Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Gabriel García Márquez

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An acknowledged masterpiece, this is the story of seven generations of the Buendía family and of Macondo, the town they have built. Though little more than a settlement surrounded by mountains, Macondo has its wars and disasters, even its wonders and miracles. A microcosm of Columbian life, its secrets lie hidden, encoded in a book and only Aureliano Buendía can fathom its mysteries and reveal its shrouded destiny. Blending political reality with magic realism, fantasy with comic invention, One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the most daringly original works of the twentieth century.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Lolly Willowes, so gentle and accommodating, has depths no one suspects. When she suddenly announces that she is leaving London and moving, alone, to the depths of the countryside, her overbearing relatives are horrified. But Lolly has a greater, far darker calling than family: witchcraft.

Lolly Willowes

Russell Hoban

'O what we ben! And what we come to...' Wandering a desolate post-apocalyptic landscape, speaking a broken-down English lost after the end of civilization, Riddley Walker sets out to find out what brought humanity here. This is his story.

Riddley Walker

Penguin Modern 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

William S. Burroughs

An opium addict is lost in the jungle; young men wage war against an empire of mutants; a handsome young pirate faces his execution; and the world's population is infected with a radioactive epidemic. These stories are woven together in a single tale of mayhem and chaos. In the first novel of the trilogy continued in The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands, William Burroughs sharply satirizes modern society in a poetic and shocking story of sex, drugs, disease and adventure.

Cities of the Red Night

Although he is best known for his exquisite novels, E.M. Forster also wrote remarkable short stories. He referred to his stories as &lsquo;fantasies&rsquo; and his attraction to myth and magic is apparent in many of them. Like his novels, the stories &ndash; whether they are set in Italy, Greece, India, and other places Forster visited, or in England itself &ndash; contrast the freedom of paganism with the restraints of English civilization, the personal, sensual delights of the body with the impersonal, inhibiting rules imposed by society. Rich in irony and alive with sharp observations on the surprises life holds, the stories often feature violent events, discomforting coincidences, and other disruptive happenings that throw the characters&rsquo; perceptions and beliefs off balance. This volume includes all twelve stories published during Forster&rsquo;s lifetime.

Selected Stories

Muriel Spark

A man of devilish charm and enterprising spirit, Dougal Douglas is employed to revitalize the ailing firm of Meadows, Meade & Grindley. He succeeds, but not quite in the way his employer intended. Strange things begin to happen as Dougal exerts an uncanny influence on the inhabitants of Peckham Rye and brings lies, tears, blackmail and even murder into the lives of all he meets, from Miss Merle Coverdale, head of the typing pool, to Beauty, the resident femme fatale, and even Mr Druce, the unsuspecting Managing Director himself.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye

Robert Graves

In order to reclaim his father's kingdom, Jason has been sent on an impossible mission - to take the golden ram's fleece that lies far away, guarded by a dragon. Jason, who is so attractive that women fall instantly in love with him, sets sail in the Argo, along with the greatest heroes of ancient Greece, including the surly (and often drunk) Hercules, the enchanting musician Orpheus and the battling twins Castor and Pollux. As they battle clashing rocks, monsters and seductresses, watched over by pitiless gods, they will learn that victory comes at a price. 
 
In The Golden Fleece Robert Graves transforms Greek myth into a thrilling and richly imagined story, bringing the ancient world vividly alive.

The Golden Fleece

Mikhail Bulgakov

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Written in secret during the darkest days of Stalin's reign, The Master and Margarita became an overnight literary phenomenon when it was finally published it, signalling artistic freedom for Russians everywhere. Bulgakov's carnivalesque satire of Soviet life describes how the Devil, trailing fire and chaos in his wake, weaves himself out of the shadows and into Moscow one spring afternoon. Brimming with magic and incident, it is full of imaginary, historical, terrifying and wonderful characters, from witches, poets and biblical tyrants to the beautiful, courageous Margarita, who will do anything to save the imprisoned writer she loves. 
 
Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, with an Introduction by Richard Pevear

The Master And Margarita

Angélica Gorodischer

In city squares and golden palaces, a series of storytellers recount the history of the greatest Empire that never was: a history in which orphans rise from the underworld to the throne, mad emperors raze cities, captive dancers induce fatal delirium and murderous empresses plot against their own children. 
 
Angélica Gorodischer’s novel, masterfully translated by Ursula K. Le Guin, conjures a vivid fictional universe of labyrinthine cities, desert caravans and the lawless South – and of an Empire fated to rise, fall and rise again.

Kalpa Imperial

The Greatest Empire That Never Was

Hermann Hesse

A new translation by David Horrocks. 
 
At first sight Harry Haller seems like 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 sometimes savage encounters - accompanied by, among others, Mozart, Goethe and the bewitching Hermione - the misanthropic Haller discovers a higher truth, and the possibility of happiness. This haunting portrayal of a man who feels he is half-human and half-wolf became a counterculture classic for a disaffected generation. Yet it is also a story of redemption, and an intricately-structured modernist masterpiece. This is the first new translation of Steppenwolf for over eighty years, returning to the fresh, authentic language of Hesse's original.

Steppenwolf

Leonora Carrington

The Hearing Trumpet is the story of 92-year-old Marian Leatherby, who is given the gift of a hearing trumpet only to discover that what her family is saying is that she is to be committed to an institution. But this is an institution where the buildings are shaped like birthday cakes and igloos, where the Winking Abbess and the Queen Bee reign, and where the gateway to the underworld is open. It is also the scene of a mysterious murder. Occult twin to Alice in Wonderland, The Hearing Trumpet is a classic of fantastic literature that has been translated and celebrated throughout the world.

The Hearing Trumpet

L. Frank Baum

This is the complete and unabridged story of The Wizard of Oz, in which Dorothy, together with her companions the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow and the cowardly Lion, makes her journey along the Yellow Brick Road in search of the wonderful wizard. 
 
Bringing together traditional handicraft with cutting-edge book design, the Penguin Threads series has already created a huge buzz among the art and book-collecting communities. This latest set features cover art by painter and illustrator Rachell Sumpter, who brings a unique, whimsical sensibility to the Threads. With vivid colours and ambitiously intricate details, these additions to our innovative series commissioned by award-winning creative director Paul Buckley are rich works of art to be cherished and shared.

The Wizard of Oz (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

My Education is Burroughs's last novel, first published two years before his death in 1997. It is a book of dreams, collected over several decades and as close to a memoir as we will see. The dreams cover themes from the mundane and ordinary - conversations with his friends Allen Ginsberg or Ian Sommerville, feeding his cats, procuring drugs or sex - to the erotic, bizarre and visionary. Always a rich source of imagery in Burroughs's own fiction, in this book dreams become a direct and powerful force in themselves.

My Education

A Book of Dreams

Jan Potocki

Alphonse, a young Walloon officer, is travelling to join his regiment in Madrid in 1739. But he soon finds himself mysteriously detained at a highway inn in the strange and varied company of thieves, brigands, cabbalists, noblemen, coquettes and gypsies, whose stories he records over sixty-six days. The resulting manuscript is discovered some forty years later in a sealed casket, from which tales of characters transformed through disguise, magic and illusion, of honour and cowardice, of hauntings and seductions, leap forth to create a vibrant polyphony of human voices. Jan Potocki (1761-1812) used a range of literary styles - gothic, picaresque, adventure, pastoral, erotica - in his novel of stories-within-stories, which, like the Decameron and Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, provides entertainment on an epic scale.

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa

Italo Calvino

From fabulous enchantments and supernatural horrors to subtler, more psychological terrors, the best of nineteenth-century fantastic literature is collected here by Italo Calvino. These mysterious and macabre tales include Hoffmann's nightmarish 'The Sandman', Poe's terrifying 'The Tell-Tale Heart' and Dickens's chilling ghost story 'The Signal-Man', and relatively unknown works from celebrated writers including Honoré de Balzac, Henry James, Sir Walter Scott, Guy de Maupassant and Robert Louis Stevenson, alongside lesser-known contributors. Each story comes with a fascinating introduction by Calvino.

Fantastic Tales

Visionary And Everyday

Apollonius of Rhodes

Now in a riveting new verse translation from Aaron Poochigian, Jason and the Argonauts (known also as the Argonautica), is the story of Jason's voyage on the Argo in quest of the Golden Fleece and his relationship with the sorceress princess Medea. Apollonius' understanding of human nature with all its merits and flaws, his unerring eye for dramatic moment, and his quiet sense of humour give reality and spirit to this fantastic story of high romance and incredible adventure.

Jason and the Argonauts

This surreal fable, set in America's Old West, features a cast of notorious characters: The Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his opponent; The Priest, who goes into gunfights giving his adversaries the last rites; and The Nihilistic Kid himself, Kim Carson, a homosexual gunslinger who, with a succession of beautiful sidekicks, sets out to challenge the morality of small-town America and fight for intergalactic freedom. 
 
Fantastical and humorous, The Place of Dead Roads continues William Burroughs' exploration of society's controlling forces - the State, the Church, women, literature, drugs - with a style that is utterly unique in twentieth-century literature.

The Place of Dead Roads

'I have gone to look for a lion.' In a world where lions have become extinct, the map-maker Jachin-Boaz nevertheless abandons his wife and son to find one, leaving just this note. But his decision has unexpected consequences. He will be pursued by his son, Boaz-Jachin, and by something else: a tawny-skinned, amber-eyed beast from another place and time, a bringer of life and death.

The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

Patricia Grace

'Destroy the land and sea, we destroy ourselves' 
 
On the remote coast of New Zealand, at the curve that binds land and sea, a small Maori community live, work, fish, play and tell stories of their ancestors. But something is changing. The prophet child Toko can sense it. Men are coming, with dollars and big plans to develop the area for tourism. As their ancestral land comes under threat, the people must unite in a battle for survival. 
 
Weaving myth and memory, Patricia Grace's prize-winning novel is a spellbinding portrait of a defiant community determined to protect their way of life at any cost.

Potiki

A man, dispirited by ageing, endeavours to steal a younger man&rsquo;s face; a doctor yearns for a virus that might eliminate his discomfort by turning everyone else into doubles of himself; a Colonel lays out the precepts of the life of DE (Do Easy); conspirators posthumously succeed in blowing up a train full of nerve gas; a mandrill known as the Purple Better One runs for the presidency with brutal results; and the world drifts towards apocalypses of violence, climate and plague. The hallucinatory landscape of William Burroughs&rsquo; compellingly bizarre, fragmented novel is constantly shifting, something sinister always just beneath the surface.

Exterminator!

Antonio Tabucchi

'My dear friend, he said, life is strange and strange things happen in life' 
 
It is a hot July Sunday in Lisbon and our narrator has an appointment to meet someone by the quayside. But when his guest does not arrive, he spends the day wandering the deserted city, encountering some memorable characters along the way: a disoriented taxi driver, an accordionist, a Seller of Stories and, finally, the long-awaited ghost of the late, great Fernando Pessoa.

Requiem

A Hallucination

Charlotte Brontë

In 1834, Charlotte Brontë and her brother Branwell created the imaginary kingdom of Angria in a series of tiny handmade books. Continuing their saga some years later, the five 'novelettes' in this volume were written by Charlotte when she was in her early twenties, and depict a aristocratic beau monde in witty, racy and ironic language. She creates an exotic, scandalous atmosphere of intrigue and destructive passions, with a cast ranging from the ageing rake Northangerland and his Byronic son-in-law Zamorna, King of Angria, to Mary Percy, Zamorna's lovesick wife, and Charles Townshend, the cynical, gossipy narrator. Together the tales provide a fascinating glimpse into the mind and creative processes of the young writer who was to become one of the world's great novelists.

Tales of Angria

The diabolical Nova Criminals now include the nightmarish characters of Sammy the Butcher, Iron Claws, Izzy the Push and the Brown Artist, and are poised to wreak untold destruction on the world with their new-found control. Only Inspector Lee of the Nova Police has any chance of stopping them, by dismantling the word and image machine before it's too late. 
 
The third book of Burroughs's linguistically prophetic 'cut-up' trilogy - following The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded - Nova Express is a hilarious and Swiftian parody of bureaucracy and the frailty of the human animal.

Nova Express

The Restored Text

'Time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.' 
 
Science and fiction interweave delightfully in these playful Cosmicomic short stories. 
 
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.

The Distance of the Moon

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges was a literary spellbinder whose tales of magic, mystery and murder are shot through with deep philosophical paradoxes. This collection brings together many of his stories, including the celebrated &quot;Library of Babel&quot;.

Labyrinths

J. M. Barrie

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'All children, except one, grow up.' 
 
It was Friday night. Mr and Mrs Darling were dining out. Nana had been tied up in the backyard. The poor dog was barking, for she could smell danger. And she was right - this was the night that Peter Pan would take the Darling children on the most breath-taking adventure of their lives, to a place called Neverland, a strange country where the lost boys live and never grow up, a land with mermaids, fairies and pirates - and of course the terrible, evil, Captain Hook. Peter Pan is undoubtedly one of the most famous and best-loved stories for children, an unforgettable, magical fantasy which has been enjoyed by generations. 
 
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.

Peter Pan

Miguel Ángel Asturias

Deep in the mountain forests of Guatemala, a community of Indigenous Mayans – the 'men of maize' – serves as stewards to sacred corn crops. When profiteering outsiders encroach on their territory and threaten to abuse the fertile land, they enter a bloody struggle to protect their way of life. Blurring the lines between history and mythology, Nobel Prize winner Miguel Ángel Asturias's lush, dream-like work offers a prescient warning against the loss of ancestral wisdom and the environmental destruction set in motion by colonial oppression and capitalist greed.

Men of Maize

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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. 
 
F. Scott Fitzgerald was the most celebrated chronicler of the Jazz Age. At the time of his death, he believed he was an alcoholic failure; but he received posthumous acclaim as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. This collection brings together some of his finest stories, including 'The Curious Tale of Benjamin Button'; 'Winter Dreams', a melancholy thwarted love story that anticipated The Great Gatsby, and 'Babylon Revisited', set the year after the 1929 stock market crash, when the Jazz Age sounded its last. 
 
'His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings' Ernest Hemingway

Babylon Revisited

Wu Ch'eng-en

Monkey depicts the adventures of Prince Tripitaka, a young Buddhist priest on a dangerous pilgrimage to India to retrieve sacred scriptures accompanied by his three unruly disciples: the greedy pig creature Pipsy, the river monster Sandy &ndash; and Monkey. Hatched from a stone egg and given the secrets of heaven and earth, the irrepressible trickster Monkey can ride on the clouds, become invisible and transform into other shapes &ndash; skills that prove very useful when the four travellers come up against the dragons, bandits, demons and evil wizards that threaten to prevent them in their quest. Wu Ch&rsquo;&ecirc;ng-&ecirc;n wrote Monkey in the mid-sixteenth century, adding his own distinctive style to an ancient Chinese legend, and in so doing created a dazzling combination of nonsense with profundity, slapstick comedy with spiritual wisdom.

Monkey

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