Penguin Little Black Classics

'But I, while vineyards ring with the cicadas' scream,
Retrace your steps, alone, beneath the burning sun.'

Virgil's lyrical, wistful and often witty pastoral poems.

Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.

Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 BCE). Virgil's other works available in Penguin Classics are The Aeneid, The Eclogues and The Georgics.

'...a good bit of spice to give the critlings a flavour, and plenty of treacle to make the mince-meat look rich'

Radical Victorian reformer Henry Mayhew walked the streets of London interviewing ordinary flower girls, market traders, piemen and costermongers to create the first ever work of mass social observation, and the ultimate account of urban life - including an extraordinary description of the city from a hot air balloon.

Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.

Henry Mayhew (1812-1887). Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor is available in Penguin Classics.

'Is it me you love, friend? or the race that made me?'

A gothic novella about love, torment and doomed aristocracy, set in the remote mountains of Spain.

Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). Stevenson's works available in Penguin Classics are An Apology for Idlers, The Black Arrow, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, In the South Seas, Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae, Treasure Island and Selected Poems.

'Our passion was so great. Will the Old Man understand and help us once again?'

The Old Man of the Moon is Shen Fu's intimate and moving account of his marriage - from early passion to the trials of poverty and separation - and his great, enduring love for his wife in eighteenth-century China.

Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.


Shen Fu (born c. 1763). Shen Fu's work is available in Penguin Classics in Six Records of a Floating Life.

'Even in the stillness of that dead-cold weather, I had heard no sound of little battering hands upon the window-glass...'

A phantom child roams the Northumberland moors, while a host of fairytale characters gone to seed gather in the dark, dark woods in these two surprising tales of the uncanny from the great Victorian novelist.

Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.

Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865). Gaskell's works available in Penguin Classics are Cranford, Cranford and Cousin Phillis, Gothic Tales, Mary Barton, North and South, Ruth, Sylvia's Lovers, The Life of Charlotte Brontë and Wives and Daughters.

'People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed - a knife - a purse - and a dark lane...'

In this provocative and blackly funny essay, Thomas de Quincey considers murder in a purely aesthetic light and explains how practically every philosopher over the past two hundred years has been murdered - 'insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him'.

Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.

Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859). Thomas de Quincey's Confessions and an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings is available in Penguin Classics.

'All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages...'

A selection taken from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass

'At night, among the reeds on the bayou, Chicot could still hear the woman's wail, mingled now with the croaking of the frogs...'

From one of the most daring writers of fin-de-siècle America, five stories of awakening that range from Louisiana's plantations and poverty-stricken bayous to its gilded cities.

Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.

Kate Chopin (1850-1904). The Awakening and Selected Stories and At Fault are available in Penguin Classics.

In 1946, E. V. Rieu's groundbreaking translation of The Odyssey established a cultural legacy that would bring the world's most compelling and influential literature to millions of readers around the globe. For over sixty-five years, Penguin Classics have been making works that were once the sole preserve of academics accessible to everyone; this catalogue offers a complete list of all titles in print across the list - more than 1,200 books, from Aristotle and Austen, to Zola and Zamyatin.

'The Penguin Classics, though I designed them to give pleasure even more than instruction, have been hailed as the greatest educative force of the twentieth century. And far be it for me to quarrel with that encomium, for there is no one whom they have educated more than myself' E. V. Rieu

'If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature.'

Two moving stories of love, loss, desire and divorce, from one of the great chroniclers of nineteenth-century New York life.

Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.

Edith Wharton (1862-1937). Wharton's works available in Penguin Classics are Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, The Custom of the Country and The House of Mirth.

'All those excessive, useless regrets...'

'In two I'll slice the hair-seat / of Helga's kiss-gulper'

In this epic tale from the Viking Age that ranges across Scandinavia and Viking Britain, two poets compete for the love of Helga the Fair - with fatal consequences.

Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.

The Icelandic Sagas were oral in origin and written down in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Other Icelandic Sagas available in Penguin Classics include Njal's Saga, Egil's Saga, Sagas of Warrior-Poets, Gisli Sursson's Saga and the Saga of the People of Eyri, The Saga of Grettir the Strong, The Saga of the People of Laxardal and Bolli Bollason's Tale, The Vinland Sagas and Comic Sagas from Iceland.

'She decided she would teach him to speak and he was very soon able to say, 'Pretty boy!', 'Your servant, sir!' and 'Hail Mary!''

'The valley was full of snakes and serpents as big as palm trees, so huge that they could have swallowed any elephant that met them.'

'I can promise to be candid, not, however, to be impartial.'

'I will go in, out of this dust and heat, out of this dry glitter of vanity, out of these toilsome futilities. I will go and never return.'

Three disturbing, mysterious and moving stories from Wells, science-fiction pioneer.

Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.

H. G. Wells (1866-1946). Wells's works available in Penguin Classics are Ann Veronica, The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories, The First Men in the Moon, The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Kipps, Love and Mr Lewisham, A Modern Utopia, The New Machiavelli, The Shape of Things to Come, A Short History of the World, The Sleeper Awakes, The Time Machine, Tono-Bungay, The War in the Air and The War of the Worlds.