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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Joseph Brodsky

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In this richly diverse collection of essays, Joseph Brodsky casts a reflective eye on his experiences of early life in Russia and exile in America. With dazzling erudition, he explores subjects as varied as the dynamic of poetry, the nature of history and the plight of the émigré writer. There is also the humorous tale of a disastrous trip to Brazil, advice to students, a homage to Marcus Aurelius and studies of Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Horace and others. The second volume of essays following Less Than One, this collection includes Brodsky's 1987 Nobel Lecture, 'Uncommon Visage'.

On Grief And Reason

Essays

Essayist and poet Joseph Brodsky was one of the most penetrating voices of the twentieth century. This prize-winning collection of his diverse essays includes uniquely powerful appreciations of great writers: on Dostoevsky and the development of Russian prose, on Auden and Akhmatova, Cavafy, Montale and Mandelstam. These are contrasted with his reflections on larger themes of tyranny and evil, and subtle evocations of his childhood in Leningrad. Brodsky's insightful appreciation of the intricacies of language, culture and identity connect these works, revealing his remarkable gifts as a prose writer.

Less Than One

Selected Essays

Elias Canetti

In July 1914, Franz Kafka's fiancée Felice broke off their engagement in a humiliating public tribunal, surrounded by her friends and family, and the other woman with whom Kafka had recently fallen in love. Broken and bereft, Kafka - at the height of his writing powers - turned the experience into his masterpiece, The Trial, where his lovers became the faceless prosecutors of Josef K. In Kafka's Other Trial, Canetti explores each letter that Kafka wrote to his fiancée, from their first tender moments together to his final letter and his refusal to reconcile. 
 
In this affecting book, he offers moving insights into the creativity of Franz Kafka and the torment he suffered as a man, a lover, and a writer.

Kafka's Other Trial

Chinua Achebe

Beautifully written yet highly controversial, An Image of Africa asserts Achebe's belief in Joseph Conrad as a 'bloody racist' and his conviction that Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness only serves to perpetuate damaging stereotypes of black people. Also included is The Trouble with Nigeria, Achebe's searing outpouring of his frustrations with his country. 
 
GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

An Image of Africa

Gerald Durrell

‘Another tiger-golden day lay ahead of us. It was as though England had never really existed’ 
 
The Durrell clan’s escapades on their Greek island home resume with the second volume of the Corfu Trilogy. Budding zoologist Gerald continues to explore the natural wonders around him, enjoying a night fishing trip, receiving a donkey as a birthday present and accidentally bringing a bear home for tea. Here too are more stories of the eccentric creatures he calls his family, including Margo’s ill-advised foray into spiritualism and what becomes known as ‘Mother’s Great Romance’. Ending as the Second World War is declared, Birds, Beasts and Relatives is an enchanting return to a magical place.

Birds, Beasts, and Relatives

Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson skewered the trials of domestic life in 1950s America with wry wit and uncanny precision. In this sequel to Life Among the Savages, her four offspring have now grown into fully-fledged demons. As their house starts to burst at the seams, the Jackson clan somehow manage (without really planning it) to move into a larger home, only to take the chaos - absent furniture, vanishing children, misbehaving refrigerators, an avalanche of books - right along with them.

Raising Demons

Penguin Modern Classics

John Healy

John Healy, the son of poor Irish immigrants in London, grows up hardened by violence and soon finds himself overwhelmed by alcoholism. He ends up in the grass arena: the parks and streets of the inner city, where beggars, thieves, prostitutes and killers fight for survival and each day brings the question of where to find the next drink. In his searing autobiography Healy describes with unflinching honesty his experiences of addiction, his escape through learning to play chess in prison, and his ongoing search for peace of mind.

The Grass Arena

An Autobiography

Adomnan of Iona

Founding father of the famous monastery on the island of Iona, a site of pilgrimage ever since his death in 597, St Columba was born into one of the ruling families in Ireland at a time of immense expansion for the Irish Church. This account of his life, written by Adomnán - the ninth abbot of Iona, and a distant relative of St Columba - describes his travels from Ireland to Scotland and his mission in the cause of Celtic Christianity there. Written 100 years after St Columba's death, it draws on written and oral traditions to depict a wise abbot among his monks, who like Christ was capable of turning water into wine, controlling sea-storms and raising the dead. An engaging account of one of the central figures in the 'Age of Saints', this is a major work of early Irish and Scottish history.

Life of St Columba

Stendhal

The Life of Henry Brulard is the autobiography of one of France's greatest writers. In this book, written with such frankness that it remained unpublishable for more than a century after its composition, the author of The Charterhouse of Parma and The Red and the Black tells the story of his unhappy childhood in a stuffy provincial town and uncovers the roots of his rebellious and skeptical temperament. Stendhal conjures up the elusive presence of his beloved mother, who died when he was only seven, while castigating the smug complacency and social climbing of his father, and the cruelty of the aunt whose care blighted his early years. At the same time he recalls the sights, sounds, places, and people of his youth, its pleasures and sorrows, with an almost preternatural clarity and immediacy. A book of brilliant images and burning emotions, The Life of Henry Brulard, like Nabokov's Speak, Memory, is not only a vivid literary memoir but an extraordinary work of the imagination.

The Life of Henry Brulard

Miklos Nyiszli

When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, they sent virtually the entire Jewish population to Auschwitz. A Hungarian Jew and a medical doctor, Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was spared from death for a grimmer fate: to perform "scientific research" on his fellow inmates under the supervision of the infamous "Angel of Death": Dr. Josef Mengele. Nyiszli was named Mengele's personal research pathologist. Miraculously, he survived to give this terrifying and sobering account of the terror of Auschwitz. 
 
This new Penguin Modern Classics edition contains an introduction by Richard Evans.

Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

Gay Talese

Gay Talese is the father of American New Journalism, who transformed traditional reportage with his vivid scene-setting, sharp observation and rich storytelling. His 1966 piece for Esquire, one of the most celebrated magazine articles ever published, describes a morose Frank Sinatra silently nursing a glass of bourbon, struck down with a cold and unable to sing, like 'Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel - only worse'. The other writings in this selection include a description of a meeting between two legends, Fidel Castro and Muhammad Ali; a brilliantly witty dissection of the offices of Vogue magazine; an account of travelling to Ireland with hellraiser Peter O'Toole; and a profile of fading baseball star Joe DiMaggio, which turns into a moving, immaculately-crafted meditation on celebrity.

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

And Other Essays

Dorothy Wordsworth

William Wordsworth

A continuous text made up of extracts from Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal and a selection of her brother's poems. Dorothy Wordsworth kept her Journal 'because I shall give William pleasure by it'. In doing so, she never dreamt that she was giving future readers not only the chance to enjoy her fresh and sensitive delight in the beauties that surrounded her at Grasmere but also a rare opportunity to observe 'the progress of a poet's mind'. Colette Clark's skilful and perceptive arrangement of Dorothy's entries alongside William's poems throws a unique light on his creative process, and shows how the interdependence of brother and sister was a vital part in the writing of many of his great poems. By reading these poems in relation to the Journal it is possible to trace the processes by which they were committed to paper and so achieve a fuller understanding of them. A writer in her own right, Dorothy kept her Journal sparse in personal and emotional detail. Yet there is, nevertheless, a deep emotional undercurrent running beneath the surface which only falters when William marries Mary Hutchinson. Never again was Dorothy to achieve the freedom, spontaneity and the limpidly beautiful prose with which she infused and irradiated the Grasmere Journals.

Home at Grasmere

Extracts from the Journal of Dorothy Wordsworth and from the Poems of William Wordsworth

Various

The word “cult” conjures images of people in thrall to a charismatic leader who extracts obedience through lies and threats, and of apocalyptic prophecies, sexual perversion, and mass suicide. From the Celtic druids, whose ritual sacrifices inspired the folk horror film The Wicker Man, all the way up to the Peoples Temple and Heaven’s Gate, The Penguin Book of Cults charts the history of our fear of the religious other. 
 
Bringing to light little-known sources such as a “death tape” of Jonestown’s final hour, when Jim Jones led more than 900 of his followers to drink poison, and a minute-by-minute log of the FBI’s final assault on the Branch Davidian headquarters, and including accounts of drinking the blood of sacrificed cats, theories that we are living inside a hollow earth, and reports that space brothers from Venus are coming to redeem us from the threat of nuclear war, this volume opens a fascinating window into cults and why some of them have ended in spectacular violence.

The Penguin Book of Cults

Henry James

James's correspondents included presidents and prime ministers, painters and great ladies, actresses and bishops, and the writers Robert Louis Stevenson, H.G. Wells and Edith Wharton. This fully-annotated selection from James's eloquent correspondence allows the writer to reveal himself and the fascinating world in which he lived. The letters provide a rich and fascinating source for James' views on his own works, on the literary craft, on sex, politics and friendship.  Together they constitute, in Philip Horne's own words, James' 'real and best biography'.

A Life in Letters

Edmund Gosse

At birth Edmund Gosse was dedicated to 'the Service of the Lord'. His parents were Plymouth Brethren. After his mother's death Gosse was brought up in stifling isolation by his father, a marine biologist whose faith overcame his reason when confronted by Darwin's theory of evolution. Father and Son is also the record of Gosse's struggle to 'fashion his inner life for himself' - a record of whose full and subversive implications the author was unaware, as Peter Abbs notes in his Introduction. First published anonymously in 1907, Father and Son was immediately acclaimed for its courage in flouting the conventions of Victorian autobiography and is still a moving account of self-discovery.

Father and Son

Anaïs Nin

The brilliant tale of Anais Nin's true love affair with Henry Miller, and her ambiguous, charged relationship with his wife, June. Drawn from the journals of a single momentous year in Paris, Henry and June provides a wildly lyrical account of a woman's sexual awakening and the disillusion of idealized marriage.

Henry and June

Boswell James

Edinburgh-born James Boswell, at twenty-two, kept a daily diary of his eventful second stay in London from 1762 to 1763. This journal, not discovered for more than 150 years, is a deft, frank and artful record of adventures ranging from his vividly recounted love affair with a Covent Garden actress to his first amusingly bruising meeting with Samuel Johnson, to whom Boswell would later become both friend and biographer. The London Journal 1762-63 is a witty, incisive and compellingly candid testament to Boswell's prolific talents.

London Journal 1762-1763

The Cistercian Order was born in Burgundy at the start of the twelfth century as a movement of radical renewal - an Order that survives to this day with the greater part of its written heritage preserved. This volume brings together a selection of its finest works, which speak powerfully across the centuries to modern readers. Writings by St Bernard of Clairvaux (c. 1090-1153) - including his letters, The Life of Malachy the Irishman, sermons on the Song of Songs and the sharply satirical Apologia for Abbot William - reveal him to be a highly individual and influential writer of the Middle Ages. Also included here are a charming description of Clairvaux, biographies of abbots and a series of exemplary stories, all drawing on the Scriptures to express intensely personal forms of monastic theology.

The Cistercian World

Monastic Writings of the Twelfth Century

Shirley Jackson's 1953 classic about life with her husband and four children in rural Vermont is one of America's most celebrated memoirs of family life. Facing badly behaved imaginary friends, intractable bank managers, an oblivious husband and ever-encroaching domestic chaos, Jackson might want to throw her hands up in despair but somehow manages to turn ordinary family experiences into brilliant adventures. Frequently hilarious, always warm and never sentimental, this is a book for anyone who has ever been in a family.

Life Among the Savages

William Yeats

This collection brings together all of W. B. Yeats&rsquo;s published prose writings on Irish folklore, legend and myth, with pieces on subjects including ghosts, kidnappers, fairies, ancient tribes, precious stones and Gaelic love songs. Through his researches on Irish folklore, Yeats attempted to create a movement in literature that was enriched by and rooted in a vital native tradition. In this volume Yeats&rsquo;s essays, introductions and sketches are presented chronologically, giving a clear picture of how his analysis developed, increasing in its depth and complexity in his quest to create an Ireland of the imagination.

Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth

James Baldwin

'The story of the negro in America is the story of America ... it is not a very pretty story' 
 
James Baldwin's breakthrough essay collection made him the voice of his generation. Ranging over Harlem in the 1940s, movies, novels, his preacher father and his experiences of Paris, they capture the complexity of black life at the dawn of the civil rights movement with effervescent wit and prophetic wisdom. 
 
'A classic ... In a divided America, James Baldwin's fiery critiques reverberate anew' Washington Post 
 
'Edgy and provocative, entertainingly satirical' Robert McCrum, Guardian 
 
'Cemented his reputation as a cultural seer ... Notes of a Native Son endures as his defining work, and his greatest' Time

Notes of a Native Son

Tennessee Williams

When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the media--though long self-identified as a gay man, Williams' candour about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself, and such revelations by America's greatest living playwright were called &quot;a raw display of private life&quot; by The New York Times Book Review. As it turns out, more than thirty years later, Williams' look back at his life is not quite so scandalous as it once seemed; he recalls his childhood in Mississippi and St. Louis, his prolonged struggle as a &quot;starving artist,&quot; the &quot;overnight&quot; success of The Glass Menagerie in 1945, the death of his long-time companion Frank Merlo in 1962, and his confinement to a psychiatric ward in 1969 and subsequent recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, all with the same directness, compassion, and insight that epitomize his plays.

Memoirs

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‘Living in Corfu was rather like living in one of the more flamboyant and slapstick comic operas’ 
 
It is 1935 and the Durrells have escaped the leaden summer skies of Bournemouth to arrive ‘like a troupe of medieval tumblers’ on the sun-drenched island of Corfu for a new life. Gerald Durrell’s beloved portrayal of his chaotic family – beatific Mother, Roger the dog, diet-obsessed Margo, book-loving Lawrence and gun-wielding Leslie – as well as his own adventures with a burgeoning menagerie of beasts, birds and insects (including an owl called Ulysses), is a timeless account of an idyllic childhood and an uproarious portrait of the English abroad.

My Family and Other Animals

Ved Mehta

Book 2 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
Translating individual experience into the universal, Mehta recounts the story of his mother's arranged marriage to a British-trained doctor and, by extension, of an ancient Indian family's struggle to find its place in a modern, rapidly changing world.

Mamaji

Continents of Exile: 2

Tim Lott

Tim Lott's parents, Jack and Jean, met at the Empire Snooker Hall, Ealing, in 1951, in a world that to him now seems 'as strange as China'. In this extraordinarily moving exploration of his parents' lives, his mother's inexplicable suicide in her late fifties and his own bouts of depression, Tim Lott conjures up the pebble-dashed home of his childhood and the rapidly changing landscape of postwar suburban England. It is a story of grief, loss and dislocation, yet also of the power of memory and the bonds of family love.

The Scent of Dried Roses

One family and the end of English Suburbia - an elegy

Book 8 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
Veritas continues Mehta's journey through education: this time as a Ph.D. student and Residential Fellow at Harvard. His experience illustrates the dramatic changes in institutional habits and behaviour that were to take places in the late 1960s, as well as how dramatically out-of-touch many senior lecturers were to the societal mood around them.

Haunted by Harvard

Continents of Exile: 8

Book 10 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
In lucid, sparse prose Mehta documents the twists and turns of a romantic history peppered with disappointment and anguish - that is until, in his search for self-understanding, he meets a surprising guide who shows the way toward new insights about himself and those he has loved.

All for Love

Continents of Exile: 10

Samuel Johnson

Book by Samuel Johnson, published in 1775. The Journey was the result of a three-month trip to Scotland that Johnson took with James Boswell in 1773. It contains Johnson's descriptions of the customs, religion, education, trade, and agriculture of a society that was new to him. The account in Boswell's diary, published after Johnson's death as The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785), offers an intimate personal record of Johnson's behavior and conversation during the trip.

A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

'These essays ... live and grow in the mind' James Campbell, Independent 
 
Being a writer, says James Baldwin in this searing collection of essays, requires 'every ounce of stamina he can summon to attempt to look on himself and the world as they are'. His seminal 1961 follow-up to Notes on a Native Son shows him responding to his times and exploring his role as an artist with biting precision and emotional power: from polemical pieces on racial segregation and a journey to 'the Old Country' of the Southern states, to reflections on figures such as Ingmar Bergman and André Gide, and on the first great conference of African writers and artists in Paris. 
 
'Brilliant...accomplished...strong...vivid...honest...masterly' The New York Times 
 
'A bright and alive book, full of grief, love and anger' Chicago Tribune

Nobody Knows My Name

More Notes Of A Native Son

The last volume of Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
During the clamour of a New York dinner party, Mehta is startled to find his father crying on his mother's shoulders. This episode begins a painful and revealing voyage into his father's personal history. In stark prose, Mehta unravels a passionate, clandestine affair that bore quiet yet extraordinary consequences for himself and his family. Red Letters also serves as a brilliant exploration and a recreation of British India: its sights and sounds, its injustices and its secrecy.

The Red Letters

Continents of Exile: 12

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