Penguin Modern Classics

Walter Mitty is an ordinary man living an ordinary life. But he has dreams - vivid, extraordinary day dreams - in which the life he leads is one of excitement and even adventure, in which he - a weary, put upon middle-aged man - is the hero of his own story.

A man can dream, can't he?

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is just one of the brilliant humorous and witty stories written by James Thurber and collected here.

Jean Rhys wrote this autobiography in her old age, now the celebrated author of Wide Sargasso Sea but still haunted by memories of her troubled past: her precarious jobs on chorus lines and relationships with unsuitable men, her enduring sense of isolation and her decision at last to become a writer. From the early days on Dominica to the bleak time in England, living in bedsits on gin and little else, to Paris with her first husband, this is a lasting memorial to a unique artist.

'Feels incredibly modern... it is brutal, frank about sex and violence, and will make your flesh creep' Ian Rankin

A brilliant new translation of Simenon's critically acclaimed masterpiece.

'And always the dirty snow, the heaps of snow that look rotten, with black patches and embedded garbage ... unable to cover the filth.'

Nineteen-year-old Frank - thug, thief, son of a brothel owner - gets by surprisingly well despite living in a city under military occupation, but a warm house and a full stomach are not enough to make him feel truly alive in such a climate of deceit and betrayal. During a bleak, unending winter, he embarks on a string of violent and sordid crimes that set him on a path from which he can never return. Georges Simenon's matchless novel is a brutal, compelling portrayal of a world without pity; a devastating journey through a psychological no-man's land.

'Among the best novels of the twentieth century' New Yorker

'An astonishing work' John Banville

'So noir it makes Raymond Chandler look beige' Independent

'Magical' Daily Mail
'I finished it with an ache in my heart and a tear in my eye' Spectator

From the author of Cider With Rosie, Village Christmas is a moving, lyrical portrait of England through the changing years and seasons.

Laurie Lee left his childhood home in the Cotswolds when he was nineteen, but it remained with him throughout his life until, many years later, he returned for good. This collection brings to life the sights, sounds, landscapes and traditions of his home - from centuries-old May Day rituals to his own patch of garden, from carol singing in crunching snow to pub conversations and songs. Here too he writes about the mysteries of love, living in wartime Chelsea, Winston Churchill's wintry funeral and his battle, in old age, to save his beloved Slad Valley from developers.

Told with a warm sense of humour and a powerful sense of history, Village Christmas brings us a picture of a vanished world.

'Brings to life the landscapes and traditions of Lee's home in Gloucestershire, from centuries-old May Day rituals and carol-singing on Christmas Eve, to his battle in old age to save his beloved Slad valley from developers' Guardian

'Simply written, observant and shot through with Lee's characteristic humility ... Against his whitewashed prose are touches of beauty' The Times Literary Supplement

A new translation of George Simenon's taut, devastating psychological novel set in American suburbia. The inspiration for the new play by award-winning playwright David Hare.

'I had begun, God knows why, tearing a corner off of everyday truth, begun seeing myself in another kind of mirror, and now the whole of the old, more or less comfortable truth was falling to pieces'

Confident and successful, New York advertising executive Ray Sanders takes what he wants from life. When he goes missing in a snow storm in Connecticut one evening, his closest friend begins to reassess his loyalties, gambling Ray's fate and his own future.

'The romans durs are extraordinary: tough, bleak, offhandedly violent, suffused with guilt and bitterness, redolent of place . . . utterly unsentimental, frightening in the pitilessness of their gaze, yet wonderfully entertaining' John Banville

'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequalled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories' Guardian

'A supreme writer . . . unforgettable vividness' Independen

'On one side of the ducats was stamped the radiant profile of Archithorius, on the other - an image of his six hundred arms'

Mortal Engines is a selection of the best of Stanislaw Lem's extraordinary miniature space epics, chosen by his heroic translator Michael Kandel, who has somehow battled through Lem's jokes, parodies, fabricated technological terms and unreliable robots and brilliantly converted them from Polish into English. Encompassing his Fables for Robots and stories from his protagonists Ijon Tichy (from The Star Diaries) and Pirx the Pilot, this is a highly entertaining but also deeply alarming view of the glories and absurdities of Outer Space.

In the space of less than four years, H. G. Wells (1866-1946) published four of the most influential, original and hair-raising of all works of science-fiction. In a life of tireless experiment, travelling and intellectual engagement, Wells was both a leading public figure and one of the great imaginers of the modern world, but his reputation was always dominated by these amazing novels: The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds. Each is great in its own right, but they also became the 'books of Genesis' for entire genres of speculative fiction.

This omnibus allows them to be read together, perhaps for the first time allowing the full range of Wells's achievement to be understood.

A husband forms gruesome plans for his new fridge; a government employee has a haunting experience on his commute home; prisoners serve as entertainment for wealthy party guests; an army officer suffers a monstrous tropical illness. These short stories contain some of the most groundbreaking and innovative writing in Dutch literature from 1915 to the present day, with most pieces appearing here in English for the first time. Blending unforgettable snapshots of the realities of everyday life with surrealism, fantasy and subversion, this collection shows Dutch writing to be an integral part of world literary history.

Henry Earlforward, a shabby Clerkenwell bookseller, has retired from life to devote himself (and his wife Violet) to a consuming passion for money. Miserliness becomes a fatal illness and Bennett gives a terrifying description of its ravages. But the book's horrible situation is saved through the character of Elsie - whose life-affirming refusal to engage with the nightmarish world of the bookseller transforms the story.

Bennett wished in Riceyman Steps to create an English novel as powerful as anything by Balzac, the writer he most admired, with the same sense of great human issues being played out within the confines of a household. The result is an unforgettable work which is also a gripping description of the harsh, battered London of the period just after the First World War.

Written in Berlin in 1934, Invitation to a Beheading contains all the surprise, excitement and magical intensity of a work created in two brief weeks of sustained inspiration. It takes us into the fantastic prison-world of Cincinnatus, a man condemned to death and spending his last days in prison not quite knowing when the end will come. Nabokov described the book as 'a violin in a void. The worldling will deem it a trick. Old men will hurriedly turn from it to regional romances and the lives of public figures ... The evil-minded will perceive in little Emmie a sister of little Lolita ... But I know a few readers who will jump up, ruffling their hair'.

'Deeply moving, original, and dealing with material that I had never encountered in fiction, but only in life' Margaret Drabble

Growing up in the world of the 'five towns' of industrial England, with their furnaces and chimneys, huddled red-brown streets, prayer meetings and small-minded bigotry, Anna is dominated by her miserly and tyrannical father. When she inherits a fortune and finds love, she struggles to break free from the constraints upon her, even though she is torn between duty and her deepest feelings. Arnold's novel of parental tyranny and rebellion is a portrayal of a woman of great spirit, complexity and integrity.

From the peerless author of The Lottery and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this is a treasure trove of deliciously dark and funny stories, essays, lectures, letters and drawings.

Let Me Tell You brings together the brilliantly eerie short stories Jackson is best known for with frank and inspiring lectures on writing; comic essays she wrote about her large, rowdy family; and revelatory personal letters and drawings. Jackson's landscape here is most frequently domestic - dinner parties, children's games and neighbourly gossip - but one that is continually threatened and subverted in her unsettling, inimitable prose. This collection is the first opportunity to see Shirley Jackson's radically different modes of writing side by side, revealing her to be a magnificent storyteller, a sharp, sly humorist and a powerful feminist.

'The stories range from sketches and anecdotes to complete and genuinely unsettling tales, somewhat alarming and very creepy ... The whole of the book offers insights into the vagaries of her mind, which was ruminant and generous ... For those of us whose imaginations, and creative ambitions, were ignited by 'The Lottery', Jackson remains one of the great practitioners of the literature of the darker impulses' - Paul Theroux, New York Times

'Shirley Jackson made a reputation with a short story in 1948. Like a lot of people I read 'The Lottery' when I was young, in an anthology of short stories from the New Yorker, and never forgot it. Let Me Tell You is a rich, enjoyable compendium of her unpublished short fiction and occasional writings, kicking off with a story of a dozen pages, 'Paranoia', which I won't forget, either' - Tom Stoppard, TLS Books of the Year

'This selection is a ceaseless delight ... there is a treat on almost every page' Daily Telegraph

George Orwell wrote, in his words, from 'a desire to see things as they are'. This new collection of his journalism and other writings, including articles, essays, broadcasts, poems, book and film reviews from across his career, shows his unmatched genius for observing the world. Whether discussing Polish immigration or Scottish independence, railing against racism, defending the English language or holding an imaginary conversation with Jonathan Swift, these pieces reveal a clear-eyed, entertaining and eternally relevant chronicler of his age.

Edited with an introduction by Peter Davison

'Orwell's luminous gift was for seeing things, for noticing what others missed, took for granted or simply found uninteresting, for discovering meaning and wonder in the familiarity of the everyday... Nothing escaped or seemed beneath his notice, which was what made him such a good reporter... Seeing Things As They Are is intended to be a collection first and foremost of his journalism, with preference given to lesser-known pieces and reviews as well as some of the poems he wrote. It is full of interest and curiosities' Jason Cowley, Financial Times

'Peter Davison gives us a feast of [Orwell's] shorter writings, showing how from such hesitant beginnings he evolved into the writer of enduring importance we know, committed to decency, equality and political honesty, who could nevertheless wax lyrical over the first signs of spring or an imaginary English pub' Gordon Bowker, Independent

'I was living in even greater circles of gangsterdom than I had dreamed, latitudes and longitudes of gangsterdom'

It's 1930's New York and fifteen-year-old streetkid Billy, who can juggle, somersault and run like the wind, has been taken under the wing of notorious gangster Dutch Schultz. As Billy learns the ways of the mob, he becomes like a son to Schultz - his 'good-luck kid' - and is initiated into a world of glamour, death and danger that will consume him, in this vivid, soaring epic of crime and betrayal.

The American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. His last poem, Pale Fire, is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should.

Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterwork is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.

Professor Timofey Pnin, previously of Tsarist Russia, is now precariously positioned at the heart of campus America. Battling with American life and language, Pnin must face great hazards in this new world: the ruination of his beautiful lumber-room-as-office; the removal of his teeth and the fitting of new ones; the search for a suitable boarding-house; and the trials of taking the wrong train.