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People in Trouble
By Sarah Schulman. 1990
'A book of resistance and love, as urgently necessary now as it was thirty years ago' Olivia Laing First published…
in 1990, discover this blistering novel about a love triangle in New York during the AIDS crisis. The perfect novel to read after bingeing It's A Sin. It was the beginning of the end of the world but not everyone noticed right away. It is the late 1980s. Kate, an ambitious artist, lives in Manhattan with her husband Peter. She's having an affair with Molly, a younger lesbian who works part-time in a movie theater. At one of many funerals during an unbearably hot summer, Molly becomes involved with a guerrilla activist group fighting for people with AIDS. But Kate is more cautious, and Peter is bewildered by the changes he's seeing in his city and, most crucially, in his wife. Soon the trio learn how tragedy warps even the closest relationships, and that anger - and its absence - can make the difference between life and death. 'Strong, nervy and challenging' New York TimesPentatonic: A Story of Music (Penguin Specials)
By Jonathan Coe. 2012
Jonathan Coe's Pentatonic is a daring and original story about family and memory inspired by music.When a family celebrates the…
prize-giving day at their daughter's secondary school, thoughts turn to their own childhoods. The father remembers his living room piano recital, recorded on a well-worn cassette tape. The mother remembers her own father's war tragedy. As the father searches for the physical reminder of his past and the mother longs to forget her own, they confront the breakdown of their marriage in the present.In Pentatonic, Jonathan Coe movingly explores the memories that unite us and the experiences that drive us apart. The story is simultaneously available as a digital download with the piece of music which originally inspired the story.Praise for Jonathan Coe:'Probably the best English novelist of his generation' Nick Hornby'Coe has huge powers of observation and enormous literary panache' Sunday Times 'Jonathan Coe's a fine writer who seems to try something new with every book' David Nicholls Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. He is the author of eight bestselling novels including What a Carve Up! and The Rotters' Club, and a biography of the novelist B. S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, which won the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for best non-fiction book of the year.The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories
By Margaret Jull Costa. 2019
This exciting collection celebrates the richness and variety of the Spanish short story, from the nineteenth century to the present…
day.Featuring over fifty stories selected by revered translator Margaret Jull Costa, it blends old favourites and hidden gems - many of which have never before been translated into English - and introduces readers to surprising new voices as well as giants of Spanish literary culture, from Emilia Pardo Bazán and Leopoldo Alas, through Mercè Rodoreda and Manuel Rivas, to Ana Maria Matute and Javier Marías. Brimming with romance, horror, history, farce, strangeness and beauty, and showcasing alluring hairdressers, war defectors, vampiric mothers, and talismanic mandrake roots, the daring and entertaining assortment of tales in The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories will be a treasure trove for readers.The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories
By Jhumpa Lahiri. 2019
'Rich. . . eclectic. . . a feast' TelegraphThis landmark collection brings together forty writers that reflect over a hundred…
years of Italy's vibrant and diverse short story tradition, from the birth of the modern nation to the end of the twentieth century.Poets, journalists, visual artists, musicians, editors, critics, teachers, scientists, politicians, translators: the writers that inhabit these pages represent a dynamic cross section of Italian society, their powerful voices resonating through regional landscapes, private passions and dramatic political events.This wide-ranging selection curated by Jhumpa Lahiri includes well known authors such as Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante and Luigi Pirandello alongside many captivating new discoveries. More than a third of the stories featured in this volume have been translated into English for the first time, several of them by Lahiri herself.The Peasants
By Wladyslaw Reymont. 2022
One of Poland's most engrossing twentieth-century epics, by the 1924 winner of the Nobel Prize for LiteratureIn the village of…
Lipce, scandal, romance and drama crackle in every hearth. Boryna, a widower and the village's wealthiest farmer, has taken the young and beautiful Jagusia as his bride - but she only has eyes for his impetuous son Antek. Over the course of four seasons - Autumn to Summer - the tangled skein of their story unravels, watched eagerly by the other peasants: the gossip Jagustynka, pious Roch, hot-blooded Mateusz, gentle Witek ... Richly lyrical and thrillingly realist, at turns comic, tragic and reflective, Wladyslaw Reymont's magnum opus is a love song to a lasting dream of rural Poland, and to the eternal, timeless matters of the heart.The Past
By Alan Pauls. 2003
'A novel that is brilliant enough to raise itself effortlessly above and beyond the level of the vices it portrays:…
strange art and reckless passion, cocaine, excessive exercise and other forms of addiction' - Fabienne Dum, Le MondeRímini splits up with his girlfriend of twelve years, Sofía. The parting is initially amicable and he moves on, carefree, with a new zest for life. Hungry to make up for lost time and keen to forget the past, he finds a younger girlfriend and starts using cocaine. Sofía, however, finds herself unable to let go, and continues to reappear on Rímini's horizon. Though the apparently idyllic relationship is over, their love has not died, merely taken on a different form. As time passes and their paths continue to cross, the past festers and torments them, like an infection.Passing (The Penguin English Library)
By Nella Larsen. 2020
Clare Kendry has severed all ties to her past. Elegant, fair-skinned and ambitious, she is married to a white man…
who is unaware of her African-American heritage. When she renews her acquaintance with her childhood friend Irene, who has not hidden her origins, both women are forced to reassess their marriages, the lies they have told - and to confront the secret fears they have buried within themselves. Nella Larsen's intense, taut and psychologically nuanced portrayal of lives and identities dangerously colliding established her as a leading writer of America's Harlem Renaissance.The Penguin English Library - collectable general readers' editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War.Particle Theory: A Novel
By Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy. 2011
Two orphaned boys - one Russian (Ivan), and one British (Michael) -may or may not be brothers, Ivan is brought…
up brutally on the bleak rural steppes, while Michael is cosseted by his grandmother in the Home Counties. And yet they coexist in a sort of parallel universe' their lives interconnected, physically in the text, as well as throug a common yearning - to discover their origins and purpose in life and to find elusive romantic and emotional fulfilment. Ivan manages to escape from his past and present to find a new life abroad. He is in almost constant motion, where Michael remains more or less rooted to the spot. His journey of discovery is through a strange, obsessive internal landscape. Gathorne-Hardy combines a rare narrative skill with compassion and humourParallel Text: Nouvelles Francaises
By Various Authors. 1972
These eight stories by leading 20th century French writers offer fascinating insights into French life and literature and are accompanied…
by a parallel English text, making them valuable for both French and English language students.Among the diverse and entertaining stories in the collection are the wistful masterpiece ‘Green Tobacco’ by Clair Sainte-Soline; the exuberant tale of ‘The Ants’ by the post-war king of café society, Boris Vian, and a suspense in the nineteenth-century erotic tradition from Andre de Mandiargues.The Pancatantra
By Visnu Sarma, Visnu Sarma. 1993
First recorded 1500 years ago, but taking its origins from a far earlier oral tradition, the Pancatantra is ascribed by…
legend to the celebrated, half-mythical teacher Visnu Sarma. Asked by a great king to awaken the dulled intelligence of his three idle sons, the aging Sarma is said to have composed the great work as a series of entertaining and edifying fables narrated by a wide range of humans and animals, and together intended to provide the young princes with vital guidance for life. Since first leaving India before AD 570, the Pancatantra has been widely translated and has influenced a cast number of works in India, the Arab world and Europe, including the Arabian Nights, the Canterbury Tales and the Fables of La Fontaine. Enduring and profound, it is among the earliest and most popular of all books of fables.Ovid Metamorphosed
By Philip Terry. 2000
The shape-shifting poetry of Ovid's Metamorphoses has fascinated writers and artists from Shakespeare to Ted Hughes, Rembrandt to Picasso. Its…
eternal freshness is haunted by an ancient idea: that a person's true nature is revealed when their physical shape is changed- the wolf-like man becomes a wolf, the obsessive spinner a spider.For this dazzling collection Philip Terry asked leading writers to take Ovid as a starting point and set their invention free. The results are startling, from Apollo and Phaeton transposed to a Dutch classroom to Diana and Actaeon in the rain of Nova Scotia. We find fables, grotesques and white-coated scientists; sports-cars, swans and shells; and even Ovid himself, high-spirited and unrepentant, speaking to us from beyond the grave.Challenging the very shape of the modern short story, Ovid Metamorphosed is a kaleidoscope of delights, scary, sexy, suggestive and profoundly entertaining.Overland
By Graham Rawle. 2018
Welcome to Overland! Where the California sun shines down on synthetic grass and plastic oranges bedeck the trees all year…
round. Steam billows gently from the chimney tops and the blue tarpaulin lake is open for fishing… Hollywood set-designer George Godfrey has been called on to do his patriotic duty and he doesn’t believe in half-measures. If he is going to hide an American aircraft plant from the threat of Japanese aerial spies he has an almighty job on his hands. He will need an army of props and actors to make the Lockheed factory vanish behind the semblance of a suburban town. Every day, his “Residents” climb through a trapdoor in the factory roof to shift model cars, shop for imaginary groceries and rotate fake sheep in felt-green meadows. Overland is a beacon for the young women labouring below it: Queenie, dreaming of movie stardom while welding sheet metal; Kay, who must seek refuge from the order to intern “All Persons of Japanese Ancestry”. Meanwhile, George’s right-hand Resident, Jimmy, knows that High Command aren’t at all happy with the camouflage project...With George so bewitched by his own illusion, might it risk confusing everybody – not just the enemy?Overland is a book like no other -- to be read in landscape format. Based on true events, it is a novel where characters' dreams and desires come down to earth with more than a bump, confronting the hardships of life during wartime. As surreal and playful as it is affecting and unsettling, no-one other than Graham Rawle could have created it.Orlando
By Virginia Woolf. 1928
Virginia Woolf's most unusual and fantastic creation, a funny, exuberant tale that examines the very nature of sexuality. WITH INTRODUCTIONS…
BY PETER ACKROYD AND MARGARET REYNOLDS As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate young nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colourful delights of Queen Elizabeth's court. By the close, he will have transformed into a modern, thirty-six-year-old woman and three centuries will have passed. Orlando will not only witness the making of history from its edge, but will find that his unique position as a woman who knows what it is to be a man will give him insight into matters of the heart. The Vintage Classics Virginia Woolf series has been curated by Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Reynolds, and the texts used are based on the original Hogarth Press editions published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. **One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**Only Human
By Kristine Naess. 2014
Bea Britt lives alone in her grandmother’s house in west Oslo. Early one morning, she wakes to find a police…
hunt outside her window and drama unfolding on her TV. Volunteers are scouring the local woods looking for Emilie, a missing schoolgirl. Emilie's rucksack is found in Bea Britt's garden. But as her spiralling doubts and suspicions take over, is she a suspect, a witness or a potential second victim? The mystery of Emilie’s disappearance and Bea Britt’s story are intricately bound to the lives of two other women: Bea Britt’s grandmother Cecilie, a troubled 1930s housewife whose marriage has broken down, and university student Beate, who is desperate for love but plagued by uncertainty. Only Human is a rich, urgent novel about family, enduring oneself and others, and what is needed when life wears thin. It lays bare the hopes, dreams, fears and failures of three infinitely human characters, and is delicately revealing of the choices that shape a human life and our quest for companionship and love.One Tongue Singing
By Susan Mann. 2004
Camille Pascal, a young, unmarried French nurse comes to South Africa with her father and her small daughter, Zara, during…
the closing years of the apartheid regime. The family settles amongst a wine-growing community in the Western Cape where they become involved in the lives of victims of the System. Interwoven with Camille's story is that of Jake Coleman, a painter with an international reputation, a deep-seated fear of failure, and a complicated private life. It is in the exclusive Jake Coleman School of Art that Zara, now a talented artist in her late teens, decides to enrol. She is a feral, troubled girl, obsessed with scenes of violence, and quite unlike anything Jake has encountered. One Tongue Singing explores some of the different faces of power, both in the ways it operates between individuals and in societies. It is written with economy, humanity and a hard brilliance, and it announces a distinctive new voice from South Africa.Of Ghosts and Goblins (Little Clothbound Classics)
By Lafcadio Hearn. 2022
Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by…
the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil.In this haunting collection, the phantoms and ghouls of Japanese folklore stalk the page. Lafcadio Hearn, a master storyteller, drew on traditional Japanese folklore, infused with memories of his own haunted childhood in Ireland, to create these chilling tales. They are today regarded in Japan as classics in their own right.'The stories occupy the reverie world our mind projects onto the backs of our eyelids, where the ordinary mingles with the supernatural' - Wall Street JournalOf Dogs and Walls (Penguin Modern)
By Yuko Tsushima. 1982
'Though their house was new, the wall had been there a long time.'In these two stories, which have never before…
been translated into English, Tsushima shows how memories, dreams and fleeting images describe the borders of our lives.Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.Obabakoak
By Bernardo Atxaga. 1989
One of only a hundred or so books originally written in the Basque language during the last four centuries, Obabakoak…
is a shimmering, mercurial novel about life in Obaba, a remote, exotic, Basque village. Obaba is peopled with innocents and intellectuals, shepherds and schoolchildren, whilst everyone from a lovelorn schoolmistress to a cultured but self-hating dwarf wanders across the page.Obabakoak is a dazzling collage of stories, town gossip, diary excerpts and literary theory, all held together by Atxaga's distinctive and tenderly ironic voice.Nothing But The Truth
By Sam Lock. 1998
Samuel Lock's first novel, AS LUCK WOULD HAVE IT, was acclaimed by the critics as one of the most strikingly…
original first novels for years and went on to win the Sagittarius Award. NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH, Lock's new novel, shares many of its qualities - an exact but curiously mysterious prose style, superb evocation of a time and place (in this case Chelsea's King's Road in the fifties), and range of deliciously eccentric characters. It is the story of Jason Callow, a mildly successful novelist, estranged from his wife and children. As Jason struggles to comprehend and overcome the inner crisis that grips him, he is observed by his neighbours, his family, his friends, all powerless, it seems, to alter the inexorable course of his destiny.Nothing But Grass
By Will Cohu. 2015
In the summer of 1875, two travellers walk south across the Lincolnshire Wolds to a village riven with dark secrets.When…
Norman Tanner kills his workmate on a cold February morning a century later, he thinks he’s got away with murder. But Norman doesn’t know about the workmate’s girlfriend, or the child that will come back to haunt him; and how he is caught up in a story that stretches back to that Victorian summer. For some in the village of Southby and its nearby grand estate, man is master of his fate, and the world is full of meaning; for others there is nothing but grass.