Nabokov's early novel about a chess-playing genius, reissuing in Modern Classics as part of the Nabokov relaunch
Vladimir Nabokov's early novel is the dazzling story of the coarse, strange yet oddly endearing chess-playing genius Luzhin. Discovering his prodigious gift in boyhood and rising to the rank of International Grandmaster, Luzhin develops a lyrical passion for chess that renders the real world a phantom. As he confronts the fiery, swift-swooping Italian Grandmaster Turati, he brings into play his carefully devised defence. Making masterly play of metaphor and imagery, The Defense is the book that, of his early works, Nabokov felt 'contains and diffuses the greatest warmth'.
'How did I so unwittingly transform the joy of living into the great luxury of being alive?'
Between 1967 and 1977, Clarice Lispector wrote weekly dispatches from her desk in Rio for the Jornal do Brasil. Already famous for her revolutionary, interior, metaphysical novels, in her Chronicles she turns her attention to the everyday, turning the material of her life into profound, touching and funny, tiny revelations.
Observing the world around her, small encounters like hearing tales of the lost loves of a taxi driver, or the bitterness lurking beneath the prettiness of an old friend, become an exposition of the currents and foibles that define our lives. Everything from the meaning of cosmonauts to the new ideas, writers and artists that populate the sparkling international world of the sixties and seventies are considered and transformed into jewels of insight, delight and devastation.
Sincere and playful, exhilarating and contemplative, Too Much of Life: Complete Chronicles opens up a new way of seeing the world.
While on a year of study in Paris in 1927, Liebling acquired the friendship and tutelage of Yves Mirande, 'one of the last great gastronomes of France', beginning a joyous apprenticeship in the fine art of eating. Told with gluttonous joie de vivre, Between Meals expounds on the delights and pitfalls of a life dedicated to food, from bad rosé ('a pinkish cross between No-Cal and vinegar') to lobster a l'Américaine ('I have never personally inquired into the mysteries of its fabrication; I am content to love a masterpiece of painting without asking how the artist mixed his colours'), to a memorable stay at a Swiss slimming clinic with a masseur named Sprudli. Witty, grouchy and full of gusto, Between Meals has the exquisite sensuality of a Michelin-starred meal and the delicious, catty wit of the perfect dinner guest. It is a love song to food, wine and Paris.
With an introduction by James Salter.
'The most important thing is probably always precisely the thing you can't have. That's where all the happiness is'
In these brief, acid-sharp stories of love, marriage and family from one of Denmark's most celebrated writers, the ordinary events of everyday life - a wife anxious not to wake her husband, a little boy losing his father's beloved knife, a woman's obsessive longing for a yellow silk umbrella - become dark and disconcerting. Here Tove Ditlevsen explores yearning, fear and the elusiveness of that strange thing called happiness.
'The purity and dazzling insight of Ditlevsen's writing speaks for itself' Daily Telegraph
'Authentic, unforced and utterly lucid' Sunday Times
'Ditlevsen's wonderful and devastatingly bleak short stories simmer with melancholy and despair' Daily Mail
Sylish, shimmering and amoral, Sagan's tale of adolescence and betrayal on the French Riviera was her masterpiece, published when she was just eighteen. However, this frank and explicit novella was considered too daring for 1950s Britain, and sexual scenes were removed for the English publication. Now this fresh and accurate new translation presents the uncensored text in full for the first time.
Bonjour Tristesse tells the story of Cécile, who leads a carefree life with her widowed father and his young mistresses until, one hot summer on the Riviera, he decides to remarry - with devastating consequences. In A Certain Smile, which is also included in this volume, Dominique, a young woman bored with her lover, begins an encounter with an older man that unfolds in unexpected and troubling ways.
Both novellas have been freshly translated by Heather Lloyd and include an introduction by Rachel Cusk. Heather Lloyd has also written a new afterword for this edition.
A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s. Simone de Beavoir describes her early life, from her birth in Paris in 1908 to her student days at the Sorbonne, where she met Jean-Paul sartre - 'the dream-companion I had longed for since I was fifteen'.
A chance encounter while holidaying in Central America leads an American couple, the Slades, to befriend the charming, handsome Grove Soto and his young Cuban mistress. But as the Slades' trip becomes prolonged and they grow increasingly dependent on their new acquaintances, an undercurrent of cruelty begins to disturb the comfort and niceties to which they are accustomed. Up Above the World shows Paul Bowles to be a master of the tension and horror of rising viciousness.
A fruity, foxy masterpiece, defender of our wilting faith in mankind' Sunday Times
Horace Rumpole is in a strange state that could only be described as a kind of air-conditioned purgatory: he has retired to Florida with his wife, Hilda (She Who Must Be Obeyed). It is safely assumed the Old Bailey hack's wig has been hung up for good. But when a rather unkempt civil servant is mixed up in the mysterious death of a minor aristocrat, Rumpole seizes the opportunity to escape a life of leisure. He is soon back in court (via a budget airline) to do battle once more with Judge 'Mad Bull' Bullingham.
Step into the unsettling world of Shirley Jackson this autumn with a collection of her finest, darkest short stories, revealing the queen of American gothic at her mesmerising best.
There's something nasty in suburbia. In these deliciously dark tales, the daily commute turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, the loving wife hides homicidal thoughts and the concerned citizen might just be an infamous serial killer. In the haunting world of Shirley Jackson, nothing is as it seems and nowhere is safe, from the city streets to the country manor, and from the small-town apartment to the dark, dark woods...
Includes the following stories: 'The Possibility of Evil'; 'Louisa, Please Come Home'; 'Paranoia'; 'The Honeymoon of Mrs Smith'; 'The Story We Used to Tell'; 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice'; 'Jack the Ripper'; 'The Beautiful Stranger'; 'All She Said Was Yes'; 'What a Thought'; 'The Bus'; 'Family Treasures'; 'A Visit'; 'The Good Wife'; 'The Man in the Woods'; 'Home'; 'The Summer People'.
Every Thursday morning in a living room in Iran, over tea and pastries, eight women meet in secret to discuss forbidden works of Western literature. As they lose themselves in the worlds of Lolita, The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice, gradually they come to share their own stories, dreams and hopes with each other, and, for a few hours, taste freedom. Azar Nafisi's bestselling memoir is a moving, passionate testament to the transformative power of books, the magic of words and the search for beauty in life's darkest moments.
A philosophical exploration of the idea of 'rebellion' by one of the leading existentialist thinkers, Albert Camus' The Rebel looks at artistic and political rebels throughout history, from Epicurus to the Marquis de Sade. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is translated by Anthony Bower with an introduction by Oliver Todd.
The Rebel is Camus' 'attempt to understand the time I live in' and a brilliant essay on the nature of human revolt. Published in 1951, it makes a daring critique of communism - how it had gone wrong behind the Iron Curtain and the resulting totalitarian regimes. It questions two events held sacred by the left wing - the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 - that had resulted, he believed, in terrorism as a political instrument. In this towering intellectual document, Camus argues that hope for the future lies in revolt, which unlike revolution is a spontaneous response to injustice and a chance to achieve change without giving up collective and intellectual freedom.
Albert Camus (1913-60) is the author of a number of best-selling and highly influential works, all of which are published by Penguin. They include The Fall, The Outsider and The First Man. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, Camus is remembered as one of the few writers to have shaped the intellectual climate of post-war France, but beyond that, his fame has been international.
The Lonely Londoners, an unforgettable account of immigrant experience and one of the great twentieth-century London novels, now in in a stunning Clothbound Classics edition.
At Waterloo Station, hopeful new arrivals from the West Indies step off the boat train, ready to start afresh in 1950s London. There, homesick Moses Aloetta, who has already lived in the city for years, meets Henry 'Sir Galahad' Oliver and shows him the ropes. In this strange, cold and foggy city where the natives can be less than friendly at the sight of a black face, has Galahad met his Waterloo? But the irrepressible newcomer cannot be cast down. He and all the other lonely new Londoners - from shiftless Cap to Tolroy, whose family has descended on him from Jamaica - must try to create a new life for themselves. As pessimistic 'old veteran' Moses watches their attempts, they gradually learn to survive and come to love the heady excitements of London.
Ranging from the age of slavery to contemporary injustices, this groundbreaking history of race, gender and class inequality by the radical political activist Angela Davis offers an alternative view of female struggles for liberation.
Tracing the intertwined histories of the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements, Davis examines the racism and class prejudice inherent in so much of white feminism, and in doing so brings to light new pioneering heroines, from field slaves to mill workers, who fought back and refused to accept the lives into which they were born.
'The power of her historical insights and the sweetness of her dream cannot be denied' The New York Times
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