Penguin Modern Classics

Isaac Bashevis Singer's work explores humanity in all of its guises. This collection of forty-seven short stories, selected by Singer himself from across the whole of his career, brings together the best of his writing. From the supernatural 'Taibele and Her Demon' to the poignant 'The Unseen', and from gentle humour in 'Gimpel the Fool' to tragedy with 'Yentl the Yeshiva Boy', these tales explore good and evil, passion and restraint, religious fervour and personal failings, within the traditional shtetls of pre-war Eastern Europe and post-war America.

The Subterraneans haunt the bars and clubs of San Francisco, surviving on a diet of booze and benzedrine, Proust and Verlaine. Living amongst them is Leo, an aspiring writer, and Mardou, half-Indian, half-Negro, beautiful and neurotic. Their bittersweet and ill-starred love affair sees Kerouac at his most evocative. Many regard this as being Kerouac's most touching and tender book.

First published in 1949, THE GOLDEN APPLES is an acutely observed, richly atmospheric portrayal of small town life in Morgana, Mississippi. There's Snowdie, who has to bring up her twin boys alone after her husband, King Maclain, disappears one day, discarding his hat on the banks of the Big Black. There's Loch Morrison, convalescing with malaria, who watches from his bedroom window as wayward Virgie Rainey meets a sailor in the vacant house opposite. Meanwhile, Miss Eckhart the piano teacher, grieving the loss of her most promising pupil, tries her hand at arson.

Eudora Welty has a fine ear for dialogue and describes each of the characters in incisive, haunting prose. '...in the South,' she says, 'everybody stays busy talking all the time - they're not sorry for you to overhear their tales'. Welty deftly picks up their stories to create an unflinching potrait of everyday life in the American South and offers a deeply moving look at human nature.

In free-spirited Paris, Jules and Jim live a carefree, bohemian existence. They write in cafés, travel when the mood takes them, and share the women they love without jealousy. Women like Lucie, flawless, an abbess, and Odile, impulsive, mischievous, almost feral. But it is Kate - with a smile the two friends had determined to always follow before they even met her, but capricious enough to jump in the Seine from spite - who steals their hearts most thoroughly.

Henri-Pierre Roché was in his mid-seventies when he wrote this, his autobiographical debut novel. The inspiration for the legendary film, it captures perfectly with excitement and great humour the tenderness of three people in love with each other and with life.

Margaret Drabble is one of the major literary figures of her generation. In this collection of her complete short fiction from across four decades, she examines the intense private worlds and passions of everyday people.

From one man's honeymooning epiphany in 'Hassan's Tower' to the journeying fantasies of 'A Voyage to Cythera', and from the sharp joy of 'The Merry Widow' to the bloody reality of the collection's title story, these are moving, witty and provocative tales, exploring cruel and loving relationships, social change and personal obsessions, and confirming her status as a leading practitioner of the art of the short story.

The short stories of Kingsley Amis - the great master of post-war comic prose - are dark, playful, moving, surprising and extremely funny. This definitive collection gathers all Amis's short fiction in a single volume for the first time and encompasses five decades of storytelling. In 'The 2003 Claret', written in 1958, a time machine is invented for the weighty task of sending a man to 2010 to discover what the booze will taste like. In 'Boris and the Colonel' a Cambridge spy is unearthed in the sleepy English countryside with the help of a plucky horse, while In 'Mason's Life' two men meet inside their respective dreams. The collection spans many genres, offering ingenious alternative histories, mystery and horror, satirical reflections and a devilishly funny attacks. Amis's stories reveal the scope of his imagination and the warmth beneath his acerbic humour, and they all share the unmistakable style and wit of one of Britain's best loved writers.

Kingsley Amis' (1922-1995) works take a humorous yet highly critical look at British society, especially of the period following the end of World War II. Born in London, Amis explored his disillusionment with British society in novels such as THAT UNCERTAIN FEELING (1955). His other works include THE GREEN MAN (1970); STANLEY AND THE WOMEN (1984); and THE OLD DEVILS (1986) which won the Booker Prize. Amis also wrote poetry, criticism, and short stories.

Rachel Cusk was born in 1967. She has won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Somerset Maugham Award, and is the author of two works of non-fiction and seven novels, including In The Fold, longlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize, and Arlington Park, shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize 2007. Her non-fiction book, A Life's Work, was published to huge acclaim in 2001, and her account of a summer spent in Italy with her family, The Last Supper, was published in 2009. Her most recent novel, The Bradshaw Variations was published in 2009. In 2003 she was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young Novelists. She lives in Brighton.

At Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage in the English countryside, five elderly people live together in rancorous disharmony. Adela Bastable bosses the house, as her brother Bernard passes his days thinking up malicious schemes against the baby-talking Marigold and secret drinker Shorty, while kindly George lies bedridden upstairs. The mismatched quintet keep their spirits alive by bickering and waiting for grandchildren to visit at Christmas. But the festive season does not herald goodwill to all at Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage. Disaster and chaos, it seems, are just around the corner ...

Told with Amis's piercing wit and humanity, Ending Up (1974) is a wickedly funny black comedy of the indignities of old age.

Douglas Yandell, a young-ish music critic, is enlisted by Kitty Vandervane to keep an eye on her roving husband - the eminent conductor and would-be radical Sir Roy - as he embarks on yet another affair. Roy, meanwhile, wants Douglas as an alibi for his growing involvement with Sylvia, an unsuitably young woman who loves nothing more than to shock and provoke. Life soon becomes extremely complicated as Douglas finds himself caught up in a frantic, farcical tangle of relationships, rivalry and scandal.

Girl, 20 is a merciless send-up of 1970s London's permissive society from a master of uproarious comedy.

The King's English is Kingsley Amis's authoritative and witty guide to the use and abuse of the English language. A scourge of illiteracy and a thorn in the side of pretension, Amis provides indispensable advice about the linguistic blunders and barbarities that lie in wait for us, from danglers, four-letter words to jargon and even Welsh rarebit. If you have ever wondered whether it's acceptable to start a sentence with 'and', to boldly split an infinitive, or to cross your sevens in the French style, Amis has the answer - or a trenchant opinion. By turns reflective, acerbic and provocative, The King's English is for anyone who cares about how the English language is used.

Brimming with gluttony, booze and lust, Roger Micheldene is loose in America. Supposedly visiting Budweiser University to make deals for his publishing firm in England, Roger instead sets out to offend all he meets and to seduce every woman he encounters. But his American hosts seem made of sterner stuff. Who will be Roger's undoing? Irving Macher, the young author of an annoyingly brilliant first novel? Father Colgate, the priest who suggests that Roger's soul is in torment? Or will it be his married ex-lover Helene? One thing is certain - Roger is heading for a terrible fall.

Outrageously funny and irreverent, One Fat Englishman (1963) is a devastating satire on Anglo-American relations.

Stella Rode has twice disturbed the ancient cloisters of Carne School: firstly by being the wrong sort, with her doyleys and china ducks, and secondly by being murdered. George Smiley, who has his own connection with the school, is asked by an old Service friend to investigate. As Smiley probes further beneath Carne's respectable veneer, he uncovers far more than a simple crime of passion. In his second George Smiley novel, le Carré moves outside the world of espionage to reveal the secrets at the heart of another particularly English institution. The result is a pitch-perfect murder mystery, with Smiley as master detective.

Barley Blair is not a Service man: he is a small-time publisher, a self-destructive soul whose only loves are whisky and jazz. But it was Barley who, one drunken night at a dacha in Peredelkino during the Moscow Book Fair, was befriended by a high-ranking Soviet scientist who could be the greatest asset to the West since perestroika began, and made a promise. Nearly a year later, his drunken promise returns to haunt him. A reluctant Barley is quickly trained by British Intelligence and sent to Moscow to liaise with a go-between, the beautiful Katya. Both are lonely and disillusioned. Each is increasingly certain that if the human race is to have any future, all must betray their countries ...

In his first post-glasnost spy novel, le Carré captures the effect of a slow and uncertain thaw on ordinary people and on the shadowy puppet-masters who command them.

The Cold War is over and Ned has been demoted to the training academy. He asks his old mentor, George Smiley, to address his passing-out class. There are no laundered reminiscences; Smiley speaks the truth - perhaps the last the students will ever hear. As they listen, Ned recalls his own painful triumphs and inglorious failures, in a career that took him from the Western Isles of Scotland to Hamburg and from Israel to Cambodia. He asks himself: Did it do any good? What did it do to me? And what will happen to us now? In this final Smiley novel, the great spy gives his own humane and unexpected answers.

A golden Cadillac big enough to cross the ocean has been seen sailing along the streets of Harlem. A hit-and-run victim's been hit so hard she got embedded in the wall of a convent. A shootout with three heistmen dressed as cops has left an important politician in a coma - and a lot of money missing. And Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson are the ones who have to piece it all together.

All Shot Up is chaotic, bloody - and completely unforgettable. Chester Himes wrote detective fiction darker, dirtier and more extreme than anyone else dared.

When it first published in 1958, Rona Jaffe's debut novel electrified readers who saw themselves reflected in its story of five young employees of a New York publishing company. There's Ivy League Caroline, who dreams of graduating from the typing pool to an editor's office; naive country girl April, who within months of hitting town reinvents herself as the woman every man wants on his arm; Gregg, the free-spirited actress with a secret yearning for domesticity. Now a classic, and as page-turning as when it first came out, The Best of Everything portrays their lives and passions with intelligence, affection, and prose as sharp as a paper cut.

A preacher called Deke O'Malley's been selling false hope: the promise of a glorious new life in Africa for just $1,000 a family. But when thieves with machine guns steal the proceeds - and send one man to the morgue - the con is up. Now Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed mean to bring the good people of Harlem back their $87,000, however many corpses they have to climb over to get it.

Cotton Comes to Harlem is a non-stop ride, with violence, sex, double-crosses, and the two baddest detectives ever to wear a badge in Harlem.