A definitive annotated edition of one of the greatest of Terry Pratchett’s multi-million-bestselling Discworld novels
Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is in hot pursuit of a serial killer. The trouble is, a well-timed lightning strike has thrown both policeman and pursued into the city’s past. Now Vimes must relive the history that made him: a cruel regime, a bloody revolution, a corrupt police force, and, most unnerving of all, a keen young recruit named Sam Vimes… Night Watch, which draws on inspirations as far ranging as Victor Hugo and M*A*S*H, is a keen satire about the true nature of political power, and the sacrifices made in the name of the greater good; but also a profoundly empathetic novel about community, connection and the tenacity of the human spirit.
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are among the most successful and influential fantasy titles of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This edition of Night Watch – written at the height of Pratchett’s imaginative powers – includes a new foreword by Rob Wilkins and an introduction and annotations by Dr David Lloyd and Dr Darryl Jones, contextualising the novel and Pratchett’s far-reaching legacy for new readers and current fans alike.
Édouard Glissant’s most celebrated, scintillating philosophical work – which sets out a new poetic vision for the world
‘We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.’
In Poetics of Relation, his most celebrated philosophical work, Édouard Glissant turns the Caribbean reality of his life into a complex, energetic vision of a world in transformation. We come to see that relation in all its senses – telling, listening, connecting, and the parallel consciousness of self and surroundings – is the key to revolutionising mentalities and reshaping societies. We are not rooted, but ever-changing; we have a right to opacity and to difference, wherever we are. Told in scintillating prose, this unique exploration of language, slavery, and poetic freedom narrates an Antillean identity, but also that of the whole world.
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'.
'A masterpiece ... the greatest novel of the Holocaust' The Guardian
A haunting, dreamlike portrayal of the encroaching horror of the Holocaust onto a genteel MittelEuropean resort town
Badenheim, a resort town near the forests of Vienna, is preparing for the arts festival of the summer season. The hotel workers and local tradespeople rush to prepare the small town for the influx of vacationers. But just as the season is getting into full swing, a small note appears on a municipal notice board: the Sanitation Department is announcing an increase in its jurisdiction. No one knows what the Sanitation Department is, but no matter – the festival carries on.
Soon inspectors are spread all over town, bringing estrangement, suspicion and mistrust wherever they go. Meanwhile, the guests carry on pursuing their pleasures and the townspeople attend to their troubles. Then another announcement appears: all Jews must register with the Sanitation Department.
An allegory, satire and fable all in one, Badenheim 1939 is a story of denial and normalisation, masterfully creating an atmosphere of impending dread and horror. Gripping and unforgettable, this is one of most intriguing and eerie books ever written about the Holocaust.
Ten tales of loss and longing, from one one Japan's greatest writers
It was the height of summer, and there was anger in the rays of the sun
A summer holiday that turns to tragedy; a moonlit journey to fulfil a wish; a couple’s unusual way of making a living; a young lieutenant who ends his life; a night of infidelities. This selection contains nine short stories and one modern Noh play by one of Japan’s greatest writers. Selected by Mishima himself for translation, they are by turns tender and delicate, ironic and shocking, showing the strange pull between duty and desire, death and beauty.
‘He can be funny, even hilarious, but he is also capable of plunging into the dark psychic depths achieved by Hitchcock’ New York Times Book Review
Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker, Ivan Morris, Donald Keene and Geoffrey W. Sargent
Evelyn Waugh's hilarious debut novel, with an introduction by Barbara Cooke
Sent down from Oxford in outrageous circumstances, Paul Pennyfeather is oddly unsurprised to find himself qualifying for the position of schoolmaster at Llanabba Castle. His colleagues are an assortment of misfits, rascals and fools, including Prendy (plagued by doubts) and Captain Grimes, who is always in the soup (or just plain drunk). Then Sports Day arrives, and with it the delectable Margot Beste-Chetwynde, floating on a scented breeze. As the farce unfolds and the young run riot, no one is safe, least of all Paul.
'His first, most perfect novel ... ruthlessly comic' John Mortimer, Guardian
This new dual-language edition of ten stories selected from The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories celebrates some of the very best twentieth-century literature from Italy. Each story appears in the original Italian alongside an expert English translation, providing unique cultural insight and literary inspiration for language learners. Ranging from a spellbinding tale of the supernatural to a powerful portrait of post-war Italy, this revelatory collection includes works from beloved authors, Italo Calvino, Fausta Cialente, Alba de Céspedes, Grazia Deledda, Natalia Ginzburg, Elsa Morante, Lalla Romano, Umberto Saba, Alberto Savinio, and Elio Vittorini.
This new dual-language edition of ten stories selected from The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories celebrates some of the very best twentieth-century literature from Spain. Each story appears in Spanish alongside an expert English translation, providing unique cultural insight and literary inspiration for language learners. Ranging from a poignant tale of betrayal to a darkly humorous exchange between wedding guests, this captivating collection includes works from authors such as Leopoldo Alas (Clarín), Cristina Fernández Cubas, Medardo Fraile, Carmen Martín Gaite, Karmele Jaio, Carmen Laforet, Javier Marías, Carme Riera, Manuel Rivas, and Esther Tusquets.
The second volume takes the reader through the tumultuous twentieth century in the company of writers including Simone de Beauvoir and Maryse Condé, Patrick Modiano and Virginie Despentes, covering world wars, revolutions and the horrors of the motorway service station. Along the way we meet electronic brains, she-wolves, a sadistic Cinderella, ancestors, infidels, dissatisfied housewives and lonely ambassadors, all clamouring to be heard. Funny, devastating and fresh at every turn, this is the place to start for lovers of French literature, new and old.
The Sheltering Sky is a book about people on the edge of an alien space; somewhere where, curiously, they are never alone' Michael Hoffman.
Port and Kit Moresbury, a sophisticated American couple, are finding it more than a little difficult to live with each other. Endeavouring to escape this predicament, they set off for North Africa intending to travel through Algeria - uncertain of exactly where they are heading, but determined to leave the modern world behind. The results of this casually taken decision are both tragic and compelling.
When Joel Knox's mother dies, he is sent into the exotic unknown of the Deep South to live with a father he has never seen. But once he gets there, everyone is curiously evasive when Joel asks to see his father. Truman Capote's first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms is a brilliant, searching study of homosexuality set in a shimmering landscape of heat, mystery and decadence.
The first volume in his Roads to Freedom trilogy, Jean-Paul Sartre's The Age of Reason is a philosophical novel exploring existentialist notions of freedom, translated by Eric Sutton with an introduction by David Caute in Penguin Modern Classics.
Set in the volatile Paris summer of 1938, The Age of Reason follows two days in the life of Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy teacher, and his circle in the cafés and bars of Montparnasse. Mathieu has so far managed to contain sex and personal freedom in conveniently separate compartments. But now he is in trouble, urgently trying to raise 4,000 francs to procure a safe abortion for his mistress, Marcelle. Beyond all this, filtering an uneasy light on his predicament, rises the distant threat of the coming of the Second World War.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was an iconoclastic French philosopher, novelist, playwright and, widely regarded as the central figure in post-war European culture and political thinking. Sartre famously refused the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964 on the grounds that 'a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution'. His most well-known works, all of which are published by Penguin, include The Age of Reason, Nausea and Iron in the Soul.
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.
In Kingsley Amis's Take A Girl Like You, twenty year old Jenny Bunn is supernally beautiful and stubbornly chaste, which is why Patrick Standish, an arrogant schoolmaster, wants her so much. This perceptive coming of age novel about a northern girl who moves south, wants to fit in and yet wants to preserve her principles, challenges our assumptions about the battle of the sexes and classes in Britain. It is a story about 'the squalid business of the man and the woman' and 'the most wonderful thing that had ever happened' to Jenny Bunn.
Few twentieth century novelists have explored our preoccupation with sex like Kingsley Amis. The results are surprising and often hilarious.
Kingsley Amis's (1922-95) works take a humorous yet highly critical look at British society, especially in the period following the end of World War II. Born in London, Amis explored his disillusionment 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.
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.
Ten produkt jest zapowiedzią. Realizacja Twojego zamówienia ulegnie przez to wydłużeniu do czasu premiery tej pozycji. Czy chcesz dodać ten produkt do koszyka?
