Penguin Archive

‘I had rather die in the adventure of noble achievements, than live in obscure and sluggish security’

In 1666, Margaret Cavendish had a vision: there was a crack in reality at the North Pole leading to a utopian parallel universe, where gender roles, scientific orthodoxy and political norms had been razed to the ground. She slipped through the portal and returned with the first science fiction novel in English – an explosive account of the Blazing World.

Rabindranath Tagore was one of the greatest authors to ever live. In these two short stories – ‘The Broken Nest’ and ‘Dead or Alive’ – he is at his devastating best, charting the slow, then fast, implosion of two perfect Bengali households. No-one understands each other; everything is misconstrued; all is lost.

Trotty Veck, an elderly porter, has read so many newspaper reports about crime and immorality that he believes the working classes are irredeemable. But, on New Year’s Eve, summoned to the church tower by a mysterious chiming, Trotty witnesses his own death, and is taken on a ghostly journey that will force him to reassess his conviction. One of Dickens’ ‘Christmas stories’, The Chimes is charming and surprising manifesto for empathy for our fellow man.

‘As for me I have one ambition only: to invent stories, very beautiful stories’

Gothic, expansive and truly spellbinding, Karen Blixen’s short stories offer incisive psychological portraits and imaginative visions of war, longing and tender love. Here, an orphan boy creates an elaborate fantasy of a life of grandeur, a feudal lord sets a peasant woman a deadly task, and a young woman resists against her captors, in the midst of conflict.

Few artists' letters are as self-revelatory as Vincent van Gogh's. From the humanistic inspiration behind The Potato Eaters to his long-time obsession with painting the vision that eventually became The Starry Night, the letters in this selection paint an intense personal narrative of his artistic development and creative process across the years. They reveal a man of great spiritual and emotional depths who – in his own words – did everything ‘for art and for life itself’.

Lay down all hope, you that go in by me . . .

Through the gates of Hell, past whirling hurricanes, leering devils and rivers of blood, lies the ultimate evil: Satan himself. Masterfully translated by Dorothy L. Sayers, this first instalment of The Divine Comedy tells the captivating tale of Dante and Virgil’s arduous journey through the nine circles of the underworld, and remains one of the most influential works in literary history.