Classics

A controversial tale of friendship and tragedy during the Great Depression. They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging...

Over seventy-five years since its first publication, Steinbeck’s tale of commitment, loneliness, hope, and loss remains one of America’s most widely read and taught novels. An unlikely pair, George and Lennie, two migrant workers in California during the Great Depression, grasp for their American...

Oliver is an orphan living on the dangerous London streets with no one but himself to rely on. Fleeing from poverty and hardship, he falls in with a criminal street gang who will not let him go, however hard he tries to escape. One...

Named after Homer, Omeros is Derek Walcott's sweeping epic of the Caribbean, weaving together history, myth, and personal memory into one of the defining poems of the twentieth century. Set across St. Lucia, Europe, North America, and the Atlantic world, the poem reimagines classical epic...

In On Love, we see Charles Bukowski reckoning with the complications of love and desire.Alternating between the tough and the tender, the romantic and the gritty, Bukowski exposes the myriad faces of love in the poems collected here - its selfishness and its narcissism,...

On the eve of the Crimean War, the young, headstrong Yelena, the daughter of aristocratic Russian parents, falls in love with a revolutionary from Bulgaria named Insarov. Facing the wrath and disapproval of her family, Yelena abandons her home to follow Insarov to Bulgaria....

When Darwin set sail at the end of 1831, it was only with a vague notion that all life forms, both present and extinct, were more strongly related than the Christian version of the world's creation purported them to be. During his five-year voyage...

Jack Kerouac’s classic American novel of freedom and the search for originality that defined a generation. Inspired by Jack Kerouac’s adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true...

A pithy and brilliant introduction to Susan Sontag’s writing on women, gathering early essays on aging, equality, beauty, sexuality, and fascism Susan Sontag was one of the most formidable, original, and influential thinkers of the last century.  On Women presents seven essays and exchanges,...

Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the seminal novel of the 1960s that has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants,...

Virginia Woolf's fantastical novel about an Elizabethan nobleman who lives for three centuries and transitions into a woman, with a new introduction by Carmen Maria Machado. The long-lived protagonist of Orlando begins as a passionate teenage aristocrat, whose days are spent in rowdy revelry...

In Othello, Shakespeare creates a powerful drama of a marriage that begins with fascination (between the exotic Moor Othello and the Venetian lady Desdemona), with elopement, and with intense mutual devotion and that ends precipitately with jealous rage and violent deaths. He sets this...

A darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue from one of the leading writers of the twentieth century, the acclaimed author of Lolita. The American poet John Shade is dead. His last poem, 'Pale Fire', is put into a...

Parable, 1. As climate catastrophe and economic collapse plunge the early 2020s into chaos, California becomes a landscape of scarcity and violence. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives in a walled community with her preacher father, family and neighbors, clinging to a fragile sense of order...

An eerie, alienating, yet comic and profoundly sympathetic short story collection about Americans in America by one of Indonesia’s most prominent writers, now in an English translation for its fortieth anniversary, with a foreword by Intan Paramaditha. In these seven stories of People from...

In 1738 Paris, a baby named Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born beneath a fishmonger’s stall and abandoned. Raised as an unwanted orphan, he quickly seems strange—most disturbingly, he has no scent of his own. Yet Grenouille possesses an extraordinary gift: a supernatural sense of smell....

Persuasion narrates the emotional journey of its protagonist, Anne Elliot, who chances upon Captain Wentworth, a suitor she was persuaded to reject seven years earlier, and whose reappearance causes her to reflect on her past decisions and contemplate her marital future. Vividly depicting the...

New York Review Children's Collection: Illustrated. Though Pinocchio is among the most famous books in the world, it remains curiously misunderstood—its image shaped in many minds by the Walt Disney film, which bears little resemblance to Carlo Collodi’s brilliant original. The tale, of course,...

Ruthless, elegant, and razor-sharp, Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays lays bare the desolation beneath America’s glittering surface in the late 1960s. Through her cool, unflinching prose, Didion captures the collapse of meaning in a world addicted to illusion—Hollywood’s hollow glamour, Las Vegas’s...

The most widely staged dramatist after Shakespeare, Chekhov left a deep mark both on the development of Russian literature and world theatre, with plays that were remarkable not just for their dialogue but their atmosphere and the tensions expressed between the lines. Collected in...

Set on an American college campus in the 1950s, Pnin follows Professor Timofey Pnin, a kind-hearted but perpetually bewildered Russian émigré struggling to find his place in an unfamiliar world. As he navigates language barriers, cultural misunderstandings, and the precarious realities of academic life,...

From the transcendent beauty of nature observed on the Yorkshire moors to fierce and forceful confrontations of mortality, Emily Brontë's poems are powerful and passionate works that eloquently elaborate upon her sister Charlotte's description of her as ""a solitude-loving raven, no gentle dove”.

This definitive collection gives us the full scope of a brilliant American poet. Poems brings together the complete published poetry of one of the most celebrated voices in American literature. Renowned for her precision, clarity, and quiet emotional power, Bishop's work combines keen observation...

Alasdair Gray’s wildly inventive reimagining of Frankenstein, set in Victorian Scotland. Blending dark humor, political satire and surreal storytelling, this modern classic is both a biting social commentary and a deeply human story of reinvention. The novel centers on Bella Baxter, a woman brought...

Pride and Prejudice is one of the most cherished love stories in English literature, delighting generations of readers with its high comedy, social observation and compelling romance, and spawning an entire industry of spin-off books, film adaptations and works of literary criticism. The pride...

Though her sisters are keen on finding men to marry, Elizabeth Bennet would rather wait for someone she loves - certainly not someone like Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, whom she finds to be smug and judgmental, in contrast to the charming George Wickham. But soon...

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” So begins Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s witty comedy of manners—one of the most popular novels of all time—that features splendidly...

An iconic novel dressed in a fierce design by acclaimed fashion illustrator Ruben Toledo. Here Elizabeth Bennet’s rejection of Mr. Darcy, Hester Prynne’s fateful letter “A”, and Catherine Earnshaw’s wanderings on the Yorkshire moors are transformed into witty and surreal landscapes to appeal to the...

Found in the Codex Atlanticus of Leonardo da Vinci's writings and drawings, 'The Prophecies' are a collection of enigmatic divinatory pronouncements, some punning and playful, others dire and ominous. While the author's intentions behind these utterances are unclear, they clearly attest to the artist's...

Describing Dante's second stage in his arduous journey to redemption, Purgatory features a host of unforgettable scenes and characters, and arguably some of the best poetry to be found in the Divine Comedy. The gloom, torments and evils of Hell have been left behind,...

When professor of phonetics Henry Higgins wagers with Colonel Pickering that he could teach even a gutter-mouthed flower seller how to speak like a duchess, little does he expect that his social experiment will be riddled with difficulties, and that behind her cockney parlance...

Rabbit, Run is the book thatestablished John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old,...

While working as a lady's companion in Monte Carlo, a young woman is swept into a whirlwind romance with the wealthy widower Maxim de Winter. But after arriving at Manderley, his grand estate on the Cornish coast, she discovers that the memory of his...

In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare creates a violent world, in which two young people fall in love. It is not simply that their families disapprove; the Montagues and the Capulets are engaged in a blood feud. In this death-filled setting, the movement from love...

Dmitry Rudin, a high-minded gentleman of reduced means, arrives at the estate of Darya Mikhailovna, where his intelligence, eloquence and conviction immediately make a powerful impression. As he stys on longer than intended, Rudin exerts a strong influence on the younger generation, and Darya's...

The Sea of Fertility #2. Yukio Mishima’s Runaway Horses is the second novel in his masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility . Again we encounter Shigekuni Honda, who narrates this epic tale of what he believes are the successive reincarnations of his childhood friend...

A haunting exploration of evil and moral corruption, Sanctuary draws on influences ranging from T. S. Eliot and Freud to myth, folklore, and the grit of hardboiled crime fiction. Set in the American South, the novel follows the abduction of Temple Drake, a Mississippi...

Schoolgirl marks the beginning of Dazai’s literary career and quickly gained attention for its sharp irony and inventive language. Today, it offers a vivid glimpse into the social structures of its time, while exploring the enduring tension between the individual and society—a theme that...

Between 1892 and 1895, Oscar Wilde's drawing-room comedies Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest made his name as a playwright who fearlessly mocked the hypocrisy and snobbery of Victorian society and took gleeful...

Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor's warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social...

Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby, she ignores her sister Elinor's warning that her impulsive behavior leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social...

In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope....

Universally acclaimed as the master of the short-story form, Anton Chekhov began his literary career as the author of brief tales and vignettes of Russian life when he was still a young medical student. Later rejected by the writer in the same self-effacing way...

In Smoke, Ivan Turgenev follows Grigori Litvinov, a young Russian returning from agricultural studies in Germany to marry his fiancée and restore his family’s neglected estate. But a chance encounter with his former love, the aristocratic Irina, rekindles a powerful passion and upends his...

Nobel Prize recipient Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country is widely considered to be the writer's masterpiece, a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan. At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante...

The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner transfigures the coming-of-age story with this brilliantly imagined novel. Includes a new foreword by the author. Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest...

As the sensitive and delicate Gertrude begins to shrink from her drunken and violent husband, their marriage becomes a battleground. Gertrude turns increasingly towards her two eldest sons, William and Paul, and determines that they will not grow up to be coal miners living...

A brilliant, genre-defying novel that captures the disorienting speed and fragmentation of modern life. First published in 1976 and hailed as a cult classic, the book follows Jen Fain, a sharp, perceptive journalist living in New York City, as she navigates the shifting landscapes...

The Sea of Fertility #1. It is 1912 in Tokyo, and the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders—rich provincial families unburdened by tradition, whose money and vitality make them formidable contenders for social and political...

New York Review Books Classics. William Stoner is born at the close of the nineteenth century to a destitute farming family in rural Missouri. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he unexpectedly discovers a passion for English literature and chooses the life...