falsity of pity, and the incompatibility of marriage with the philosophical life.

'O let them be left, wildness and wet'As Kingfishers Catch Fire is a selection of Gerard Manley Hopkins' incomparably brilliant poetry, ranging from the ecstasy of 'The Windhover' and 'Pied Beauty' to the heart-wrenching despair of the 'sonnets of desolation'.

'This is as much a mystery as the Immaculate Conception, which of itselfmust make a doctor an unbeliever.'A stunning pair of short stories about faith and sacrificial love.

'She has many rare and charming qualities, but Sobriety is not one of them.'A selection of Austen's dark and hilarious early writings - featuring murder, drunkenness, perjury, theft, poisoning, women breaking out of prison, men forging wills and babies biting off their mothers' fingers...

'Because of his baldness and hairiness, he announced it was a capital offence for anyone either to look down on him as he passed or to mentiongoats in any context.'The biography of the brutal, crazed and incestuous Roman Emperor Caligula, who tried to appoint his own horse consul.

'Yes, we did many things, then - allBeautiful ...'Lyrical, powerful poems about love, sexuality, sun-soaked Greece and the gods.

'Hate is not conquered by hate: hate is conquered by love. This is a laweternal.'Captivating aphorisms illustrating the Buddhist dhamma, or moral system.I

'Drawn on by his eagerness for the open sky, he left his guide and soared upwards...'Ovid tells the tales of Theseus and the Minotaur, Daedalus and Icarus, the Calydonian Boar-Hunt, and many other famous myths.

A selection of Maupassant's brilliant, glittering stories set in the Parisian beau monde and Normandy countryside.

'Did she know and if she knew would she speak?'The story of an unsolved literary mystery that explores what James referred to as "troubled artistic consciousness"

Virginia Woolf's delightful biography of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel, which asks what it means to be human - and to be dog.

'She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth' A selection of Rossetti's most famous poems, from the hallucinatory 'Goblin Market' to 'In the bleak mid-winter'

'With one's face in the wind you were almost burned with a shower of Firedrops' A selection from Pepys' startlingly vivid and candid diary, including his famous account of the Great Fire

'Desperate-minded villain!' Two of Dickens' hilarious early stories from Sketches by Boz: 'The Great Winglebury Duel' and 'Bloomsbury Christening'

'No one characteristic clasps us purely and universally in its embrace.' A selection of charming essays from a master of the genre exploring the contradictions inherent to human thought, words and actions.

'Better mad with the crowd than sane all alone'. In these witty Machiavellian aphorisms unlikely Spanish priest Baltasar Gracian shows us how to exploit friends and enemies alike to thrive in a world of deception and illusion

'And then he, completely astonished at her words, left off his lewdness,saying to her as many a man had done before, "Either you are a truly good woman or else a truly wicked woman." ' Brave, outspoken and guaranteed to annoy people wherever she went - including exasperated fellow pilgrims in Jerusalem and her long-suffering husband - Margery Kempe was one of the most vivid and unforgettable voices of the Middle Ages.

Dazzling modern lyrical poems from Catullus - by turns smutty, abusive, romantic and deeply moving.

'The vessel drove before her bows two billows of liquid phosphorus' A selection of Darwin's extraordinary adventures during the voyage of the Beagle.

'The Argonauts were terrified at the sight. But Jason planting his feet apart stood to receive them, as a reef in the sea confronts the tossing billows in a gale.'The tragic, epic love affair that allowed Jason to get the Golden Fleece.

Written by spy, traveller and pioneering female writer Aphra Benn, this story of an African prince sold into slavery is considered one of the earliest English novels. 'We are bought and sold like apes or monkeys, to be the sport of women, fools, and cowards, and the support of rogues ..."

'Of what a mistake were you guilty in marrying a Man of his age! - just old enough to be formal, ungovernable and to have the Gout - too old to be agreable, and too young to die.' The scheming and unscrupulous Lady Susan is unlike any Austen heroine you've met in this fascinating early novella.

'In this painting of Leonardo's there was a smile so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human.' Often called "the first art historian", Vasari writes with delight on the lives of Leonardo and other celebrated Renaissance artists .

'What is the life of a human being - a drop of dew, a flash of lightning? This is so sad, so sad.' Autobiographical stories from one of Japan's masters of modernist story-telling.

'Nothing more lonely -' A selection of Basho's most magical haiku

He was not blind to the fact that murder, like the religions of the Pagan world, requires a victim as well as a priest...' Wilde's supremely witty tale of dandies, anarchists and a murderous prophecy in London high society.

A collection of cantos from Paradiso, the most original and experimental part of the Divina Commedia.

'No voice, no low, no howl is heard; the chief sound of life here is a
hiss.'Stories and poems by Herman Melville drawn from his years at seaI.

'I could see that she was still terribly afraid, but I didn't soften anything; instead, seeing that she was afraid I deliberately intensifiedit.'In this short story, Dostoyevsky masterfully depicts desperation, greed, manipulation and suicide.

'And again, as always, he had the feeling he was holding something that never was quite his - his. Something too delicate, too precious, that would fly away once he let go.'Three sharp and powerful short stories from Katherine Mansfield, one of the genre's all-time masters.

'... a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food...'Swift's devastating short satire on how to solve a famine

Four hilarious and provocative stories from Boccaccio's Decameron, featuring cuckolded husbands, cross-dressing wives and very bad priests.

'It's coming - the postponeless Creature' Electrifying poems of isolation, beauty, death and eternity from a reclusive genius and one of America's greatest writers

'Drunk or sober, king or soldier, none will be excluded' - Sensual,profound, delighted, wise, Hafez's poems have enchanted their readers for more than 600 years. One of the greatest figures of world literature, he remains today the most popular poet in modern Iran.

'Strangely enough, I mistook it for a gentleman at first. Fortunately I had my spectacles with me so I could see it was really a nose.'With this pair of absurd, comic stories Gogol indulges his imagination and delights readers.

'But I, while vineyards ring with the cicadas' scream,Retrace your steps, alone, beneath the burning sun.' Virgil's lyrical, wistful and often witty pastoral poems.