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A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Category: No Category | Series: Penguin Modern Classics Ser.
In this nightmare vision of a not-too-distant future, fifteen-year-old Alex and his three friends rob, rape, torture and murder - for fun. Alex is jailed for his vicious crimes and the State undertakes to reform him - but how and at what cost?
A Short History of Decay by E. M. Cioran
Category: Philosophy | Series: Penguin Modern Classics Ser.
A Short History of Decay (1949) is E. M. Cioran's nihilistic and witty collection of aphoristic essays concerning the nature of civilization in mid 20th-century Europe. Touching upon man's need to worship, the feebleness of God, the downfall of the Ancient Greeks and the melancholy baseness of all exist ...Show more
A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
Category: No Category | Series: Penguin Modern Classics Series
Fading southern belle Blanche Dubois depends on the kindness of strangers and is adrift in the modern world. When she arrives to stay with her sister Stella in a crowded, boisterous corner of New Orleans, her delusions of grandeur bring her into conflict with Stella's crude, brutish husband Stanley. Eve ...Show more
All My Sons by Arthur Miller
Category: No Category | Series: Penguin Modern Classics
In Joe and Kate Keller's family garden, an apple tree - a memorial to their son Larry, lost in the Second World War - has been torn down by a storm. But his loss is not the only part of the family's past they can't put behind them. Not everybody's forgotten the court case that put Joe's partner in jail, ...Show more
Alone In Berlin by Hans Fallada
Category: Modern Fiction | Series: Penguin Modern Classics Ser.
Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. When unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel receive the news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France, they are shocked out of their quiet existence and begin a silent campaign of defiance. A deadly game of cat-and-mouse develops between ...Show more
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Category: No Category | Series: Penguin Modern Classics Ser.
The novel tells the story of Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, who returns to his ancestral home in the Sierra Nevada. Wheelchair-bound with a crippling bone disease, Ward embarks nonetheless on a search to rediscover his grandmother, no long dead ...Show more
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Category: No Category | Series: Penguin Modern Classics Ser.
Atlas Shrugged is the "second most influential book for Americans today" after the Bible, according to a joint survey of five thousand people conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club in 1991. In a scrap heap within an abandoned factory, the greatest invention in history lies d ...Show more
Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade by Patrick Dennis
Category: No Category | Series: Penguin Modern Classics Ser.
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 ...Show more
Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata
Category: No Category | Series: Penguin Modern Classics Ser.
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 n ...Show more
Big Sur by Jack Kerouac
Category: No Category | Series: Penguin Modern Classics
In 1960 Jack Kerouac was near breaking point. Driven mad by constant press attention in the wake of the publication of On the Road, he needed to 'get away to solitude again or die', so he withdrew to a cabin in Big Sur on the Californian coast. The resulting novel, in which his autobiographical hero Jac ...Show more
Blue of Noon by BATAILLE GEORGES
Category: Classic Fiction | Series: Penguin Modern Classics Ser.
Set against the backdrop of Europe's slide into Fascism, Blue of Noon is a blackly compelling account of depravity and violence. As its narrator lurches despairingly from city to city in a surreal sexual and mental nightmare of squalor, sadism and drunken encounters, his internal collapse mirrors the fi ...Show more
Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
Category: No Category | Series: Penguin Modern Classics
Holly Golightly is generally up all night drinking cocktails and breaking hearts. She hasn't got a past. She doesn't want to belong to anything or anyone, not even to her one-eyed rag-bag pirate of a cat. One day Holly might find somewhere she belongs. Also includes: House of Flowers, A Diamond Guitar, ...Show more