Aaron Robertson is a writer, an editor, and a translator of Italian literature. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon was short-listed for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award, and in 2021 he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, n+1, The Point, and Literary Hub, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Aaron Robertson

Aaron Shapiro

Aaron T Beck

Aaron Vallance

Aaron Young was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, and read Politics and Communications at The University of Liverpool. He is a BAFTA-nominated director, producer and executive producer with over 20 years of experience across projects for the BBC, PBS, Channel 4, Channel 5, UKTV, UK Film Council and Arts Council England. A long-time collaborator of acclaimed historian, James Holland, he is the producer and director of the BAFTA-shortlisted BBC titles ‘Battle of Britain: The Real Story’ and, ‘Dam Busters: The Race to Smash the German Dams’, as well as ‘The Battle for Malta’, ‘Normandy ’44: The Battle Beyond D-Day’, the RTS-nominated ‘Imphal &amp; Kohima: Britain’s Greatest Battle.’, and the 3-part series, 'Normandy '44: D-Day and the Battle for France. His most recent credits include 'Hidden Histories of WWII', 'Lost Temples of Cambodia', the RTS-winning ‘Lost Home Movies of Nazi Germany’, and ‘Prue Leith: Journey with My Daughter’. Aaron was named in the inaugural list of BAFTA ‘Brits to Watch.’ He is the co-owner of award-winning film and television production company, Bright Button Productions, and lives with his wife and children in Poundbury, Dorset.

Aaron Young

Aatish Taseer

Abbe Prevost

Abbey Bryant is an NYC-based award-winning illustrator. With her BFA in Children's Book Illustration, her notable illustrated books include Nautilus award winner Hazel Mist, Hypnotist as well as an Enchanted Fairy House Kit with Scholastic's Klutz! 
 
As a queer illustrator, LGBTQ+ themes and stories hold a spot near to her heart. Most days she can be found around the city drawing New Yorkers or sketching trees at the park.

Abbey Bryant

Abbey Clancy is a model, television presenter and the host of chart-topping podcast The Therapy Crouch. She was the runner-up of Britain's Next Top Model in 2006, winner of Strictly Come Dancing in 2013 and went on to present Britain's Next Top Model. Later this year she will host Celebrity Homes on ITV.

Abbey Clancy

Abbie Greaves studied at Cambridge University before working in a literary agency for a number of years. She was inspired to write her first novel, The Silent Treatment, after reading a newspaper article about a boy in Japan who had never seen his parents speak to one another before. 
 
Abbie lives in Brighton with her boyfriend.

Abbie Greaves

Abbie Ross is a British author and psychotherapist. Her first book, Hippy Dinners, a funny and poignant memoir of her bohemian childhood in 1970s North Wales, has been optioned by Baby Cow, who are developing it into an 8-part television series. 
Before turning to writing, Abbie had a successful career as a producer at Aardman Animations, the acclaimed studios behind Wallace &amp; Gromit and the film Chicken Run. 
Today, she divides her time between her thriving psychotherapy practice in Bristol, and her writing, and finds that the two careers complement each other perfectly.

Abbie Ross

Abbie Spallen

Abbie Taylor lives in Dublin. She works as a doctor and has two daughters.

Abbie Taylor

Abby L Yates co-founded the Ghostbusters with Erin Gilbert. Ghosts from Our Past was her first book, now finally back in print.

Abby L Yates

Abby Lee

Abby Rawlinson is an integrative therapist with a private practice based in east London, UK. Her work mixes traditional psychotherapeutic theories with cutting-edge, evidence-based techniques into a style that feels relatable, down-to-earth, and compassionate. Abby regularly contributes to articles, including but not limited to Stylist, Elle, BBC, Harpers Bazaar, Sheerluxe, Women's Health, and Psychologies. She can be found on Instagram @therapywithabby or online at therapywithabby.co.uk

Abby Rawlinson

Abby Wambach is a two-time Olympic gold medallist, FIFA World Cup champion, six-time winner of the U.S. Soccer Athlete of the Year award and one of Time’s Most Influential People. She is a founder of Treat Media, an award-winning media company that makes art for humans who want to stay human. Abby is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Wolfpack and the New York Times bestseller Forward. Named one of the ‘50 Most Powerful People in Podcasting,’ she is co-host of the chart-topping podcast We Can Do Hard Things, which has received over a half billion plays. Abby is an executive producer of the Sundance award-winning film Come See Me in the Good Light, part owner of the NWSL’s Angel City Football Club and sits on multiple boards. Her most recent book, We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life’s 20 Questions, created with Glennon Doyle, Amanda Doyle and Treat Media, is being hailed as ‘the guidebook for being alive.’

Abby Wambach

Abel &amp; Cole’s story starts in 1988 with Keith Abel flogging potatoes door-to-door. ‘Of course potatoes are organic,’ he thought, ‘they’re vegetables’. However, he quickly discovered how unnecessarily complicated our food system had become and, consequently, realised the huge benefits of going organic and never looked back. In fact, Abel &amp; Cole still get veg from the farm where Keith's first organic spuds came from. 
To this day, their priorities remain the same. Now, selling 100% organic produce, Abel &amp; Cole believe that organic farming (a holistic system that encourages biodiversity) is the very best way to go. It protects our countryside and the critters that inhabit it, insists on the very best animal welfare, supports your local community and, frankly, tastes heaps better. Abel &amp; Cole think so anyway.

Abel & Cole Limited

Abhijit Banerjee, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). In 2011, he was named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s top 100 global thinkers. Banerjee served on the U.N. Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

Abhijit V. Banerjee

Abhishek Mukherjee, 30, is a Delhi-based journalist. He holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from Delhi University, a post-graduate diploma in journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Raipur. He also likes dogs.

Abhishek Mukherjee

Abi Elphinstone grew up in Scotland where she spent most of her childhood running wild across the moors, hiding in tree houses and building dens in the woods. After being coaxed out of her tree house, she studied English at Bristol University and then worked as an English teacher in Africa, Berkshire and London. She is the bestselling and multi-award shortlisted author of RUMBLESTAR (first in The Unmapped Chronicles), SKY SONG &amp; THE DREAMSNATCHER TRILOGY, published by S&amp;S. When she's not writing, Abi volunteers for Beanstalk, speaks in schools and travels the world looking for her next story.

Abi Elphinstone

Abi Falase is a Black British writer and director, reimagining fundamental societal concepts in inventive new worlds. Abi has written and directed a number of plays, including The Village and Rush with the Almedia Theatre, as well as Rift for Immediate Theatre and was shortlisted for the BBC Scriptworks ‘A Thousand Stories’ scriptwriting competition in 2021.

Abi Falase

Abi Titmuss

Abie Longstaff is the eldest of six children and grew up in Australia, Hong Kong and France. She knows all about squabbling, chaos and bossing younger sisters around. So she logically began her career as a barrister. She started writing when her children were born. Her favourite childhood books were Hating Alison Ashley, A Little Princess, Maura's Angel and The Black Stallion and she sneakily reads them again sometimes. Abie lives in Hove with her family.

Abie Longstaff

Abigail Ahern

Abigail Balfe is a queer, auDHD author-illustrator and Emmy award-winning creative based in Brighton. Before writing books full-time, Abigail led digital campaigns for pop stars such as One Direction and Little Mix, and for TV broadcasters including Channel 4 and Netflix. She also performed stand-up comedy and won several small trophies for her onstage humour, which featured life-size illustrations, ridiculous songs, and rambling stories about her family. In 2023, Abigail was named one of the Top 50 Influential Neurodivergent Women in the UK.

Abigail Balfe

Abigail Docherty

Abigail Foster is a Chartered Accountant and founder of Elent Finance, a financial education company designed to demystify the world of finance and empower you to achieve financial wellbeing. 
 
Abigail has worked with leading financial institutions across the UK, including HMRC, the Bank of England and Downing Street, and global companies such as Google and Goldman Sachs. She hosts a weekly money segment on LBC radio and has also appeared as a finance expert on ITV, Channel 5 and Sky News.

Abigail Foster

Abigail Owen is the #1 New York Times and #1 USA Today bestselling author of 30+ books that range from upper YA (18+) epic romantasy to new adult modern mythic romantasy to super spicy adult paranormal romance. She loves magical worlds with plots that move hot and fast, feisty heroines with sass, heroes with heart, a dash of snark, and oodles of HEAs! Other titles include: wife, mother, Star Wars geek, ex-competitive skydiver, AuDHD, spreadsheet lover, Jeopardy! fanatic, organizational guru, true classic movie buff, linguaphile, wishful world traveler, and chocoholic. Abigail currently resides in Austin, Texas, with her own swoon-worthy hero, their (mostly) angelic teenagers, and an adorable fur baby.

Abigail Owen

Abigail Ulman was born and raised in Melbourne. She has a BA in Creative Arts from the University of Melbourne/VCA and was a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. This is her first book.

Abigail Ulman

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Friedrich Schiller

'The artist is certainly the child of his age, but all the worse for him if he is at the same time its pupil, even worse its minion.' 
 
On the Aesthetic Education of Man is one of the most profound works of German philosophy, in which Friedrich Schiller analyses politics, revolution and the history of ideas to define the relationship between beauty and art. Resulting from Schiller's deep disillusionment with the course of the French Revolution and expressed as a series of letters to a patron, On the Aesthetic Education of Man is an impassioned attempt to drag mankind upwards from failure to greatness through placing ideas of aesthetic education at the heart of the human experience: 'Our era has actually taken both wrong turnings, and has fallen prey to coarseness on the one path, lethargy and perversity on the other. Having strayed along both paths, it is beauty that can lead [us] back.' Schiller's arguments are as arresting, challenging and inspiring today as when they were first written - it is above all one of the great political statements from a time of revolutionary change.

On the Aesthetic Education of Man

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A husband forms gruesome plans for his new fridge; a government employee has a haunting experience on his commute home; prisoners serve as entertainment for wealthy party guests; an army officer suffers a monstrous tropical illness. These short stories contain some of the most groundbreaking and innovative writing in Dutch literature from 1915 to the present day, with most pieces appearing here in English for the first time. Blending unforgettable snapshots of the realities of everyday life with surrealism, fantasy and subversion, this collection shows Dutch writing to be an integral part of world literary history.

The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories

This is the first anthology capacious enough to celebrate the full diversity and energy of its writers, subjects and tones. The most famous authors are here, and many others, including some magnificent stories never republished since their first appearance in magazines and periodicals. The Penguin Book of the British Short Story has a permanent authority, and will be reached for year in and year out.This volume takes the story from its origins with Defoe, Swift and Fielding to the 'golden age' of the fin de siècle and Edwardian period.

The Penguin Book of the British Short Story: 1

From Daniel Defoe to John Buchan

This is the first anthology capacious enough to celebrate the full diversity and energy of its writers, subjects and tones. The most famous authors are here, and many others, including some magnificent stories never republished since their first appearance in magazines and periodicals. The Penguin Book of the British Short Story has a permanent authority, and will be reached for year in and year out. This volume takes the story from the 1920s to the present day.

The Penguin Book of the British Short Story: 2

From P.G. Wodehouse to Zadie Smith

One of the three seminal works of Japanese literature, this beautiful collection of poems and tales offers an unparalleled insight into ancient Japan. 
 
Along with the Tale of Genji and One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each, The Tales of Ise is considered one of the three most important works of Japanese literature. A poem-tale collection from the early Heian period, it contains many stories of amorous adventures, faithful friendship and travels in exile, framing the exquisite poems at the work's heart. 
 
The Tales of Ise has influenced waka, Noh, tales and diaries since the time it was written, and is still the source of endless inspiration in novels, poetry, manga and cartoons. This volume has been translated by Peter MacMillan and includes a preface by the renowned Japanologist Donald Keene. 
 
'MacMillan's Tales of Ise adds to the treasures of Japanese literature that can now be enjoyed in English translation. It is the most poetic translation of this work to date and establishes MacMillan as an outstanding translator of Japanese poetry' - Donald Keene

The Tales of Ise

Toby Wilkinson

'Man perishes; his corpse turns to dust; all his relatives pass away. But writings make him remembered.' 
 
The fascination Ancient Egypt holds in our minds has many sources, but at the heart of it lie hieroglyphics. This extraordinary writing system was for many years seen as the ultimate challenge and puzzle before finally being cracked in the 1820s. Preserved carved in stone or inked on papyri, hieroglyphic writings give a unique insight into an awe-inspiring but also deeply mysterious culture. 
 
Toby Wilkinson has translated a rich selection of pieces, ranging from accounts of battles to hymns to stories to royal proclamations. This book is both very enjoyable and an essential resource for anyone wanting to study one of humankind's great civilizations.

Writings from Ancient Egypt

Anecdotes of the Cynics

Oscar Wilde

'It would be unfair to expect other people to be as remarkable as oneself' 
 
Wilde's celebrated witticisms on the dangers of sincerity, duplicitous biographers, the stupidity of the English - and his own genius. 
 
One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast

Arthur Conan Doyle

All four of Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary Sherlock Holmes novels, collected in a unique Graphic Deluxe edition with an introduction by Michael Dirda 
 
In 1886, an unsuccessful ophthalmologist on the southern coast of England decided to try his hand at writing a detective story. Unlike his historical romances, which required the utmost care, this could be dashed off quickly. The first draft, featuring a Mr. Sherrinford Holmes, was a bit rough around the edges, but with a little revision, something astonishing emerged: Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, and A Study in Scarlet. As if with no warning, they sprung forth from their creator's head, fully-formed in a new style so well-defined it felt immediately like an established genre. Their partnership cemented within pages of the book's opening-the sum of their parts accomplishing far more than they could apart. Sporting his signature billowing coat and pipe in hand, the genius investigator Holmes captivated readers with his alluring melancholy and superhuman intuition, while Watson remained ever the perfect foil, a classic Victorian gentleman with brilliant intellect. 
 
Collected here are all four Holmes novels-A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and The Valley of Fear-tracing the origins of the pair up through their greatest showdowns with arch-enemy Professor Moriarty. Set in the seductive shadow-world of Victorian London, they are at once an indelible portrait of their time and immortal stories unmarred by passing time. Though endlessly reinterpreted, reinvented and imitated, they have never been surpassed: the stories of Holmes and Watson lives on as immediate and original in our time as in their own.

Sherlock Holmes: The Novels

Before the twelfth century, fiction had completely disappeared in Europe. In this important and provocative book, Laura Ashe shows how English writers brought it back, composing new tales about King Arthur, his knights and other heroes and heroines in Latin, French and English. Why did fiction disappear, and why did it come to life again to establish itself the dominant form of literature ever since? And what do we even mean by the term 'fiction'? Gathering extracts from the most important texts of the period by Wace, Marie de France, Chaucer and others, this volume offers an absorbing and surprising introduction to the earliest English fiction.

Early Fiction in England

From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Chaucer

Thomas Malthus

Malthus' life's work on human population and its dependency on food production and the environment was highly controversial on publication in 1798. He predicted what is known as the Malthusian catastrophe, in which humans would disregard the limits of natural resources and the world would be plagued by famine and disease. He significantly influenced the thinking of Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace and his theories continue to raise important questions today in the fields of social theory, economics and the environment. 
 
With an introduction by Robert Mayhew.

An Essay on the Principle of Population and Other Writings

Michael Grant

A classic introduction to Latin literature, with translations of the best passages from Virgil, Livy, Ovid, Seneca and many others. 
 
This classic anthology traces the development of Latin literature from the early Republican works of Cicero and Catullus, to the writers of the Empire such as Lucan and Petronius, to the later writings of St Augustine. The selections cover comedy and epic, history and philosophy, in prose and in verse, and each passage is prefaced by an introduction to the author and his influence. The translators range across history from Alexander Pope and Lord Byron to contemporaries. The result is a broad and brilliant overview of the civilization of Rome and its Empire - an ideal introduction to Latin literature. 
 
Michael Grant was born in 1914. He served as an intelligence officer during the Second World War, and subsequently held academic posts at the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Khartoum and Belfast. Over his lifetime, he published nearly fifty books on the ancient world, ranging from studies of Roman coinage, to biographies of Caesar, Nero and Jesus, to books on Ancient Israel and the Middle Ages. Many of his translations were published in Penguin Classics. Professor Grant moved to Italy in 1966, where he spent most of the rest of his life until his death in 2004.

Latin Literature

An Anthology

Kenko

'It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before 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.

A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees

Jonathan Swift

'... a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food...' 
 
Swift's devastating short satire on how to solve a famine 
 
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 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 of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. 
 
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). Swift's works available in Penguin Classics are Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal and Other Writings.

A Modest Proposal

Matthew Arnold

'One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class' 
 
 Poet, education reformer, social theorist and passionate critic of Victorian England, Matthew Arnold condemned an industrial society in 'bondage to machinery' and argued instead that the wonder and joy of culture - in particular the 'sweetness and light' of classical civilization - were essential to human life. The other pieces here, on literary criticism, schools, France, journalism and democracy, form a powerful call to arms from a writer who believed that the English needed to be taught not what to think, but how to think. 
 
 Edited with an introduction by P. J. Keating.

Culture and Anarchy and Other Selected Prose

Including works from Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Cornish, Breton and Manx, this Celtic Miscellany offers a rich blend of poetry and prose from the eighth to the nineteenth century, and provides a unique insight into the minds and literature of the Celtic people. It is a literature dominated by a deep sense of wonder, wild inventiveness and a profound sense of the uncanny, in which the natural world and the power of the individual spirit are celebrated with astonishing imaginative force. Skifully arranged by theme, from the hero-tales of Cú Chulainn, Bardic poetry and elegies, to the sensitive and intimate writings of early Celtic Christianity, this anthology provides a fascinating insight into a deeply creative literary tradition. 
 
Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson was born in 1909. He began his career as a lecturer in Celtic at Cambridge, before becoming the first chair of the Department of Celtic Language and Literature at Harvard. He undertook war service with the Uncommon Languages section of British censorship and subsequently held professorships at Harvard and Edinburgh. Professor Jackson died in 1991.

A Celtic Miscellany

Selected and Translated by Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson

John Milton

John Milton was celebrated and denounced in his own time both as a poet and as a polemicist. Today he is remembered first and foremost for his poetry, but his great epic Paradise Lost was published very late in his life, in 1667, and in his own time most readers more readily recognised Milton as a writer of prose. This superbly annotated new book is an authoritative edition of Milton's major prose works, including Of Education, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and the Divorce tracts, as well as the famous 1644 polemical tract on the opposing licensing and censorship, Areopagitica.

Areopagitica and Other Writings

Friedrich Engels

Karl Marx

A rousing call to arms whose influence is still felt today, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' The Communist Manifesto is edited with an introduction by Gareth Stedman-Jones in Penguin Classics. 
 
Marx and Engels's revolutionary summons to the working classes, The Communist Manifesto is one of the most important political theories ever formulated. After four years of collaboration, they produced an incisive account of their idea of Communism, in which they envisage a society without classes, private property or a state, arguing that the exploitation of industrial workers will eventually lead to a revolution in which Capitalism is overthrown. This vision provided the theoretical basis of political systems in Russia, China, Cuba and Eastern Europe, affecting the lives of millions. The Communist Manifesto still remains a landmark text: a work that continues to influence and provoke debate on capitalism and class. 
 
Gareth Stedman Jones's extensive and scholarly introduction provides an unique assessment of the place of The Communist Manifesto in history, and its continuing relevance as a depiction of global capitalism. This edition reproduces Samuel Moore's translation of 1888 and contains a guide to further reading, notes and an index. 
 
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was born in Trier, Germany and studied law at Bonn and Berlin. He settled in London, where he studied economics and wrote the first volume of his major work, Das Kapital (1867, with two further volumes in 1884 and 1894). He is buried in Highgate Cemetery, London. 
 
Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), as well as his collaboration with Marx, was the author of The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), based on personal observations and research. 
 
If you enjoyed The Communist Manifesto, you might like Marx's Capital, also available in Penguin Classics. 
 
'The words of the Communist Manifesto flare like the fiery writing on the wall above the crumbling bastions of capitalist society: socialism or barbarism!' 
Rosa Luxemburg

The Communist Manifesto

Penguin Classics

Clark Ashton Smith

Not just any fantasy, horror, and science fiction author could impress H. P. Lovecraft into calling him 'unexcelled by any other writer, dead or living'. Clark Ashton Smith - autodidact, prolific poet, amateur philosopher, bizarre sculptor, and unmatched storyteller - simply wrote like no one else, before or since. This new collection of his very best tales and poems is selected and introduced by supernatural literature scholar S. T. Joshi and allows readers to encounter Smith's visionary brand of fantastical, phantasmagorical worlds, each one filled with invention, terror and a superlative sense of metaphysical wonder.

The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies

James Thurber

This collection brings together the best of James Thurber's brilliantly funny, eccentric and anarchic writings. It includes his most famous work, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, in which an ordinary man's fantasies have a more powerful hold on him than reality, as well as essays, poetry and cartoons gathered from all of Thurber's collections. Making fun of his own weaknesses and those of other people (and dogs) - the English teacher who looked only at figures of speech, the Airedale who refused to include him in the family, the botany lecturer who despaired of him totally - James Thurber is a true original, whose off-beat imagination shows us everyday life from a different angle.

The Thurber Carnival

Chomei

These two works on life's fleeting pleasures are by Buddhist monks from medieval Japan, but each shows a different world-view. In the short memoir Hôjôki, Chômei recounts his decision to withdraw from worldly affairs and live as a hermit in a tiny hut in the mountains, contemplating the impermanence of human existence. Kenko, however, displays a fascination with more earthy matters in his collection of anecdotes, advice and observations. From ribald stories of drunken monks to aching nostalgia for the fading traditions of the Japanese court, Essays in Idleness is a constantly surprising work that ranges across the spectrum of human experience. 
 
Meredith McKinney's excellent new translation also includes notes and an introduction exploring the spiritual and historical background of the works. 
 
Chômei was born into a family of Shinto priests in around 1155, at at time when the stable world of the court was rapidly breaking up. He became an important though minor poet of his day, and at the age of fifty, withdrew from the world to become a tonsured monk. He died in around 1216. 
 
Kenkô was born around 1283 in Kyoto. He probably became a monk in his late twenties, and was also noted as a calligrapher. Today he is remembered for his wise and witty aphorisms, 'Essays in Idleness'. 
 
Meredith McKinney, who has also translated Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book for Penguin Classics, is a translator of both contemporary and classical Japanese literature. She lived in Japan for twenty years and is currently a visitng fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra. 
 
'[Essays in Idleness is] a most delightful book, and one that has served as a model of Japanese style and taste since the 17th century. These cameo-like vignettes reflect the importance of the little, fleeting futile things, and each essay is Kenko himself' Asian Student

Essays in Idleness

and Hojoki

American Supernatural Tales is the ultimate collection of weird and frightening American short fiction. As Stephen King will attest, the popularity of the occult in American literature has only grown since the days of Edgar Allan Poe. The book celebrates the richness of this tradition with chilling contributions from some of the nation's brightest literary lights, including Poe himself, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and - of course - Stephen King. By turns phantasmagoric, spectral, and demonic, this is a frighteningly good collection of stories.

American Supernatural Tales

Albert Camus

In this profound and moving philosophical statement, Camus poses the fundamental question: If human existence has no meaning, is life worth living? 
 
'What I touch, what resists me - that is what I understand' 
 
As Camus argues, if there is no God to give meaning to our lives, humans must take on that purpose themselves. This is our 'absurd' task, like Sisyphus condemned forever to roll a rock up a hill. Written during the bleakest days of the Second World War, The Myth of Sisyphus argues for an acceptance of reality that encompasses revolt, passion and, above all, liberty, gained through an awareness of pure existence. 
 
This volume contains several other essays, including lyrical evocations of the sunlit cities of Algiers and Oran, the settings of his great novels The Outsider and The Plague. The writings in this volume are all, in their own way, hymns to the physical world and the elemental pleasures of living. 
 
Translated by Justin O'Brien 
With an afterword by James Wood

The Myth of Sisyphus

Edgar Allan Poe

Part of a new six-volume series of the best in classic horror, selected by award-winning director Guillermo del Toro 
 
 The Raven: Tales and Poems is a landmark new anthology of Poe's work, which defied convention, shocked readers, and confounded critics. This selection of Poe's writings demonstrates the astonishing power and imagination with which he probed the darkest corners of the human mind. 'The Fall of the House of Usher' describes the final hours of a family tormented by tragedy and the legacy of the past. In 'The Tell Tale Heart,' a murderer's insane delusions threaten to betray him, while stories such as 'The Pit and the Pendulum' and 'The Cask of Amontillado' explore extreme states of decadence, fear and hate. The title narrative poem, maybe Poe's most famous work, follows a man's terrifying descent into madness after the loss of a lover. 
 
 Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 49), was born in Boston, USA. He was a short-story writer, editor and literary critic, and is considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor the detective-fiction genre.

The Raven

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino in Collection of Sand claimed that 'the brain begins in the eye'. The essays collected here display his fascination with the visual universe, in which the things we see tell a truth about the world. With encyclopedic knowledge and engaging curiosity, Calvino writes about such diverse subjects as the imaginative pleasures of maps, bizarre exhibitions and the earliest forms of written language. Books and paintings provoke discussions of artistic motivation, while descriptions of a meticulous Japanese garden, Trajan's column crumbling to dust or a Mexican temple smothered by the jungle lead to contemplations on space, time and civilization. 
 
Surprising and profound, Collection of Sand provides a glimpse into the mind of a master of the magination. 
 
Italo Calvino, one of Italy's finest postwar writers, has delighted readers around the world with his deceptively simple, fable-like stories. Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy; he fought for the Italian Resistance from 1943-45. He died in Siena in 1985, of a brain hemorrhage. 
 
Martin L. McLaughlin is Professor of Italian and Fiat-Serena Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Oxford where he is a Fellow of Magdalen College. He is the English translator of Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino among many others.

Collection of Sand

Essays

Edward John Trelawny

In February 1822 the writer and adventurer Edward John Trelawny arrived in Pisa to make the acquaintance of his heroes Shelley and Byron, leaving a broken marriage and an exotic seafaring career behind him. He became a close companion to them and their circle, and this collection of his reminiscences is one of the most fresh and intriguing documents of the Romantic age. It records his initial meeting with a cynical and flippant Byron, his impressions of a youthful, otherworldly Shelley and, most memorably, the poet's death at sea and the subsequent burning of his body on the sand. Trelawny's Records combine vigorous prose, vivid description and mythmaking to create one of the most memorable portraits of an age. 
 
Rosemary Ashton's new introduction explores the mysterious life and quixotic character of Trelawny, and this edition includes all the author's later revisions. 
 
Edward John Trelawny (1792-1881) was one of the most curious figures of the English Romantic Movement, and spent his long life travelling extensively as a naval officer, biographer and adventurer. After a brief education, Trelawny was assigned as a volunteer in the Royal Navy by the age of thirteen, and led an unaccomplished naval career until his resignation at nineteen. He met Shelley and Byron in Italy in 1822, where he became fascinated, almost hypnotized, by the two poets. His Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author, written after both their deaths, is the end-product of this strange obsession. An incorrigible romancer, Trelawny had three marriages - the second of which was to Tersitza, sister of the Greek warlord Odysseus Androutsos, whose cause he had joined and whose mountain fortress he looked after when Odysseus was arrested. He died after a fall at the age of eighty-eight, in England, and his ashes were buried in Rome in a plot adjacent to Shelley's grave. 
 
Rosemary Ashton was educated at the universities of Aberdeen, Heidelberg and Cambridge. She taught English literature at University College London from 1974 to 2012, and is Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature and an Honorary Fellow of UCL. She has published critical biographies of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas and Jane Carlyle, George Eliot, and George Henry Lewes, two books on Anglo-German literary and cultural relations in the nineteenth century, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800-1860 (1980) and Little Germany: Exile and Asylum in Victorian England (1986), and two books about Victorian radicalism, 142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London (2006) and Victorian Bloomsbury (2012).

Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author

Epicurus

The teachings of Epicurus-about life and death, religion and science, physical sensation, happiness, morality, and friendship-attracted legions of adherents throughout the ancient Mediterranean world and deeply influenced later European thought. Though Epicurus faced hostile opposition for centuries after his death, he counts among his many admirers Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, and Isaac Newton. This volume includes all of his extant writings-his letters, doctrines, and Vatican sayings-alongside parallel passages from the greatest exponent of his philosophy, Lucretius, extracts from Diogenes Laertius' Life of Epicurus, a lucid introductory essay about Epicurean philosophy, and a foreword by Daniel Klein, author of Travels with Epicurus and coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar.

The Art of Happiness

Merle Miller

Originally published in 1971, Merle Miller's On Being Different is a pioneering and thought-provoking book about being homosexual in the United States. Just two years after the Stonewall riots, Miller wrote a poignant essay for the New York Times Magazine entitled "What It Means To Be a Homosexual" in response to a homophobic article published in Harper's Magazine. Described as "the most widely read and discussed essay of the decade," the article was developed into the remarkable short book On Being Different - one of the earliest memoirs to affirm the importance of coming out.

On Being Different

What It Means to Be a Homosexual

George Orwell

'Politics and the English Language' is widely considered Orwell's most important essay on style. Style, for Orwell, was never simply a question of aesthetics; it was always inextricably linked to politics and to truth.'All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.'Language is a political issue, and slovenly use of language and cliches make it easier for those in power to deliberately use misleading language to hide unpleasant political facts. Bad English, he believed, was a vehicle for oppressive ideology, and it is no accident that 'Politics and the English Language' was written after the close of World War II.

Politics and the English Language

'She turned into a frog, into a lizard, into all kinds of other reptiles and then into a spindle' 
 
In these tales, young women go on long and difficult quests, wicked stepmothers turn children into geese and tsars ask dangerous riddles, with help or hindrance from magical dolls, cannibal witches, talking skulls, stolen wives, and brothers disguised as wise birds. Half the tales here are true oral tales, collected by folklorists during the last two centuries, while the others are reworkings of oral tales by four great Russian writers: Alexander Pushkin, Nadezhda Teffi, Pavel Bazhov and Andrey Platonov. 
 
In his introduction to these new translations, Robert Chandler writes about the primitive magic inherent in these tales and the taboos around them, while in the afterword, Sibelan Forrester discusses the witch Baba Yaga. This edition also includes an appendix, bibliography and notes. 
 
'This is a unique, beautifully edited book: an essential addition to the library of any Russophile' - Spectator 
 
*Longlisted for the Rossica Translation Prize 2014* 
 
Translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler 
With Sibelan Forrester, Anna Gunin and Olga Meerson

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