Carti in categoria Literature & Biography

Is there anything quite so exhilarating as swimming in wild water? This is a joyful swimming tour of Britain, a frogs-eye view of the countrys best bathing holes - the rivers, rock pools, lakes, ponds, lochs and sea that define a watery island. Charming, funny, inspiring, an assertion of the native swimmers right to roam, a celebration of the magic of water - this book will indeed make you want to strip off and leap in.Selected from the book Waterlog by Roger DeakinVINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BI...

How do you remember the summers of your childhood? For Laurie Lee they were flower-crested, heady, endless days. Here is an evocation of summer like no other - a remote valley filled with the scent of hay, jazzing wasps, blackberries plucked and gobbled, and games played until the last drop of dusk. Lees joyful and stirring writing captures the very essence of Englands golden season. Selected from the book Cider with Rosie by Laurie LeeAn enchanting book, an exquisite farewell, not only to child...

A modernist work of profound wisdom that continues to enthral readers with its subtle blend of Eastern mysticism and Western culture, the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Hermann Hesses Steppenwolf is revised by Walter Sorell from the original translation by Basil Creighton.At first sight Harry Haller seems a respectable, educated man. In reality he is the Steppenwolf: wild, strange, alienated from society and repulsed by the modern age. But as he is drawn into a series of dreamlike and someti...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Sons and Lovers by D. H. LawrenceShe was a brazen hussy.She wasnt. - And she was pretty, wasnt she?I didnt look ... And tell your girls, my son, that when theyre running after you, theyre not to come and ask your mother for you - tell them that - brazen baggages you meet at dancing classesThe marriage of Gertrude and Walter Morel has become a battleground. Repelled by her uneducated and sometimes violent husband, delicate Gertrude devotes her life to her ch...

In addition to his celebrated childrens books such as James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl wrote short fiction for adult audiences, and the tales collected in Someone Like You are dark, witty morsels of intrigue and suspense from a master storyteller. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is published with a foreword by Dom Joly.These eighteen tales of the macabre show Dahls dark brilliance as a short story writer. They are wicked (as an old man attracts the...

Your sister might be the kindred soul who knows you best, or the most alien being in your household; she might enrage you or inspire you; she might be your fiercest competitor or closest co-conspirator, but shell always share with you a totally unique bond. Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy are four of the most famous sisters in literature, and these stories of the joys and heartaches they share are a touching celebration of the special ties of sisterhood.Selected from the books Little Women and Good Wives ...

The valley was full of snakes and serpents as big as palm trees, so huge that they could have swallowed any elephant that met them.A selection of fantastic and perilous adventures at sea from the Thousand and One Nights.Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguins 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Silas Marner by George EliotGod gave her to me because you turned your back upon her, and He looks upon her as mine: youve no right to her!Wrongly accused of theft and exiled from a religious community many years before, the embittered weaver Silas Marner lives alone in Raveloe, living only for work and his precious hoard of money. But when his money is stolen and an orphaned child finds her way into his house, Silas is given the chance to transform his lif...

Hermann Hesses moving and inspirational chronicle of spiritual enlightenment, with an introduction by Paulo Coehlo Siddhartha is perhaps the most important and compelling moral allegory our troubled century has produced. Integrating Eastern and Western spiritual traditions with psychoanalysis and philosophy, this strangely simple tale, written with a deep and moving empathy for humanity, has touched the lives of millions since its original publication in 1922. Set in India, Siddhartha is the sto...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Sense and Sensibility by Jane AustenThe more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!Jane Austens novel tells the story of Marianne Dashwood, who wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinors warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always ...

W.B. Yeatss Selected Poems is edited with an introduction and notes by Timothy Webb in Penguin Modern Classics.Few have lived their ideas so passionately and nobly as W.B. Yeats in his love affairs, politics and poetry. From his youth in the 1880s, a fertile dreamer rediscovering and remaking the Irish tradition, he grew into a great and innovative poet of the twentieth century. This selection of Yeatss work includes the final book from the unjustly neglected narrative poem The Wanderings of Ois...

Saki is perhaps the most graceful spokesman for Englands Golden Afternoon - the slow and peaceful years before the First World War. Although, like so many of his generation, he died tragically young, in action on the Western Front, his reputation as a writer continued to grow long after his death. The stories are humorous, satiric, supernatural, and macabre, highly individual, full of eccentric wit and unconventional situations. With his great gift as a social satirist of his contemporaryupper-c...

Robinson Crusoe runs away from home to join the navy. After a series of adventures at sea, he is shipwrecked in a devastating storm, and finds himself alone on a remote desert island. He remains there many years, building a life for himself in solitude, until the day he discovers another mans footprint in the sand...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel DefoeI walkd about on the shore, lifting up my hands, and my whole being, as I may say, wrapt up in the contemplation of my deliverance ... reflecting upon all my comrades that were drownd, and that there should not be one soul savd but my self ... Who has not dreamed of life on an exotic isle, far away from civilization? Here is the novel which has inspired countless imitations by lesser writers, none of which equal the power and ...

An exploration of race from one of the twentieth centurys primary chroniclers of the African American experience.Is who we are really only skin deep? In this searing, remonstrative book, Toni Morrison unravels race through the stories of those debased and dehumanised because of it. A young black girl longing for the blue eyes of white baby dolls spirals into inferiority and confusion. A friendship falls apart over a disputed memory. An ex-slave is haunted by a lonely, rebukeful ghost, bent on br...

The first book in his award-winning Rabbit series, John Updikes Rabbit, Run contains an afterword by the author in Penguin Modern Classics.Its 1959 and Harry Rabbit Angstrom, one time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence - stuck with a fragile, alcoholic wife, a house full of overflowing ashtrays and discarded glasses, a young son and a futile job. With no way to fix things, he resolves to flee from his family and his home in Penn...

Its 1969, and the times are changing. America is about to land a man on the moon, the Vietnamese war is in full swing, and racial tension is on the rise. Things just arent as simple as they used to be - at least, not for Rabbit Angstrom. His wife has left him with his teenage son, his job is under threat and his mother is dying. Suddenly, into his confused life - and home - comes Jill, an eighteen-year-old runaway who becomes his lover. But when she invites her friend to stay, a young black radi...

Its 1979 and Rabbit is no longer running. Hes walking, and beginning to get out of breath. Thats OK, though - it gives him the chance to enjoy the wealth that comes with middle age. Its all in place: hes Chief Sales Representative and co-owner of Springer motors; his wife, at home or in the club, is keeping trim; he wears good suits, and the cash is pouring in. So why is it that he finds it so hard to accept the way that things have turned out? And why, when he looks at his family, is he haunted...

Its 1989, and Harry Rabbit Angstrom is far from restful. Fifty-six and overweight, he has a struggling business on his hands and a heart that is starting to fail. His family, too, are giving him cause for concern. His son Nelson is a wreck of a man, a cocaine addict with shattered self-respect. Janice, his wife, has decided that she wants to be a working girl. And as for Pru, his daughter-in-law, she seems to be sending out signals to Rabbit that he knows he should ignore, but somehow cant. He h...

Could drugs offer a new way of seeing the world? In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gramme of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers, was transformed. His account of his experience, and his vision for all that psychedelics could offer to mankind, has influenced writers, artists and thinkers around the world.The unabridged text of The Doors o...