About Salman Rushdie: Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most acclaimed, award-winning contemporary authors. Translated into over forty languages, his sixteen works of fiction include Midnight’s Children – for which he won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers on the 25th anniversary of the prize and Best of the Booker on the 40th anniversary – Shame, The Satanic Verses, Quichotte and Victory City. His latest book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in the Queen's last Birthday Honours list in 2022.

Salman Rushdie

About Salman Khan: Salman Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. His lessons on YouTube have revolutionized learning, garnering billions of views globally. Recognized as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, Khan is also the founder of schoolhouse.world, Khan Lab School, and Khan World School, and the author of The One World Schoolhouse. He holds three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Salman Khan

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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

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

Oscar Wilde

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Celebrated as the writer of The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde is equally beloved for his fairy tales, written ‘partly for children and partly for those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy’. With warmth, tenderness and quiet wit, these fables have moved and delighted for generations. In far-off kingdoms and ocean realms, in the company of giants and nightingales, Wilde speaks of heartbreak and redemption, of cruelty and compassion, of love lost, of love gained, of love everlasting. Rediscover here the complete stories from The Happy Prince and The House of Pomegranates, Wilde’s two fairy tale collections. 
 
Wilde's children's stories are splendid ... As explanations of the world, fairy stories tell us what science and philosophy cannot and need not. There are different ways of knowing 
Jeanette Winterson

The Complete Fairy Tales

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

Richard Matheson

Among the greats of twentieth century horror and fantasy, few names stand above Richard Matheson. Though known by many for novels like I Am Legend and his sixteen Twilight Zone episodes, Matheson truly shines in his chilling, masterful short stories. Matheson revolutionized horror by taking it out of Gothic castles and strange cosmos and into the darkened streets and suburbs we recognize as our own. He infuses tales of the fantastic and supernatural with dark explorations of human nature, delving deep into the universal dread of feeling alone and threatened in a dangerous world.

The Best of Richard Matheson

Jorge Luis Borges

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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

With warmth, tenderness and quiet wit, Oscar Wilde's fables and fairy tales have moved and delighted for generations. In far-off kingdoms and ocean realms, in the company of giants and nightingales, Wilde speaks of heartbreak and redemption, of cruelty and compassion, of love lost, of love gained, of love lasting. Included in this selection are stories from The Happy Prince and A House of Pomegranates.

The Star-Child

Russell Hoban

An inexplicable message flashing onto the screen of his Apple II computer at 3 a.m. heralds the beginning of a startling quest for frustrated author Herman Orff. Taking up the offer of a cure for writer's block leads him to 'those places in your head that you can't get to on your own'. Herman is plunged into a semi-dreamland inhabited by a bizarre combination of characters from myth and reality: the talking head of Orpheus; a lost love; the young girl of Vermeer's famous portrait - and a frequency of Medusas.

The Medusa Frequency

Penguin Modern Classics

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

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in 1943, only a year before his plane vanished over the Mediterranean Sea during a reconnaissance mission. Nearly eighty years later, this fable of love and loneliness has lost none of its power. 
 
The narrator is a pilot downed in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the miraculous appearance of a little prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. "In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don't dare disobey," the narrator recalls. "Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket." And so begins their dialogue, one confined only by the limits of the imagination, by the horizon of a child's wonder...

The Little Prince

And Letter to a Hostage

Mircea Cartarescu

'Visionary... almost as if David Lynch had dramatised the prophetic books of William Blake' Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times 
 
'This is writing of overwhelming accomplishment' Chris Power, Observer 
 
 An enthralling, hallucinatory masterwork by one of Central Europe’s most celebrated novelists 
 
‘We exist between the past and future like the vermiform body of a butterfly, in between its two wings’ 
 
Beneath the streets of communist Bucharest linger hidden passageways, lost to memory. Here, sprawling hospitals give way to travelling circuses and underground jazz clubs, and Cartarescu’s childhood, prehistory and visionary fever dreams are woven into the landscape of the city, haunted by secret police and zombie hoards. 
 
Part visceral dream-memoir, part phantasmic pilgrimage, Mircea Cartarescu’s Blinding is one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a fascinating, kaleidoscopic journey into the past.

Blinding: The Left Wing

Borges' first collection of stories (1935). In his writing, Borges always combined high seriousness with a wicked sense of fun. Here he reveals his delight in re-creating (or making up) colorful stories from the Orient, the Islamic world, and the Wild West, as well as his horrified fascination with knife fights, political and personal betrayal, and bloodthirsty revenge. Spark-ling with the sheer exuberant pleasure of story-telling, this collection marked the emergence of an utterly distinctive literary voice.

A Universal History of Iniquity

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

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

Francois Rabelais

The dazzling and exuberant moral stories of Rabelais (c. 1471-1553) expose human follies with their mischievous and often obscene humour, while intertwining the realistic with carnivalesque fantasy to make us look afresh at the world. Gargantua depicts a young giant, reduced to laughable insanity by an education at the hands of paternal ignorance, old crones and syphilitic professors, who is rescued and turned into a cultured Christian knight. And in Pantagruel and its three sequels, Rabelais parodied tall tales of chivalry and satirized the law, theology and academia to portray the bookish son of Gargantua who becomes a Renaissance Socrates, divinely guided in his wisdom, and his idiotic, self-loving companion Panurge.

Gargantua and Pantagruel

Edgar Allan Poe

Arguably America's most influential short story writer, Edgar Allan Poe's tales of suspense never fail to spook and amaze. Gathered in this selection are his very best horror stories, including the gothic tour de force 'The Fall of the House of Usher', the other-worldly 'The Masque of the Red Death', and the murderous 'The Tell-Tale Heart'.

The Masque of the Red Death

L. Frank Baum

W. W. Denslow

John R. Neill

This fully annotated volume collects three of Baum's fourteen Oz novels in which he developed his utopian vision and which garnered an immense and loyal following. The Wizard of Oz (1900) introduces Dorothy, who arrives from Kansas and meets the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion and a host of other characters. The Emerald City of Oz (1910) finds Dorothy, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry coming to Oz just as the wicked Nome King is plotting to conquer its people. In Baum's final novel, Glinda of Oz (1920), Dorothy and Princess Ozma try to prevent a battle between the Skeezers and the Flatheads. 
 
Tapping into a deeply rooted desire to live in a peaceful country which values the sharing of talents and gifts, Baum's imaginative creation, like all great utopian literature, holds out the possibility for change. Baum's classics spawned many adaptations, including the 1939 Judy Garland-starring classic film The Wizard of Oz and Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. The latter was adapted into the second-highest grossing Broadway musical of all time, Wicked, which is also phenomenally successful in London's West End. Included in this edition are a selection of original illustrations by W. W. Denslow and John R. Neill, a jacketed hardcover, top-staining and coloured endpapers.

The Wizard of Oz

And Other Wonderful Books of Oz: The Emerald City of Oz and Glinda of Oz

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

William S. Burroughs

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!

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

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

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

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

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

Terry Pratchett

Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is in hot pursuit of a serial killer. The trouble is, a well-timed lightning strike has thrown both policeman and pursued into the city’s past. Now Vimes must relive the history that made him: a cruel regime, a bloody revolution, a corrupt police force, and, most unnerving of all, a keen young recruit named Sam Vimes… Night Watch, which draws on inspirations as far ranging as Victor Hugo and M*A*S*H, is a keen satire about the true nature of political power, and the sacrifices made in the name of the greater good; but also a profoundly empathetic novel about community, connection and the tenacity of the human spirit. 
 
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are among the most successful and influential fantasy titles of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This edition of Night Watch – written at the height of Pratchett’s imaginative powers – includes a new foreword by Rob Wilkins and an introduction and annotations by Dr David Lloyd and Dr Darryl Jones, contextualising the novel and Pratchett’s far-reaching legacy for new readers and current fans alike. 
 
'A master storyteller' - A.S. Byatt

Night Watch

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

Borges' stories have a deceptively simple, almost laconic style. In maddeningly ingenious stories that play with the very form of the short story, Borges returns again and again to his themes: dreams, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gaucho knife-fighters, transparent tigers and the elusive nature of identity itself.

The Aleph

Lewis Carroll

The Penguin English Library Edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll 
 
'"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice (she was so surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English). "Now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Goodbye, feet!"' 
 
'I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole ... without the least idea what was to happen afterwards,' wrote Lewis Carroll, describing how Alice was conjured up one 'golden afternoon' in 1862 to entertain his child-friend Alice Liddell. His dream worlds of nonsensical Wonderland and the back-to-front Looking Glass kingdom depict order turned upside-down: a baby turns into a pig, time is abandoned at a disorderly tea-party and a chaotic game of chess makes a seven-year-old girl a Queen. But amongst the anarchic humour and sparkling word play, puzzles and riddles, are poignant moments of nostalgia for lost childhood. 
 
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

Margaret Cavendish

Flamboyant, theatrical and ambitious, Margaret Cavendish was one of the seventeenth century's most striking figures: a woman who ventured into the  male spheres of politics, science, philosophy and literature. The Blazing World is a highly original work: part Utopian fiction, part feminist text, it tells of a lady shipwrecked on the Blazing World where she is made Empress and uses her power to ensure that it is free of war, religious division and unfair sexual discrimination. This volume also includes The Contract, a romance in which love and law work harmoniously together, and Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, which explores the power and freedom a woman can achieve in the disguise of a man.

The Blazing World and Other Writings

Penguin Classics

A fascinating mix of autobiographical episodes and extraordinary Egyptian theology, Burroughs's final novel is poignant and melancholic. Blending war films and pornography, and referencing Kafka and Mailer, The Western Lands confirms his status as one of America's greatest writers. The final novel of the trilogy containing Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads, this is a profound meditation on morality, loneliness, life and death.

The Western Lands

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