Penguin Modern Classics

Italo Calvino once said that he preferred to give false details about his biography since he felt that even the genuine data of a writer's life shed no light on the creative work. But this volume of posthumously collected personal writings is the closest we will ever come to the autobiography of this most private of writers. The pieces collected here range from the early 1950s to his last interview, completed just before his sudden death in 1985. Apart from providing a glimpse into his own formative experiences and evolution as an author, Calvino's autobiographical writings also examine the major events of twentieth-century history from a very personal viewpoint. This volume is full of ideas on literature and other writers, all conveyed with the author's distinctive lightness and intelligence.

The successful writer Oki has reached middle age and is filled with regrets. He returns to Kyoto to find Otoko, a young woman with whom he had a terrible affair many years before, and discovers that she is now a painter, living with a younger woman as her lover. Otoko has continued to love Oki and has never forgotten him, but his return unsettles not only her but also her young lover. This is a work of strange beauty, with a tender touch of nostalgia and a heartbreaking sensitivity to those things lost forever.

Shimamura is tired of the bustling city. He takes the train through the snow to the mountains of the west coast of Japan, to meet with a geisha he believes he loves. Beautiful and innocent, Komako is tightly bound by the rules of a rural geisha, and lives a life of servitude and seclusion that is alien to Shimamura, and their love offers no freedom to either of them. Snow Country is both delicate and subtle, reflecting in Kawabata's exact, lyrical writing the unspoken love and the understated passion of the young Japanese couple.

Ogata Shingo is growing old, and his memory is failing him. At night he hears only the sound of death in the distant rumble from the mountain. The relationships which have previously defined his life - with his son, his wife, and his attractive daughter-in-law - are dissolving, and Shingo is caught between love and destruction. Lyrical and precise, The Sound of the Mountain explores in immaculately crafted prose the changing roles of love and the truth we face in ageing.

A woman finds herself filling a pit in the forest in the middle of the night; a family lock each other in their bedrooms to battle a strange plague; a wizard punishes two beautiful ballerinas by turning them into one hugely fat circus performer; a colonel is warned not to lift the veil from his dead wife's face; and a distraught father brings his daughter back to life by eating human hearts in his dreams.

In these blackly comic tales of revenge, disturbing deaths and haunting melancholy, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya blends miracles and madness in the darkest of modern fairy tales.

Kikuji has been invited to a tea ceremony by a mistress of his dead father. He is shocked to find there the mistress's rival and successor, Mrs. Ota, and that the ceremony has been awkwardly arranged for him to meet his potential future bride. But he is most shocked to be drawn into a relationship with Mrs. Ota - a relationship that will bring only suffering and destruction to all of them. Thousand Cranes reflects the tea ceremony's poetic precision with understated, lyrical style and beautiful prose.

Originally written in 1952 but not published till 1985, Queer is an enigma - both an unflinching autobiographical self-portrait and a coruscatingly political novel, Burroughs' only realist love story and a montage of comic-grotesque fantasies that paved the way for his masterpiece, Naked Lunch. Set in Mexico City during the early fifties, Queer follows William Lee's hopeless pursuit of desire from bar to bar in the American expatriate scene. As Lee breaks down, the trademark Burroughsian voice emerges; a maniacal mix of self-lacerating humor and the Ugly American at his ugliest. A haunting tale of possession and exorcism, Queer is also a novel with a history of secrets, as this new edition reveals.

Andy Warhol kept these diaries faithfully from November 1976 right up to his final week, in February 1987. Written at the height of his fame and success, Warhol records the fun of an Academy Awards party, nights out at Studio 54, trips between London, Paris and New York, and surprisingly even the money he spent each day, down to the cent. With appearances from and references to everyone who was anyone, from Jim Morrison, Martina Navratilova and Calvin Klein to Shirley Bassey, Estee Lauder and Muhammad Ali, these diaries are the most glamorous, witty and revealing writings of the twentieth century.

Clinging to the Wreckage is the first part of John Mortimer's acclaimed autobiography. Here he recounts his solitary childhood in the English countryside, with affectionate portraits of his remote parents - an increasingly unconventional barrister father, whose blindness must never be mentioned, battling earwigs in the mutinous garden, and a vague and endlessly patient mother. As a boy dreaming of a tap-dancing career on the stage and forming a one-boy communist cell at boarding school, his father pushes him to pursue the law, where Mortimer embarks on the career that was to inspire his hilarious and immortal literary creations.

Told with great humour and touching honesty, this is a magnificent achievement by one of Britain's best-loved writers.

When Simeon Simcox, a socialist clergyman, leaves his entire fortune not to his family but to the ruthless, social-climbing Tory MP Leslie Titmuss, the Rector's two sons react in very different ways. Henry, novelist and former 'angry young man' turned grumpy old reactionary, decides to fight the will and prove their father was insane. Younger brother Fred, a mild-mannered country doctor, takes a different approach, quietly digging in Simeon's past, only to uncover an entirely unexpected explanation for the legacy.

An exquisitely drawn saga of ancient rivalries and class struggles, featuring a glorious cast of characters, Paradise Postponed is a delicious portrait of English country life by a master satirist.

When a Tory MP is found dead in a swimming-pool wearing a leopardskin bikini, the embittered Leslie (now Lord) Titmuss sees the ideal opportunity to re-enter the political arena. All he needs is a puppet, and Terry Flitton - inoffensive New Labourite - is perfect. Along with his beautiful, very PC wife, Terry heads blindly for the Hartscombe and Worsfield South by-election. But is he too busy listening for the sound of victory trumpets to notice that the Tory dinosaur is not quite extinct?

John Mortimer's brilliant follow-up to Paradise Postponed and Titmuss Regained, The Sound of Trumpets is a devilishly witty satire on political ambition, spin and sleaze, and the culmination of a masterly trilogy.

The Right Honourable Leslie Titmuss has clawed his way up the Tory government ranks and is now Secretary of State at the Ministry of Housing, Ecological Affairs and Planning (H.E.A.P.), and in pursuit of beautiful widow Jenny Sidonia. But seismic changes are afoot in the beautiful countryside where a new town threatens to engulf his own back garden. Will Leslie bow to market forces? Or will he join the fight against the multi-storey car parks, shopping precincts and office blocks that could sweep away Rapstone Valley?

The sequel to John Mortimer's stunning novel Paradise Postponed, Titmuss Regained is a panoramic satire on the machinations of politics and an affectionate elegy to a disappearing world.

In what is one of the finest autobiographies to come out of the First World War, the distinguished poet Edmund Blunden records his experiences as an infantry subaltern in France and Flanders. Blunden took part in the disastrous battles of the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele, describing the latter as 'murder, not only to the troops, but to their singing faiths and hopes'. In his compassionate yet unsentimental prose, he tells of the heroism and despair found among the officers. Blunden's poems show how he found hope in the natural landscape; the only thing that survives the terrible betrayal enacted in the Flanders fields.

A 1959 classic 'hard' science-fiction novel by renowned Cambridge astronomer and cosmologist Fred Hoyle. Tracks the progress of a giant black cloud that comes towards Earth and sits in front of the sun, causing widespread panic and death. A select group of scientists and astronomers - including the dignified Astronomer Royal, the pipe smoking Dr Marlowe and the maverick, eccentric Professor Kingsly - engage in a mad race to understand and communicate with the cloud, battling against trigger happy politicians.

In the pacy, engaging style of John Wyndham and John Christopher, with plenty of hard science thrown in to add to the chillingly credible premise (he manages to foretell Artificial Intelligence, Optical Character Recognition and Text-to-Speech converters), Hoyle carries you breathlessly through to its thrilling end.

When shy young heir Patrick is orphaned at the age of ten, the only family he has is his wealthy and eccentric aunt, a New York socialite named Mame. Prone to dramatic costumes, flights of fancy and expensive whims, Mame will raise Patrick the only way she knows how - with humour, mishaps, unforgettable friends and lots of love. From progressive schooling and Mame's search for a husband to her short-lived literary career and the puncturing of some of Patrick's romances, Auntie Mame is the most magnificent and hilarious work of love, style, wit and the life of a modern American.

As far as Benjamin Braddock's parents are concerned, his future is sewn up. Now he has graduated from college, he will go to Yale or Harvard, get a good job and enjoy a life of money, cocktails and pool parties in the suburbs, just like them. For Benjamin, however, this isn't quite enough. When his parents' friend Mrs Robinson, a formidable older woman, strips naked in front of him and they begin an affair, it seems he might have found a way out. That is, until her daughter Elaine comes into the picture, and things get far more complicated.