In 1940 Steinbeck sailed in a sardine boat with his great friend the marine biologist, Ed Ricketts, to collect marine invertebrates from the beaches of the Gulf of California. The expedition was descr
Her grand attempt to tell what she felt was the story of Jane Eyre's 'madwoman in the attic', Bertha Rochester, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea is edited with an introduction and notes by Angela Smith i
From hustling, drug addiction and armed violence in America's black ghettos Malcolm X turned to the puritanical fervour of the Black Muslims. He became identified in the white press as a teacher of ra
A story of the troubled life of an introspective historian, Antoine Roquentin, and an exposition of one of the most influential and significant philosophical attitudes of modern times - existentialism
P B Jones discovers that bed-hopping rather than literary ability is the way to get published. He discovers along the way that prayers that are answered cause more pain than those that remain ignored.
Spurred on by admiration for his novelist half-brother and irritation at the biography written about him by Mr Goodman ('his slapdash and very misleading book'), the narrator, V, sets out to record Se
School is 'wet and weedy', according to Nigel Molesworth, the 'goriller of 3B', 'curse of St Custard's' and superb chronicler of fifties English life. Nothing escapes his disaffected eye and he has li
This volume brings together Freud's main contributions to the psychology of love. His illuminating discussions of the ways in which sexuality is always psychosexuality - that there is no sexuality wit
Isak Dinesen was the pen-name of Karen Blixen, who was born in Rungsted, Denmark in 1885. After studying art, she married her cousin, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke. Together they went to Kenya to manage a
A pitch-black comedy set in London overshadowed by the looming threat of the Second World War, Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square includes an introduction by J.B. Priestley in Penguin Modern Classics.
An incomparable satirist, the author became the "laughing devil" of the San Francisco news media, for he was about as discreet as a runaway locomotive, according to H L Mencken. This dictionary presen
June 1940 was the summer of defeat for the French soldiers, deserted by their officers, utterly demoralized, awaiting the Armistice. Day by day, hour by hour, Iron in the Soul unfolds what men thought
Written in Paris in the early 1950s, this book created controversy in its analysis of 'modern' society that had allowed itself to be hypnotized by socio-political doctrines, and to accept totalitarian
The Gift is the phantasmal autobiography of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, a writer living in the closed world of Russian emigre intellectuals in Berlin shortly after the First World War. In this his las
Albinus - rich, married middle-aged and respectable - is an art critic and aspiring filmmaker who lusts after the coquettish young cinema usherette Margot. Gradually he seduces her and convinces himse
Provides inspiration for anti-colonial movements ever since, analysing the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for freedom. In this book, the author makes clear the econ
Stevie Smith was one of the few 'modern' poets to reach a wide general audience. Bizarre, witty, sad, sometimes caustic, her poems impart a zest for life, and reveal her eye for the marvels of the ord
A collection of seven tales, whose settings range from Tuscany and Elsinore, to a dhow on its way from Lamu to Zanzibar. It is shot through with themes of love and desire - from the maiden lady who no
This is the authoritative edition of the work of one of the world's greatest living poets. This volume brings together a selection of Miosz's poetry from his early youth in Poland to poems marking a n
Drawing directly on original manuscripts, this collection comprises the major short stories published after Kafka’s death. It includes The Great Wall of China, Blumfeld, An Elderly Bachelor, Investiga
