A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

A. J. Liebling, born in Manhattan in 1904, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and contributed innumerable articles to the magazine throughout his lifetime, on subjects ranging from food to boxing and France to horse racing. As a war correspondent during the Second World War, he reported from France, England and Algeria, and participated in the Normandy landings. In later life he married the writer Jean Stafford, his third wife. He died in 1963.

A. J. Liebling

A. J. Rosen is an author of YA fantasy novels and is an ambassador for Wattpad, known as @agatharoza. Entwined is her first novel.

A. J. Rosen

A. K. Davidson

A. O. Scott has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000. His writing has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, the New Yorker and the Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. 
 
@aoscott

A. O. Scott

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A. S. Byatt

A. T. Williams won the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2013 for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa. He lives in Warwickshire.

A. T. Williams

A. W. Chase

Dubbed ‘The new queen of spy fiction’ by the Guardian newspaper, and ‘the real thing’ by the Washington Post, A.C. 'Ava' Glass is the CWA Dagger-shortlisted author of Alias Emma (The Chase), The Traitor and The Trap. The Traitor was a 2023 Richard and Judy Bookclub pick. Alias Emma was a Barnes and Noble book of the month. A former crime reporter and communications consultant, for five years Ava worked closely with spies. Her time in that world fascinated her, and the people she met back then inspire every book she writes.

A.C. Glass

A.E. Housman

Arthur Edward Waite was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. 
 
An American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, his strong interest in all esoteric matters - divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony - led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

A.E. Waite

A.E. Warren is the author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series, which consists of Subject Twenty-One, The Hidden Base, The Fourth Species and The Final Rising. 
 
After spending eight years working as a lawyer, she began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. 
 
 She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

A.E. Warren

A.G.D. Maran

A.J. Ayer

A.J. Cronin

A K Benedict writes crime and speculative fiction in a room filled with clowns, mannequins and Doctor Who figures. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was nominated for an eDunnit award and is in development for a major 8-part TV series by Company Pictures. Her second, Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts, came out in February 2016. She's written Torchwood audio dramas for Big Finish and her short stories have featured in anthologies including Great British Horror and Best British Short Stories. She lives in St Leonards-on-Sea with her dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

A.K.Benedict

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

A.M. Ellis is a speculative fiction author and lover of everything steeped in myth and mystery. Her stories often lean into diverse voices, not only in her identity as a Black woman, but in exploring neurodivergence and mental health. A proud introvert and nostalgic gamer, she lives in Maryland, USA, with her husband and three children.

A.M. Ellis

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his work. He lives in North London.

A.N. Wilson

A. T. Emerald lives with her husband and baby daughter in Nottinghamshire. She discovered her love of writing in 2020 and has not shut up about enemies to lovers ever since. She loves iced matcha, torrid love confessions with knives pressed to throats (fictional, of course) and does not accept bills for any therapy her books might incur.

A.T. Emerald

A.W. Priest

A.B.C. Merriman-Labor was a barrister, writer and munitions worker born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1877. His published works include A Series of Lectures on the Negro Race and The Story of the African Slave in a Nutshell. He also edited two editions of the Handbook of Sierra Leone. He arrived in the UK in 1904 to study law. In 1907, he organised a centenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in Westminster Abbey. He later embarked on an 'entertainment-lecture' tour called Life and Scenes in Britain, travelling across thousands of miles of West, South West and Central Africa, which he expanded on to create Britons Through Negro Spectacles.

ABC Merriman-Labor

AJ Cronin

AJ Molloy

Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

Aaliya Jaleel is a freelance illustrator, designer, and visual development artist, currently majoring in Animation at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also the illustrator of Under My Hijab and Muslim Girls Rise. You can visit her online at www.aaliyamj.com.

Aaliya Jaleel

Aaron Allston

After more than fifteen years of experience as a clinical psychotherapist, Dr Aaron Balick has taken the amazing insights from psychology and psychotherapy out of the consultation room and made them accessible to the wider world. 
 
He has been an ‘agony uncle’ for many years for both CBBC and BBC Radio 1, as well as on television, including BBC Worldwide, BBC 3 and BBC Learning.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Carroll

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Carter G. Woodson

New to Penguin Classics, one of the most influential works of Black social criticism ever written 
 
The Mis-education of the Negro is today considered one of the most influential works by 'the father of Black history', Carter G. Woodson, setting the table for generations of antiracist teaching pioneered by Black educators. 
 
As both student and teacher, Woodson witnessed the distortions of Black life in the history and literature taught in schools and universities. He believed that there was a relationship between these distortions and the violence that circumscribed Black life in the material world, declaring, "There would be no lynching it if did not start in the schoolroom." Mixing social criticism, history, theory and memoir, The Mis-education of the Negro argues cogently that students, teachers, and leaders needed to be educated in a manner that was accountable to Black experiences and lived realities, both past and present.

The Mis-Education of the Negro

Michel Foucault

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

The final major work by one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century 
 
In the fourth and final volume of his far-reaching and influential study of human sexuality, Foucault turns his attention to early Christianity, exploring how ancient ideas of pleasure were modified into the notion of the 'flesh'. Ranging over marriage, procreation and the concept of virginity as a divine state, Foucault brilliantly shows how a fledgling religion altered and defined the Western history of desire. Confessions of the Flesh brings to a conclusion one of the twentieth century's seminal works. 
 
'A thinker of immense power ... posing questions that still perplex us' The Times Literary Supplement 
 
'Required reading ... The appearance of the fourth volume is the most significant event in the world of Foucault scholarship in 20 years ... Essential' Los Angeles Review of Books

The History of Sexuality: 4

Confessions of the Flesh

Dionne Brand

A man with his head in the clouds, an artist who has visions, is shot dead after a domestic disturbance. His partner struggles with her feelings of responsibility, and whole relationships, whole lives, the entire multicultural city of Toronto, swirl around the fatal moment. Outsiders settle in the unfamiliar landscape of a new country, uncomfortable with the place and its people, uncomfortable sometimes with themselves. Still earlier, the poet discovers herself as speaker and subject, in a joyful, imagistic, rigorous and ruthless reclamation of the poetic. 
 
With a critical introduction by scholar and theorist Christina Sharpe, Nomenclature is the searing new volume spanning a decades-long career, from 1982-2022, and gathering the new and collected poems of one of Canada's most honoured, significant and bestselling poets. Here, Dionne Brand bears powerful witness to the seemingly unending wars, the ascendance of fundamentalisms and the nameless casualties of the current era, but also to the rich textures of human life and human feeling that, in the face of this world's violences, endure and flourish - and that might reach beyond the known to some other, possibly future, time and place. 
 
It is a master work, classic and living, and a record of one of the great writers of our age.

Nomenclature

New and Collected Poems

René Girard

René Girard eludes easy categories, bridging the fields of literary criticism, anthropology, sociology, history, religion and theology. Influencing such writers as J. M. Coetzee and Milan Kundera, his insight into contagious violence looks ever more prophetic and relevant seven years after his death. In many ways he is the thinker for our modern world of social media and herd behaviour. 
 
In this newly selected collection of writings, Cynthia L. Haven has created an approachable anthology of his work, addressing Girard's thoughts on the nature of desire, human imitation and rivalry, the causes of conflict and violence, the deep structure of religion and cultural subjects like opera and theatre. 
 
Girard spoke to his times in language that was engaging, accessible and often controversial. A long-time friend and colleague, Haven shines a spotlight on his role as a public intellectual and profound theorist, inviting a new generation to his corpus.

All Desire is a Desire for Being

Lucille Clifton

Blessing the Boats draws together poems from across Lucille Clifton's career, showcasing the stunning simplicity and grace with which she addressed the whole of human experience: birth, death, children, family, illness, sexuality and injustice in antebellum and contemporary America. Hers is a poetry that is passionate and wise, not afraid to rage or whisper; a poetry that speaks unparalleled candour and empathy to the personal, the political and the spiritual.

Blessing The Boats

Hannah Dawson

The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing selects writing from across time and throughout the world, creating a treasure-trove of the most important feminist thought alongside surprising and delightful fiction, poetry and diaries, celebrating the multiplicity of feminist voices that have emerged over the centuries. 
 
Beginning in the fifteenth century with Christine de Pizan, who imagined a City of Ladies that would serve as a refuge from the harassment of men, this book goes beyond the usual white, western story. The writers in this anthology ask questions about class, capitalism and colonialism, and other axes of oppression that intersect with sexism. Inside, we find writers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who declared in 1848 the self-evident truth 'that all men and women are created equal', alongside Sojourner Truth, born into slavery in New York, who asked in 1851 'and ain't I a woman?' 
 
Put together by a world-leading historian of ideas and a feminist, The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing is both a history of thought - readers will find incisive and provocative selections from Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, Audre Lorde and over one hundred other pioneering thinkers - and a voyage of discovery, highlighting lesser-anthologised thinkers, like Juana Inés de la Cruz's seventeenth-century philosophical satire of 'misguided men', or the "poet of Palestine" Fadwa Tuqan's mountainous journeys towards self-knowledge and revolution. 
 
The product of many years of research and reading, The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing is both a deeply considered introduction to feminist thought and an abundance of riches to read and keep throughout a lifetime.

The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing

Anna Julia Cooper

The Portable Anna Julia Cooper will introduce a new generation of readers to an educator, public intellectual and community activist whose prescient insights and eloquent prose underlie some of the most important developments in modern American intellectual thought and African-American social and political activism. 
 
This volume brings together, for the first time, Anna Julia Cooper's major collection of essays, A Voice from the South, along with several previously unpublished poems, plays, journalism and selected correspondences, including over thirty previously unpublished letters between Anna Julia Cooper and W. E. B. Du Bois.

The Portable Anna Julia Cooper

Harry Crews

1935, Bacon County, Georgia. The bite of the Great Depression was beginning to be felt in the rest of America, but its teeth had been in Bacon County for years. Here one of America's most original storytellers, Harry Crews, was born in a sharecropper's cabin at the end of a dirt road. A Childhood is his memoir of that time - his first years of life - and that place: the poor soil and the sickness, the blood feuds and the faith healers, the ghosts and the shopping catalogues. 
 
A profound vision of the rural South that resounds with the violence of poverty and the tenderness of kinship, A Childhood is a true American classic.

A Childhood

The Biography of a Place

Peter Kropotkin

'Don't compete! - competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!' 
 
Welcome to the anarchist history of the world. In this lively, provocative work, Peter Kropotkin argues that 'mutual aid' is a natural instinct in all of us, animal and human. Cooperation, reciprocity, support: these, for Kropotkin, are the overlooked foundations of our history. 
 
From the earliest days of evolution through to artisanal guilds, indigenous nomads and even the Royal National Lifeboat Association, it is a pragmatic, mutually beneficial bond to our fellow humans that has allowed us to survive. In this, Kropotkin challenges all the major orthodoxies of his age, from individualism and social Darwinism to Marxist theories of the saviour state. Instead, these essays insist that a better life for all of us - and our planet - begins when we reject competition, and embrace the local, the mutual and the collective.

Mutual Aid

A Factor of Evolution

James Baldwin

'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

Louise Glück

For the past fifty years, Louise Glück has been a major force in modern poetry, distinguished as much for the restless intelligence, wit and intimacy of her poetic voice as for her development of a particular form: the book-length sequence of poems. This volume brings together the twelve collections Glück has published to date, offering readers the opportunity to become immersed in the artistry and vision of one of the world's greatest poets. 
 
From the allegories of The Wild Iris to the myth-making of Averno; the oneiric landscapes of The House on Marshland to the questing of Faithful and Virtuous Night - each of Glück's collections looks upon the events of an ordinary life and finds within them scope for the transcendent; each wields its archetypes to puncture the illusions of the self. Across her work, elements are reiterated but endlessly transfigured - Persephone, a copper beech, a mother and father and sister, a garden, a husband and son, a horse, a dog, a field on fire, a mountain. Taken together, the effect is like a shifting landscape seen from above, at once familiar and unspeakably profound.

Poems

1962–2020

Saghïmbay Orozbaq uulu

'I am a steel-fanged lion, a dragon ready to pounce, a mighty poplar with golden branches rising up to the sky' 
 
The bard Saghïmbay Orozbaq uulu composed his oral telling of the great Central Asian Manas epic in the early twentieth century, although it draws on far older sources. This vivid episode from his narrative tells the bravura story of an uncertain new khan, Boqmurun, who holds a great feast to commemorate his predecessor, Kökötöy. From east and west, warriors and their turbulent retinues come to compete in horse races, jousting and wrestling, and soon insults are hurled and scores settled violently. Yet none can beat the supreme hero, the mighty, truculent Manas. By turns earthy, stirring, bombastic and funny, Saghïmbay's work stands as a monument to the oral culture of a nomadic people. 
 
Daniel Prior's landmark translation includes a 'How to Read the Epic' section, commentary, maps and illustrations.

The Memorial Feast for Kökötöy Khan

A Kirghiz Epic Poem in the Manas Tradition

Erving Goffman

In this groundbreaking work, acclaimed sociologist Erving Goffman examines how society treats those who it considers abnormal. Forced to adjust their social identities from situation to situation, Goffman analyses the variety of strategies that stigmatised individuals deploy to deal with the rejection of others, as well as the complex image of themselves they subsequently project. 
 
Relying extensively on biography and the lived experience of those who have found themselves on the edges of society, Goffman lays out the ways in which stigma dramatically alters the way the person affected feels about themselves, and the ways in which it can often violently shatter their relationships with 'normal' people.

Stigma

Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity

Since the earliest moments of human history, dragons have occupied a place in our imaginations. Bringer of night in Ancient Egypt; mortal enemy of the elephant in South Asia; slain by a god in Sanskrit hymn. In the Book of Revelation, there is the Leviathan; in Loch Ness, a monster. Their crushing coils and their treasure hoards are found throughout literature and language: in the Old English of Beowulf, in the Elvish of Tolkien, in the far-flung travels of Marco Polo. 
 
The Penguin Book of Dragons is the definitive collection of all this and more: two thousand years of legend and lore about the menace and majesty of dragons.

The Penguin Book of Dragons

Acclaimed on first publication and today considered one of the defining works of the sociology, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life is Erving Goffman's extraordinary analysis of the structure of our social interactions. 
 
Blurring the line between workaday life and theatrical performance, Goffman argues that our behaviour with others is defined by how we wish to be perceived - resulting in displays bearing a startling similarity to those of an actor on the stage. From the houses and clothes that we use as 'fixed props' to the 'backstage' of the solitude in which our personas are rehearsed and relaxed, Goffman's insight reveals human character to be not fixed or stable, but liquid and consciously maintained.

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Luisa Capetillo

In 1915, Puerto Rican activist Luisa Capetillo was arrested for wearing men's trousers in public. This act of rebellion was the result of a lifelong devotion to socialist and feminist thought. And this zeal runs throughout her brilliant essays: in the challenges to big business, in her strident campaigning for the legalization of divorce, in the championing of 'free love'. At once a sharp critique and a celebration of world politics, A Nation of Women embraces humanism and envisions a world in which economic and social structures can be broken down, allowing both the worker and the woman to be free.

A Nation of Women

An Early Feminist Speaks Out

Elaine Brown

"I have all the guns and all the money. I can withstand challenge from without and from within. Am I right, Comrade?" So said Elaine Brown on becoming the first female leader of the Black Panther Party in 1974. By that time the group had grown from a small local outfit into a national revolutionary movement, described by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover as 'the greatest threat to the internal security of the country'. 
 
Brown's gripping memoir charts her rise from an impoverished neighbourhood in Philadelphia, through a political awakening during a bohemian adolescence, and on to her time as a foot soldier for the Panthers and her ascent into its upper echelons. As an unfortgettable portrayal of Black girlhood in 1950s Philadelphia and the revolutionary experience in 1960s California, A Taste of Power is a seminal exploration of power, prejudice and the struggle for justice.

A Taste of Power

Eric Williams

'If one criterion of a classic is its ability to reorient our most basic way of viewing an object or a concept, Eric Williams's study supremely passes that test' Seymour Drescher 
 
 Arguing that the slave trade was at the heart of Britain's economic progress, Eric Williams's landmark 1944 study revealed the connections between capitalism and racism, and has influenced generations of historians ever since. Williams traces the rise and fall of the Atlantic slave trade through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to show how it laid the foundations of the Industrial Revolution, and how racism arose as a means of rationalising an immoral economic programme. Most significantly, he showed how slavery was only abolished when it ceased to become financially viable, exploding the myth of emancipation as a mark of Britain's moral progress. 
 
'Its thesis is a starting point for a new generation of scholarship' New Yorker

Capitalism and Slavery

Tété-Michel Kpomassie

'The play of moonlight on the icebergs was indescribably strange, and its magnificent refracted shimmers were brighter than day. One night, fooled by its brilliance, I got up at three in the morning.' 
 
Scorching heat, rich, fertile soil and treacherous snakes marked the landscape in which Kpomassie grew up in 1950s Togo, West Africa. When, as a teenager, he discovered a book on Greenland, this distant land of snow and ice became an instant obsession and he embarked on the adventure of a lifetime. 
 
In this work of rich, immersive travel writing Kpomassie invites the reader to join him on his audacious journey as he makes his way from the Equator to the bitter cold of the Arctic and settles into life with the Inuit peoples, adapting to their foods and customs. Part memoir, part anthropological observation, this warm, captivating narrative teems with nuanced observations on community, belonging and colonization. 
 
Originally published in 1981, this critically acclaimed work has been translated into nine languages and is a rare example of travel writing from a West African perspective that highlights unexpected connection between cultures despite their contrasting landscapes. 
 
This translation by James Kirkup has previously been published with the title An African in Greenland

Michel the Giant

An African in Greenland

Joseph P. Laycock

Levitation. Feats of superhuman strength. Speaking in tongues. A hateful, glowing stare. The signs of spirit possession have been documented for thousands of years and across religions and cultures, even into our own time. Unsettling and chilling, The Penguin Book of Exorcisms brings together the most astonishing accounts: Saint Anthony set upon by demons in the form of a lion, a bull and a panther, who are no match for his devotion and prayer; the Prophet Muhammad casting an enemy of God out of a young boy; fox spirits in medieval China and Japan; a headless bear assaulting a woman in sixteenth-century England; the possession of an entire convent of Ursuline nuns in a French town; a Zulu woman who daily floated to a height of five feet; the exorcism in Earling, Iowa, in 1928 that inspired the film The Exorcist; a Filipina girl 'bitten by devils'; and a rare example of a priest's letter requesting permission of a bishop to perform an exorcism - after witnessing a boy walk backwards up a wall. . .

The Penguin Book of Exorcisms

This startlingly original reworking of the Persephone myth takes us to the icy shores of Averno, the crater lake regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. Here, the consolations of rebirth and renewal are eclipsed by the immediacy of loss - by a mother's possessive grief, an abducted girl's equivocal memories, a farmer's lament for a lost harvest. This chorus offers neither comfort nor solace but deepened understanding, its sorrow textured by the poet's luminous wit. Together, the poems of Averno swell to a staggeringly powerful lamentation, through which the reader glimpses the ecstasy of the inevitable, only to find it resisted by the insistent, impersonal presence of the Earth.

Averno

Michael Pollan

Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As humans have driven the living planet to the brink of collapse, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend it. Their words have endured, becoming the classics that define the environmental movement today. 
 
Food Rules, Michael Pollan's wise and witty critique of the western industrialised diet, distils the wisdom of history and traditional cultures to three simple rules: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Food Rules

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As humans have driven the living planet to the brink of collapse, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend it. Their words have endured, becoming the classics that define the environmental movement today. 
 
In The Democracy of Species Robin Wall Kimmerer guides us towards a more reciprocal, grateful and joyful relationship with our animate earth, from the wild leeks in the field to the deer in the woods.

The Democracy of Species

Jared Diamond

Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As humans have driven the living planet to the brink of collapse, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend it. Their words have endured, becoming the classics that define the environmental movement today. 
 
This is his haunting account of visiting the mysterious stone statues of Easter Island, showing how a remote civilization destroyed itself by exploiting its own natural resources - and why we must heed this warning.

The Last Tree on Easter Island

Silvia Federici

A cult classic since its publication in the early years of this century, Caliban and the Witch is Silvia Federici's history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages through the European witch-hunts, the rise of scientific rationalism and the colonisation of the Americas, it gives a panoramic account of the often horrific violence with which the unruly human material of pre-capitalist societies was transformed into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms. It is a study of indigenous traditions crushed, of the enclosure of women's reproductive powers within the nuclear family, and of how our modern world was forged in blood.

Caliban and the Witch

Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

June Jordan

For the poet and activist June Jordan, neither poetry nor activism could easily be disentangled from the other. Her storied career came to chronicle a living, breathing history of the struggles that defined the USA in the latter half of the twentieth century; and her poetry, accordingly, put its dazzling stylistic range to use in exploring issues of gender, race, immigration, representation and much else besides. 
 
Here, above all, are sinuous, lashing and passionate lines, virtuosic in their musicality and always bearing the stamp of Jordan's irrepressible personality. Here are poems of suffusing light and profound anger: poems moved as much by political animus as by a deep love for the observation of human life in all its foibles, eccentricities, strengths and weaknesses. 
 
With a foreword by Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown, The Essential June Jordan allows new readers to discover - and old fans to rediscover - the vital work of this endlessly surprising poet who, in the words of Adrienne Rich, believed that 'genuine, up-from-the-bottom revolution must include art, laughter, sensual pleasure, and the widest possible human referentiality.'

The Essential June Jordan

Among the oldest and most popular mythical beings, mermaids and other merfolk have captured the imagination since long before Ariel sold her voice to a sea witch in the beloved Disney film adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Little Mermaid'. As far back as the eighth century B.C., sailors in Homer's Odyssey stuffed wax in their ears to resist the Sirens, who lured men to their watery deaths with song. More than two thousand years later, the gullible New York public lined up to witness a mummified 'mermaid' specimen that the enterprising showman P. T. Barnum swore was real. 
 
The Penguin Book of Mermaids is a treasury of such tales about merfolk and water spirits from different cultures, ranging from Scottish selkies to Hindu water-serpents to Chilean sea fairies. A third of the selections are published here in English for the first time, and all are accompanied by commentary that explores their undercurrents, showing us how public perceptions of this popular mythical hybrid - at once a human and a fish - illuminate issues of gender, spirituality, ecology and sexuality.

The Penguin Book of Mermaids

Sharing its title with the poetic name for Finland - 'the land of heroes' - Kalevala is the soaring epic poem of the Finnish people. Born of an ancient tradition of folklore and song, Kalevala is a work rich in magic, cosmic mystery and myth, presenting a story of a people through the ages, from the dawn of creation. Sung by rural Finns since prehistoric times, and formally compiled by Elias Lönnrot in the nineteenth century, it is a landmark of Finnish culture and it played a vital role in galvanizing Finland's national identity in the decades leading up to independence. And yet its tales of tragedy and triumph, adventure and ambition, hope, lust, death and birth, reach far beyond the region's borders, searching the heart of human existence.

Kalevala

The Epic of the Finnish People

Frantz Fanon

Few modern voices have had as profound an impact as Frantz Fanon. A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is an unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. 
 
Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, it established Fanon as a revolutionary thinker and remains just as relevant and powerful today.

Black Skin, White Masks

Penguin Modern Classics

Cedric J. Robinson

'A towering achievement. There is simply nothing like it in the history of Black radical thought' Cornel West 
 
'Cedric Robinson's brilliant analyses revealed new ways of thinking and acting' Angela Davis 
 
'This work is about our people's struggle, the historical Black struggle' 
 
Any struggle must be fought on a people's own terms, argues Cedric Robinson's landmark account of Black radicalism. Marxism is a western construction, and therefore inadequate to describe the significance of Black communities as agents of change against 'racial capitalism'. Tracing the emergence of European radicalism, the history of Black African resistance and the influence of these on such key thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James and Richard Wright, Black Marxism reclaims the story of a movement.

Black Marxism

The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

A Private Thriller

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

A Puffin Book

A Ripley Novel

A Slice of the Moon

A Victorian Mystery

A Walk in...

A Women’s Murder Club Thriller

A chef Paul Delamare Mystery

Aberrations

Across the Universe

Actiphons

Adelia Aguilar

Adrian Mole

Adventures in Time

Aftermath

Against War

Age of X

Agent 21

Agent Z

Detective Aidan Waits is a troubled junior detective haunted by his past. Facing an uncertain future, and disconnected from his history, DC Waits and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter 'Sutty' Sutcliffe work on Manchester's streets to uncover the city's worst criminals among the grime of the underworld.

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