Penguin Modern Classics

'... a human being, an intellectual human being who constantly bends the entire force of his mind on the ridiculous task of forcing a wooden king into the corner of a wooden board, and does it without going mad!'

A group of passengers on a cruise ship challenge the world chess champion to a match. At first, they crumble, until they are helped by whispered advice from a stranger in the crowd - a man who will risk everything to win. Stefan Zweig's acclaimed novella Chess is a disturbing, intensely dramatic depiction of obsession and the price of genius.

'It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh (...)'

H.P. Lovecraft was perhaps the greatest twentieth century practitioner of the horror story, introducing to the genre a new evil, monstrous, pervasive and unconquerable. At the heart of these three stories are terrors unthinkable and strange: a crash-landing meteorite, the wretched inhabitant of an ancient castle and a grave-robber's curse.

This book includes The Colour Out Of Space, The Outsider and The Hound.

'Father,' I said, feeling I might as well get it over while I had him in a good humour, 'I had it all arranged to kill my grandmother.'

Praised as Ireland's Chekhov, Frank O'Connor was a modern master of the short story. From an amateur brass band divided by partisanship to English soldiers who befriend their Irish captors, and from a child's comic confession to the end of a small-town friendship, these four humorous and tragic stories refract universal truths through the prism of 20th-century Ireland.

This book contains The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland, Guests of the Nation, A Story by Maupassant, and First Confession.

'I suppose it was conceited of me. But it was fun. And I felt like getting a bit of my own back on some of the people who'd conned and flattered me into wasting all those years.'

In this wry, piercing short story from one of the greatest of all British postwar writers, an ageing poet considers the value of his art - and of the critics who've found genius in it. Then, with his final work, he exercises a unique revenge . . .

'And then one day a solitary figure appeared, moving toward them across the lifeless plain from the west.One man on a camel... '

Paul Bowles's unforgettable short stories portray people facing hostile environments and the innate savagery of humanity. These three unbearably tense tales from sun-drenched and brutal climes tell of vengeance, abandonment, violence and cruelty enjoyed and suffered, in a surreal realm of horror.

This book includes The Delicate Prey, A Distant Episode and The Circular Ruins.

'Three weeks later the world was advised of the coming of a new breakfast food, heralded under the resounding name of 'Filboid Studge''

H.H. Munro, better known by his pen name, Saki, wrote wickedly comic satires of upper-class Edwardian life. These seven short stories are macabre and extremely funny: they include a cat that is regrettably taught to speak, a vicious pet ferret worshipped as a god, a businessman triumphantly selling an unpalatable breakfast mush, and many dark twists and barbs.

This book includes Filboid Studge, a Story of a Mouse That Helped, Todermory, Mrs. Packletide's Tiger, Sredni Vashtar, The Music on the Hill, The Recessional and The Cobweb.

'Her feelings for the child redeemed her from bitterness, and shed some light on the dark industrial terraces and the waste lands of the city's rubble.'

One of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation, Margaret Drabble is an unmatched observer of postwar English lives, portraying social change, sexual liberation, landscape, class and the messy complications of human relationships with intricacy and honesty. In these two stories of lives colliding, a mother buying a birthday gift has her dreams destroyed, and a honeymoon leads to an unexpected epiphany.

This book contains The Gifts of War and Hassan's Tower.

'We were friends, somehow.But in the end, somehow, he intended to be a mortal enemy.All the while that he was making the gestures of a close and precious friend he was fattening my soul in a coop till it was ready for killing.'

Vital, exuberant, streetwise and philosophizing, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow is one of the undisputed masters of American prose. In this inspired novella an ageing man writes an apology for his rudeness to a librarian thirty-five years earlier, unleashing a dazzling, rancorous comic riff on growing old, regret, rudeness, smoking and 'the world's grandeur'.

'The condemned man looked so doggishly submissive, it really seemed as if one might allow him to roam the slopes freely, and only needed to whistle when it was time for the execution, and he would come.'

Kafka transformed the possibilities of the short story, his unique imagination giving his dark tales a sense of dream-like logic and unreality, in which their horrors are humorous and unease pervades. In these two stories, a traveller is shown the workings of an elaborate machine with a bloody purpose, and a son awakens unimagined resentments in his father.

This book includes In the Penal Colony and The Judgement.

'I pushed her back into the house without saying anything, shut the door. We stood looking at each other inside. She dropped her hand slowly and tried to smile. Then all expression went out of her white face and it looked as intelligent as the bottom of a shoe box...I lit my cigarette, puffed it slowly for a moment and then asked: "What are you doing here?"

Before creating Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler perfected the hardboiled private detective story in the pages of Blask Mask magazine - tough, spare tales of gumshoes and murder, laced with a weary lyricism and deadpan, laconic wit. 'Killer in the Rain' is vintage Chandler, the groundwork for his classic first novel The Big Sleep.

'People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more than they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime.'

'If she concealed so much and knew so much one must prize her open with the first tool that came to hand - the imagination.'

Virginia Woolf's writing tested the boundaries of modern fiction, exploring the depths of human consciousness and creating a new language of sensation and thought. Sometimes impressionistic, sometimes experimental, sometimes brutally cruel, sometimes surprisingly warm and funny, these five stories describe love lost, friendships formed and lives questioned.

This book includes The Lady in the Looking Glass, A Society, The Mark on the Wall, Solid Objects and Lappin and Lapinova.

'Staring out at the river his agony was like a great lidless eye'

In this stark, compelling and greatly autobiographical novella, Malcolm Lowry tells the story of Bill Plantagenet, a piano player and ex-sailor who has lost his band and his mind drinking in New York. As Plantagenet commits himself to a Psychiatric hospital to suffer his recovery, Lowry writes with eloquent ferocity on the delusions of madness, and the true meaning of sanity.

'He was blamed for endless disasters, from failed exams to a bridge collapse, an avalanche, even a shipwreck: all due, in the stupid opinion of, first, his fellow-students and, later, his colleagues, to the penetrating power of his evil eye...'

Profound and compassionate, Primo Levi was one of the most astonishing literary voices to emerge from the twentieth century. Whether describing the most beautiful poem ever composed or an invention gone horribly wrong, these eight exquisitely wrought stories open up a rich, fantastical world of wonder, adventure and cruel twists of fate, where nothing is as it seems.

This book contains The Magic Paint, The Death of Marinese, Censorship in Bitinia, Knall, Gladiators, The Fugitive, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Buffet Dinner

"It's like gadgets in shops.You buy a gadget and you develop an affection for it... but all of a sudden there are newer and better gadgets in the shops.More up-to-date models."

William Trevor has been acclaimed as the greatest contemporary writer of short stories in the English language, likened to Chekhov for his insights into human nature. These three tales of obsession, heartbreak, silent sorrow and the small tragedies of ordinary lives are profound, immaculate and beautiful.

This book includes The Mark-2 Wife, The Time of Year and Cheating at Canasta.

'"Watch out for the mosquitoes," they called to one another, lyrically because warning wasn't any use anyway, as they walked out of their kimonos and dropped them like the petals of one big scattered flower on the bank behind them, and exposing themselves felt in a hundred places at once the little pangs.'

Moon Lake is the story of a summer camp in Mississippi, a surly lifeguard, a rebellious orphan girl, and the fateful day when they learn the secrets of life and death. Pulitzer Prize-winner Eudora Welty's extraordinary short story is a lushly atmospheric and acutely observed portrayal of the strange, surreal time between childhood and adulthood.

'A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers' from Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino

Penguin Modern Classics have been shaping the reading habits of generations since 1961. This 50th anniversary catalogue offers a complete list of all the titles in print across the Modern Classics list, from Chinua Achebe to Stefan Zweig via George Orwell and everything else in between. It also contains Italo Calvino's inspiring essay on what makes a classic a classic.