LITTLE BLACK CLASSICS

'Reader, if you're ready, so am I.' These witty vignettes, set in Charlotte Brontë's imaginary world of Angria, feature debauched aristocrats, high-society courtesans and the rakish, brooding hero Zamorna, and offer a fascinating insight i

Entertaining, touching and sharp-tongued letters between the great eighteenth-century composer and his mentor father.

The great nineteenth-century German thinker's musngs on self-deceit, superstition, art. and ambition.

'There sat the dog with eyes as big as mill wheels'Though criticised for their anarchic immorality when first published, Hans Christian Andersen's tales made him an international star, taken to the hearts of children and adults for their be

It was as if the sea, breaking down the wall protecting all the homes of the town, had sent a wave over her head'One of Conrad's most powerful, gripping storiesIntroducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little

'Strangely enough, I mistook it for a gentleman at first. Fortunately I had my spectacles with me so I could see it was really a nose. .Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate

'Mind you, it was a pukka, respectable opium-house, and not one of those stifling, sweltering chandoo-khanas that you can find all over the City.'Kipling first became famous for his pungent, harsh and shocking stories of northwest India, wh

'What is the life of a human being - a drop of dew, a flash of lightning? This is so sad, so sad.' Autobiographical stories from one of Japan's masters of modernist story-telling.Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80t

I could see that she was still terribly afraid, but I didn't soften anything; instead, seeing that she was afraid I deliberately intensified it.' In this short story, Dostoyevsky masterfully depicts desperation, greed, manipulation and sui

'An ass, clothed in the skin of a lion...'Aesop's animal fables are some of the earliest stories ever told, thought to have been composed by a slave in Greek antiquity and giving glimpses of a world that is harsh, pitiless and yet also eeri

'Hoodwink'd in faery fancy...'This volume contains a selection of Keats's greatest verse - including his gothic story in verse, 'The Eve of St Agnes', and the mysterious 'Lamia' - exploring themes of love, enchantment, myth and magic.Introd

She has many rare and charming qualities, but Sobriety is not one of them.'A selection of Austen's dark and hilarious early writings - featuring murder, drunkenness, perjury, theft, poisoning, women breaking out of prison, men forging wills