Anita Desai

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Bruce Chatwin

In this collection of profiles, essays and travel stories, Chatwin takes us to Benin, where he is arrested as a mercenary during a coup; to Boston to meet an LSD guru who believes he is Christ; to India with Indira Ghandi when she attempted a political comeback in 1978; and to Nepal where he reminds us that 'Man's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot'

What Am I Doing Here?

Edward Albee

When middle-aged Martha and her husband George are joined by the younger Nick and Honey for late-night drinks after a party, the stage is set for a night of drunken recriminations and revelations. Battle-lines are drawn as Martha and George drag their guests into their own private hell of a marriage.

Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf

W. Somerset Maugham

Eclectic and illuminating, these essays are the last that Maugham published. Ranging from an appreciation of Goethe's novels, to an encounter with an Indian holy man, with a considered analysis of the form at which Maugham himself excelled - the short story - they present the enduring views and opinions of this eminent writer.

Points of View

Virginia Woolf

Discover Virginia Woolf’s informative and erudite critical essays on some of the key novelists and dramatists of the canon – from the ancient Greeks to Jane Austen and beyond. 
 
Virginia Woolf read, and wrote, as an outsider, denied the educational privileges of her male contemporaries. She was perhaps better able, then, to address a 'common reader' in this wide-ranging collection of essays. With all the imagination and gaiety that are the stamp of her genius, she turns from medieval England to tsarist Russia, and subjects Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian novelists and modern essayists to her wise, acute and entertaining scrutiny. 
 
Essays on Jane Austen, George Eliot, Nancy Mitford, Joseph Conrad, Michel de Montaigne, Daniel Defoe and many others.

The Common Reader: Volume 1

Edward W Said

‘Readers accustomed to the precision and elegance of Edward Said's analytical prowess will not be disappointed . . . Those discovering Said for the first time will be profoundly impressed’ Toni MorrisonFollowing his profoundly influential study Orientalism, Edward W. Said turned his attention to the Western world, tracing the connections between imperialism and European art, literature and music. From Jane Austen to Salman Rushdie, from Yeats to media coverage of the Gulf War, Culture and Imperialism initiates a dialogue between culture and the political and economic fabric of its time. Vast in its scope and stunning in its erudition, this collection of essays remains as urgent today as it was on first publication. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

Culture and Imperialism

Edward St Aubyn

Shakespeare’s King Lear is reimagined in Edward St Aubyn's gripping story of a media mogul who has lost control. 
 
Henry Dunbar, the once all-powerful head of a global media corporation, is not having a good day. In his dotage he handed over care of the corporation to his two eldest daughters, Abby and Megan. But relations quickly soured, leaving him to doubt the wisdom of past decisions. 
 
Now imprisoned in a care home in the Lake District with only a demented alcoholic comedian as company, Dunbar starts planning his escape. As he flees into the hills, his family is hot on his heels. Who will find him first, his beloved youngest daughter, Florence, or the tigresses Abby and Megan, so keen to divest him of his estate? 
 
‘Malevolently enjoyable… A fable of fatherly neglect and daughterly cruelty’ Financial Times 
 
‘Deeply affecting…and funny’ Observer 
 
SHAKESPEARE RETOLD: Time travel. Zombies. Power-hungry media moguls. This is Shakespeare as you’ve never seen him before: nine iconic plays transformed by the best novelists of our time, with covers by Michael Craig-Martin.

Dunbar

King Lear, Retold

Tracy Chevalier

Shakespeare's Othello is ingeniously transplanted into a high school setting in this taut story about teenage friendship and racial tension. 
 
Arriving at his fourth school in six years, diplomat’s son Osei knows he needs an ally. Luckily he hits it off with Dee, the most popular girl in school. But one student can’t stand to witness this budding relationship: Ian decides to destroy the friendship between the black boy and the golden girl. By the end of the day, the school and its key players – teachers and pupils alike – will never be the same again. 
 
The tragedy of Othello is transposed to a 1970s suburban Washington schoolyard in this powerful drama of alienation, adolescence and friends torn apart. 
 
‘A compact and intense read full of twists, turns and intrigue’ Daily Express 
 
'New Boy, with its angsty teenagers, racial frictions and a magnificently fleshed out antagonist, is a tense and tight read... A heady rollercoaster of emotions' Observer 
 
SHAKESPEARE RETOLD: Time travel. Zombies. Power-hungry media moguls. This is Shakespeare as you’ve never seen him before: nine iconic plays transformed by the best novelists of our time, with covers by Michael Craig-Martin.

New Boy

Othello, Retold

Alan Ayckbourn

'What is remarkable about Alan Ayckbourn's comedy is that it contrives to be simultaneously hilarious and harrowing. Literally, it is agonisingly funny' 
Daily Telegraph 
 
In Three Plays Ayckbourn's perfectly pitched dialogue slices into the soul of suburbia. The settings are simple - a kitchen, a bedroom, a party - but the relationships between the husbands and wives are more complicated. Fraught relationships are exposed with humour, bathos and a sharp understanding of human nature.

Three Plays - Absurd Person Singular, Absent Friends, Bedroom Farce

Kurt Vonnegut

For eight years, big game hunter and war hero Harold Ryan has been presumed dead, lost in the Amazon rainforest while hunting for diamonds. Now he’s back, only to find his wife engaged to a hippy doctor and his son transformed into a pampered sissy. Though his hunting trophies remain, an inexplicable birthday cake sits in the living room bearing a strange icing inscription: Happy Birthday Wanda June. Can the household bear the returning force of Harold’s machismo? And who on earth is Wanda June?

Happy Birthday, Wanda June

Adam O'Riordan

The perfect gift for Valentine’s Day 
 
'And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods 
Makes heaven drowsy with harmony' 
Love's Labour's Lost, William Shakespeare 
 
When Love Speaks brings together the greatest writing on love and commitment - from Donne to Cole Porter, Sappho to P.G. Wodehouse, love letters of the great composers to Edwardian marriage advice. These poems and passages capture high romance and everyday happiness, feverish first love and tender union. This joyful anthology provides a range of unique and inspiring readings for a wedding or civil ceremony. 
 
Selected by the poet Adam O'Riordan

When Love Speaks

Poetry and prose for weddings, relationships and married life.

Witty, comedic and engrossing, this second collection showcases the range of W. Somerset Maugham’s talent as a playwright. The delightful satires of marriage Lady Frederick and Home and Beauty are included here alongside the insightful war drama For Services Rendered, and Maugham's tense colonial drama The Letter. Eclectic in theme and sardonic in style, these plays are masterpieces of English social comedy and melodrama.

Plays Volume Two

Elspeth Huxley

When Elspeth Huxley’s pioneer father buys a remote plot of land in Kenya, the family sets off to discover their new home: five hundred acres of Kenyan scrubland, infested with ticks and white ants, and quavering with heat. What they lack in know-how they make up for in determination: building a grass house, employing local Kikuyu tribe members and painstakingly transforming their patch of wilderness into a working farm. Huxley’s unforgettable childhood memoir is a sensitive account of settler life at the turn of the twentieth century and a love song to the harshness and beauty of East Africa.

The Flame Trees Of Thika

Memories of an African Childhood

Izumi Shikibu

Ono no Komachi

Here is a collection of sexy, brief, fleeting poems about love, lust and longing. They originate from a time in Japanese history where aristocratic women of the Heian court were free to marry and conduct love affairs according to their desires. Education and refinement were so highly valued that the courtly manner of expressing oneself, whether to give condolences for a death, to send back a forgotten fan, or to heighten the anticipation of a lover's visit, was with a poem of just five lines. A convention of secrecy surrounding love affairs fills these verses with palpable emotion. 
 
These vivid and erotic poems express love in all its forms, and do so with amazing economy of words, unforgettable imagery and breath-taking modernity. 
 
INTRODUCED BY NIKITA GILL 
 
'They are full of dreams, of autumns, of lovers known or not yet met, of desire, wonderment, loneliness' Irish Times 
 
Translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani, this is an edition that brings the story of the poems to life with a detailed introduction and notes on the translation.

The Ink Dark Moon

John Lennon

WITH AN AFTERWORD BY YOKO ONO AND ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR 
 
John Lennon wrote the material collected in Skywriting by Word of Mouth during Yoko Ono's pregnancy with Sean Lennon. After John's assassination in 1980, his manuscript was stolen from the Lennon's home. Skywriting was finally published in 1986, and it displays all of Lennon's extraordinary creativity and inventiveness with language. It includes Lennon's only piece of autobiography, 'The Ballad of John and Yoko' as well as short works of fiction, accounts of falling in love, marriage, the break-up of the Beatles and life in America.

Skywriting By Word of Mouth

Anne Carson

This is a volcanic journey into the soul of a winged red monster named Geryon. It is queer coming-of-age love story, a Greek myth retold, and a modern classic. 
 
Tormented as a boy by his brother, Geryon escapes to a parallel world of photography. He falls deeply in love with Herakles, a golden young man, who deserts him at the peak of infatuation. So Geryon retreats ever further into the world created by his camera, fascinated by his wings, his redness and the fantastic accident of who he is. But all is suddenly and irrevocably shattered by Herakles&rsquo; return. 
 
Autobiography of Red is a deceptively simple narrative filled with currents of meaning, emotion, and the truth about what it&rsquo;s like to be red. An extraordinary, modern epic poem - moving, disturbing and delightful. 
 
'Totally engrossing' Ocean Vuong 
 
'This book is amazing - I haven't discovered any writing in years that's so marvellously disturbing' Alice Munro 
 
&lsquo;A profound love story...sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender&rsquo; Ruth Padel, New York Times Book Review

Autobiography of Red

Anne Tyler

Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew is hilariously reimagined by one of our greatest living novelists, in this very funny, heartbreaking story of one woman, two men and unconventional happy endings. 
 
Kate Battista is stuck. How did she end up running house and home for her eccentric scientist father and infuriating younger sister Bunny? Dr Battista has other problems. His brilliant young lab assistant, Pyotr, is about to be deported. And without Pyotr, his new scientific breakthrough will fall through... 
 
When Dr Battista cooks up an outrageous plan that will enable Pyotr to stay in the country, he's relying - as usual - on Kate to help him. Will Kate be able to resist the two men's touchingly ludicrous campaign to win her round? 
 
Anne Tyler's brilliant retelling of The Taming of the Shrew asks whether a thoroughly modern woman like Kate would ever sacrifice herself for a man. The answer is as surprising as Kate herself. 
 
'A thoroughly modern love story' Guardian, Book of the Year 
 
‘The worst wedding in history...vintage Anne Tyler’ The Times 
 
SHAKESPEARE RETOLD: Time travel. Zombies. Power-hungry media moguls. This is Shakespeare as you’ve never seen him before: nine iconic plays transformed by the best novelists of our time, with covers by Michael Craig-Martin.

Vinegar Girl

The Taming of the Shrew, Retold

Oscar Wilde

A selection of Oscar Wilde's best and most important plays - sharp, relevant and brilliant to this day. 
 
 Who would have thought a comedy of manners written more than a hundred years ago would still be so apt and so funny? Oscar Wilde was a genius of play-writing, and his deftness, wit and sharp eye for social satire keep audiences in thrall to this day. Alongside Earnest, discover a biblical tragedy retold, Lady Windemere and her infamous fan and Wilde's take on an ideal husband, in this selection of Wilde's most important plays. 
 
 ‘[The Importance of Being Earnest] has a strong claim to being the most perfect comedy in the English language’ Daily Telegraph

The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

In his day, W. Somerset Maugham was most celebrated as a playwright, and the breadth of his ability is manifested in this collection of his most popular plays. Included here are the noirish mystery The Sacred Flame, the hilarious satires The Circle, The Constant Wife, and Our Betters, and the sharp-witted drama Sheppey. Whether suspenseful or acerbically witty, these plays take a sly look at the idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies of their time.

Plays Volume One

Why should one half be free to live, while the other is doomed to watch silently from the sidelines? In this visionary collection, Virginia Woolf leads us on a transformative journey through the liberating powers of the mind. From an exploration of why women were barred from writing and under what conditions they might break free, to the solace derived from haunting London's streets, these essays and stories present Woolf at her most impassioned, rendering the pursuit of liberty one of life's most poetic adventures. 
 
Selected from the books A Room of One's Own, The Waves and Street Haunting and Other Essays by Virginia Woolf 
 
VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
Love by Jeanette Winterson 
Home by Salman Rushdie 
Language by Xiaolu Guo 
Race by Toni Morrison

Liberty

Vintage Minis

Howard Jacobson

Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is ingeniously reinvented by Howard Jacobson, in his merciless, sharp and funny story of revenge, justice and antisemitism. 
 
‘Who is this guy, Dad? What is he doing here?’ 
 
With an absent wife and a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector and philanthropist Simon Strulovitch is in need of someone to talk to. So when he meets Shylock at a cemetery in Cheshire’s Golden Triangle, he invites him back to his house. It’s the beginning of a remarkable friendship... 
 
‘Inspired...It does what any good literary subversion should do: deepens and enhances one's appreciation of the original’ Guardian 
 
‘Jacobson’s prose has the sort of elastic precision you only get from a writer who is truly in command… There's also deep and sincere soul-searching going on here’ Independent 
 
SHAKESPEARE RETOLD: Time travel. Zombies. Power-hungry media moguls. This is Shakespeare as you’ve never seen him before: nine iconic plays transformed by the best novelists of our time, with covers by Michael Craig-Martin.

Shylock is My Name

The Merchant of Venice, Retold

The Merchant of Venice Retold (Hogarth Shakespeare)

FROM THE ONE-OF-A-KIND IMAGINATION THAT BROUGHT US SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5 AND CAT'S CRADLE 
 
 'Kurt Vonnegut is either the funniest serious writer around or the most serious funny writer' Los Angeles Times Book Review 
 
An 'autobiographical collage' of speeches, stories and essays, in Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut writes beguilingly about everything from country music to George Bush, his favourite comedians to his mother's midnight mania, and bittersweet tributes to a dead best friend and a dead marriage. 
 
Resonating with his singular voice, this is a self-portrait in writing that showcases why Kurt Vonnegut is as genius an essayist and commentator on American society as he is a novelist.

Palm Sunday

John Fowles

In 1963 John Fowles won international recognition with his first published novel The Collector. But his roots as a serious writer can be traced back long before to the journal he began as a student at Oxford in the late 1940s and continued to keep faithfully over the next half century. Written with an unsparing honesty and forthrightness, it reveals the inner thoughts and creative development of one of the twentieth century's most innovative and important novelists. 
 
This first-hand account of the road to fame and fortune holds the reader's attention with all the narrative power of the novels, but also offers an invaluable insight into the intimate relationship between Fowles's own life and his fiction.

The Journals Volume 1

Aldous Huxley

Discover this profound account of Huxley's famous experimentation with mescalin that has influenced writers and artists for decades. 
 
 ‘Concise, evocative, wise and, above all, humane, The Doors of Perception is a masterpiece’ Sunday Times 
 
In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers, was transformed. Huxley described his experience with breathtaking immediacy in The Doors of Perception. 
 
In its sequel Heaven and Hell, he goes on to explore the history and nature of mysticism. Still bristling with a sense of excitement and discovery, these illuminating and influential writings remain the most fascinating account of the visionary experience ever written. 
 
 WITH A FOREWORD J.G. BALLARD

The Doors of Perception

And Heaven and Hell

Konstantin Paustovsky

Discover one of Twentieth-Century Russia's most lauded lost classics, now in a remarkable new translation. 
 
'Outstanding... A sparkling, supremely precious literary achievement' Telegraph 
 
'One of the great Russian autobiographies, as fresh now as the day it was written - and the day it was lived' Julian Barnes 
 
In 1943, Konstantin Paustovsky, the Soviet Union's most revered author, started out on his masterwork - The Story of a Life; a grand, novelistic memoir of a life lived on the fast-unfurling frontiers of Russian history. Eventually published over six volumes, it would cement Paustovsky's reputation as the voice of Russia around the world, and see him nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. 
 
Taking its reader from Paustovsky's Ukrainian youth, struggling with a family on the verge of collapse and the first flourishes of creative ambition, to his experiences working as a paramedic on Russia's frontlines and then as a journalist covering the country's violent spiral into revolution, The Story of a Life offers a portrait of an artistic journey like no other.

The Story of a Life

Volumes 1–3

Graham Greene

UPDATED AND EDITED WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY JUDITH ADAMSON 
 
Whether reporting from the London cinema, Cotswolds villages, second-hand bookshops, war zones or political trouble spots, Graham Greene's novelistic gifts for detail, drama and compassionate curiosity provide unique and resonant insights into his life and times. To know war on any continent, read ‘A Memory of Indo-China’; to glimpse high political chicanery, read ‘The Great Spectacular’; to feel the flush and aftermath of revolutionary change, take up his pieces about Cuba. Reflections provides an extraordinary mirror on the twentienth century from one of its greatest observers.

Reflections

Michael Ondaatje

Booker prize winning author Michael Ondaatje invites you on a brutal, beautiful journey into the American West. . . 
 
At twenty-one years old, Billy the Kid has killed a man for each year he’s been alive. 
 
Roaming the blasted planes of the Wild West, he moves between friends, foes and lovers, fighting to keep just one step ahead of the law. Yet in this twisted wasteland – a country of mad dogs, of sweat and gore and blinding heat – the sheriffs play dirty too.Melding prose, poetry, imagined interviews and ephemeral photography, Ondaatje weaves together a lyrical reinterpretation of Billy’s short, infamous existence, forming a portrait of a young man, and a young country, borne out of violence, threaded through with disaster, yet rich in wonder. 
 
‘Ondaatje’s language is clean and energetic, with the pop of bullets. This is literature, art.’ Annie Dillard 
 
'Ondaatje’s eye for detail is wonderful and he uses it poetically, with superb restraint' Larry McMurtry

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

Wilfred Owen

'Orpheus, the pagan saint of poets, went through hell and came back singing. In twentieth-century mythology, the singer wears a steel helmet and makes his descent "down some profound dull tunnel" in the stinking mud of the Western Front. For most readers of English poetry, the face under that helmet is that of Wilfred Owen.' Professor Jon Stallworthy, from his Introduction. 
 
When Wilfred Owen was killed in the days before the Armistice in 1918, he left behind a shattering, truthful and indelible record of a soldier's experience of the First World War. His greatest war poetry has been collected, edited and introduced here by Professor Jon Stallworthy. This special edition is published to commemorate the end of the hellish war that Owen, though the hard-won truth and terrible beauty of his poetry, has taught us never to forget.

The War Poems Of Wilfred Owen

W.G. Sebald

Encountering an eccentric cast of characters along the way, Sebald confronts the frailty of human existence as he voyages along the Suffolk coast on foot. 
 
 What begins as the record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia becomes the great, constellated story of people and cultures past and present: of Chateaubriand, Thomas Browne, Swinburne and Conrad, of fishing fleets, skulls and silkworms. A rich meditation on the past via a melancholy trip along the Suffolk coast, The Rings of Saturn is an intricately patterned and haunting book on the transience of all things human. 
 
VINTAGE VOYAGES: A world of journeys, from the tallest mountains to the depths of the mind

The Rings of Saturn

(Vintage Voyages)

Václav Havel

Václav Havel’s remarkable and rousing essay on the tyranny of apathy, with a new introduction by Timothy Snyder 
 
Cowed by life under Communist Party rule, a greengrocer hangs a placard in their shop window: Workers of the world, unite! Is it a sign of the grocer’s unerring ideology? Or a symbol of the lies we perform to protect ourselves? 
 
 Written in 1978, Václav Havel’s meditation on political dissent – the rituals of its suppression, and the sparks that re-ignite it – would prove the guiding manifesto for uniting Solidarity movements across the Soviet Union. A portrait of activism in the face of falsehood and intimidation, The Power of the Powerless remains a rousing call against the allure of apathy. 
 
'Havel’s diagnosis of political pathologies has a special resonance in the age of Trump' Pankaj Mishra

The Power of the Powerless

Robert Frost

A wonderful collection of Robert Frost’s writing. 
 
No poet is more emblematically American than Robert Frost. Hailed as ‘the most eminent, the most distinguished Anglo-American poet’ by T.S. Eliot, he is the only writer in history to have been awarded four Pulitzer Prizes. In iconic poems like ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, simple images summon the rural landscape of New England, and Frost unfailingly moves the reader with his profound grasp of the human condition. 
 
This is the most comprehensive and authoritative volume of Frost's verse available, comprising all eleven volumes of his poems, meticulously edited by Edward Connery Lathem.

The Collected Poems

biblio.categories.code

biblio.publicationStatus

biblio.brand

biblio.workEditions.format

biblio.ageRange

biblio.series.seriesName

biblio.imprint.description

biblio.type

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Best-Jane-Austen-quotes_Online-Desktop_Penguin

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

Search Results

Little Black Classics Box Set

Penguin Modern Box Set

Doctor Who: Circuit-Breaker

Frankenstein

Here, from Anita Desai to Salman Rushdie, are five books about families, India, marriage and the rest, to keep you going as the series moves on.

Showing results for: ‘Anita Desai’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter