Penguin Modern Classics

Walter Bridge, husband to India and father to three, is a successful lawyer in a Kansas suburb. The daily dramas of his life only serve to illuminate his narrow prejudices and complacent outlook, yet he is also troubled by dark undercurrents of desire and a yearning for something forever out of his reach. In Mr Bridge, Evan S. Connell gives us a poignant, satirical and poetic portrayal of a man who cannot escape his limitations and of a couple growing old together but unable, ultimately, to connect.

Mrs Bridge, an unremarkable and conservative housewife in Kansas City, has three children and a kindly lawyer husband. She spends her time shopping, going to bridge parties and bringing up her children to be pleasant, clean and have nice manners. And yet she finds modern life increasingly baffling, her children aren't growing up into the people she expected, and sometimes she has the vague disquieting sensation that all is not well in her life. In a series of comic, telling vignettes, Evan S. Connell illuminates the narrow morality, confusion, futility and even terror at the heart of a life of plenty.

Our lives are filled with objects. Everyday things used in everyday settings, they are our constant companions. As such, writes Soetsu Yanagi, they should be made with care and built to last, treated with respect and even affection. They should be natural and simple, sturdy and safe - an aesthetic fulfilment of our practical needs. They should, in short, be things of beauty.

Long revered as the authority on craftsmanship and Japanese aesthetics, Yanagi devoted his life and writing to defend the value of craft. In an age of feeble and ugly machine-made things, this now-classic book is a call for each of us to deepen our relationship with the objects that surround us. Inspired by the work of the simple artisans Yanagi encountered on his lifelong travels through Japan and Korea, it is a heartfelt defence of modest, honest, handcrafted objects, from traditional teacups to jars to paper. Objects that exemplify the beauty of everyday things.

"Radical and inspiring ... Yanagi's vision puts the connection between heart and hand before the transient and commercial" - Edmund de Waal

"Soetsu Yanagi's unerring eye has influenced generations of makers. His notion of Zen and the art of design continues to inspire all those involved in shaping our everyday world" - Jasper Morrison

Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh were two of the twentieth century's most amusing and gifted writers, who matched wits and traded literary advice in more than five hundred letters over twenty-two years. Dissecting their friends, criticizing each other's books and concealing their true feelings beneath a barrage of hilarious and knowing repartee, they found it far easier to conduct a friendship on paper than in person. This correspondence provides a colourful glimpse into the literary and social circles of London and Paris, during the Second World War and for twenty years after.

Ronald Knox - priest, classicist and brilliant, prolific writer - was one of the outstanding men of letters of his time. The renowned Oxford chaplain was a friend of figures such as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and was known for his caustic wit and spiritual wisdom. Evelyn Waugh, his devoted friend and admirer, was asked by Knox to write his biography just before his death in 1957. The result, published after two years of research and writing, is a tribute to a uniquely gifted man: 'the wit and scholar marked out for popularity and fame; the boon companion of a generation of legendary heroes; the writer of effortless felicity and versatility ... who never lost a friend or made an enemy'.

For D. H. Lawrence the novel was the pinnacle, 'the one bright book of life', yet his non-fiction shows him at his most freewheeling and playful. This is a selection of his brilliantly varied essays, on subjects including art, morality, obscenity, songbirds, Italy, Thomas Hardy, the death of a porcupine in the Rocky Mountains and the narcissism of photographing ourselves. Arranged chronologically to illuminate the patterns of Lawrence's thought over time, and including many little-known pieces, they reveal a writer of enduring freshness and force.

'Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.' Waugh begins his story with heredity, writing of the energetic, literary and sometimes eccentric men and women who, unknown to themselves, contributed to his genius. Save for a few pale shadows, his childhood was warm, bright and serene. The Hampstead and Lancing schooldays which followed were sometimes agreeable, but often not. His life at Oxford - which he evokes in Brideshead Revisited - was essentially a catalogue of friendship. His cool recollection of those hedonistic days is a portrait of the generation of Harold Acton, Cyril Connolly and Anthony Powell. That exclusive world he recalls with elegant wit and precision. He closes with his experiences as a master at a preparatory school in North Wales which inspired Decline and Fall.

The book that made Hans Fallada famous, Little Man, What Now? is filled with an extraordinary mixture of comedy and desperation. It tells the story of one of European literature's most sympathetic young couples - 'Boy' and 'Lämmchen' - as they battle indomitably through a world of grotesque threats in Depression Berlin. A rich gallery of hulking crooks, maternity nurses, nudists, a terrible mother and Nazi streetfighters cannot shake their love for each other. But is love enough in a city as cold and indifferent as Berlin in 1932?

The great novel of Weimar Germany, Little Man, What Now? is full of men and women trying to keep ahead of their bills and hang on to their daydreams, from harrassed men's clothing assistants to a very unlucky chocolate shop owner. This brilliant new translation by Michael Hofmann brings to life an entire era, one that was - as neither Fallada nor his characters knew - just about to be swept away.

Whether celebrating Hogarth or savaging Hollywood, mocking modern manners or defending traditional English architecture, inviting readers to 'come inside' the Catholic Church or expressing his contempt for modish Marxism and American-style religion, Evelyn Waugh's journalism is sparkling, sometimes vitriolic and always full of good sense. In this wonderful selection he explores his Oxford youth, his unexpected conversion, his literary enthusiasms (from P. G. Wodehouse to Graham Greene) and the perils of basing fictional characters on real people. Decades after their publication, these pieces still retain their capacity to delight, to surprise and to shock.

When the great Ryszard Kapuscinski was a young journalist in the early 1960s, he was sent to the farthest reaches of his native Poland between foreign assignments. The resulting pieces brought together in this new collection, nearly all of which are translated into English for the first time, reveal a place just as strange as the distant lands he went on to visit.

From forgotten villages to collective farms, Kapuscinski explores a Poland that is post-Stalinist but still Communist; a country on the edge of modernity. He encounters those for whom the promises of rising living standards never worked out as planned, those who would have been misfits under any political system, those tied to the land and those dreaming of escape.

In 1581 Edmund Campion, a Jesuit priest working underground in Protestant England, was found guilty of treason and hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. Years later he would be beatified. Evelyn Waugh's compelling and elegant narrative is a homage to the man he revered as a poet, scholar, hero and martyr. He tells Campion's story with a novelist's eye for detail, from his success as an Oxford scholar, through his travels around Europe, his doomed secret mission to England and on to his capture and dramatic trial.

Vividly re-creating a time of persecution and surveillance, Waugh writes that 'the hunted, trapped murdered priest is our contemporary and Campion's voice sounds to us across the centuries'.

In 1935 Italy declared war on Abyssinia and Evelyn Waugh was sent to Addis Ababa to cover the conflict. His acerbic account of the intrigue and political machinations leading up to the crisis is coupled with amusing descriptions of the often bizarre and seldom straightforward life of a war correspondent rubbing shoulders with less-than-honest officials, Arab spies, pyjama-wearing radicals and disgruntled journalists. Witty, lucid and penetrating, Evelyn Waugh captures the dilemmas and complexities of a feudal society caught up in twentieth-century politics and confrontation.

Between 1929 and 1935 Evelyn Waugh travelled widely and wrote four books about his experiences. In this collection he writes, with his customary wit and perception, about a cruise around the Mediterranean; a train trip from Djibouti to Abyssinia to attend Emperor Haile Selassie's coronation in 1930; his travels in Aden, Zanzibar, Kenya and the Congo, coping with unbearable heat and plagued by mosquitoes; a journey to Guyana and Brazil; and his return to Addis Ababa in 1935 to report on the war between Abyssinia and Italy. Waugh's adventures on his travels gave him the ideas for such classic novels as Scoop and Black Mischief.

"I've been told that no one sings the word 'hunger' like I do. Or the word 'love'."

Lady Sings the Blues is the inimitable autobiography of one of the greatest icons of the twentieth century. Born to a single mother in 1915 Baltimore, Billie Holiday had her first run-in with the law at aged 13. But Billie Holiday is no victim. Her memoir tells the story of her life spent in jazz, smoky Harlem clubs and packed-out concert halls, her love affairs, her wildly creative friends, her struggles with addiction and her adventures in love. Billie Holiday is a wise and aphoristic guide to the story of her unforgettable life.

Guy Crouchback, determined to get into the war, takes a commission in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. His spirits high, he sees all the trimmings but none of the action. And his first campaign, an abortive affair on the West African coastline, ends with an escapade which seriously blots his Halberdier copybook. Men at Arms is the first book in Waugh's brilliant trilogy, Sword of Honour, which chronicles the fortunes of Guy Crouchback. The second and third volumes, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender, are also published in Penguin Modern Classics.

Guy Crouchback is now attached to a commando unit undergoing training on the Hebridean isle of Mugg, where the whisky flows freely and HM forces have to show respect for the laird. But the comedy of Mugg is followed by the bitterness of Crete.