As Mrs Dalloway works on the preparations for a dinner party, her thoughts throughout the day wander from memories of the past to interrogations about the present and lead her to assess the choices she has made in life and love. Her monologue interwe... More details on Mrs. Dalloway
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning — fresh as if issued to children on...
The legendary 1951 scroll draft of On the Road, published as Kerouac originally composed it... More details on On the Road
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up...
WINNER OF THE 2019 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 BOOKER PRIZE
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2019
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019 ... More details on Ducks, Newburyport
For her, movement was all. She could see, taste, smell it. She reacted faster than she could hear. A mountain lion needs to know how every flower behaves, so as not to mistake it for a glint of bare r...
When Mrs Ramsay tells her guests at her summer house on the Isle of Skye that they will be able to visit the nearby lighthouse the following day, little does she know that this trip will only be completed ten years later by her husband, and that a gu... More details on To the Lighthouse
To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, ...
A complex, intense American novel of family from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
With an introduction by Richard Hughes
Ever since the first furore was created on its publication in 1929, The Sound and the Fury has been considered one of... More details on The Sound and the Fury
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tre...
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time... More details on As I Lay Dying
Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cottonhouse can see Jewel's frayed and broken straw hat a fu...
One of the twentieth century's great undisputed masterpieces, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano includes an introduction by Michael Schmidt in Penguin Modern Classics.
It is the fiesta 'Day of the Dead' in the small Mexican town of Quauhnahuac. In th... More details on Under the Volcano
Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaus. Overlooking one of these valleys, which is dominated by two volcanoes, lie...
Ulysses' takes place in a single day, 16 June 1904, also known as Bloomsday, it sets the characters and incidents of the Odyssey of Homer in modern Dublin and represents Odysseus (Ulysses), Penelope and Telemachus in the characters of Leopold Bloom, ... More details on Ulysses
STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild ...
This cult classic of gonzo journalism is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop cult... More details on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
The New York office was not familiar with the Vincent Black Shadow: they referred me to the Los Angeles bureau—which is actually in Beverly Hills just a few long blocks from the Polo Lounge—but when I...
Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on the work of authors like Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, and William Gibson, on the relationship of art and obscenity, and on the shape of music, film,... More details on Naked Lunch
I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a...