Then his adoring twin sister, Kate, gets him taken on as the bodyguard of Krogh, her lover and boss, a megalomaniac Swedish financier. All goes well until Krogh gives orders that offend Anthony's innate decency. Outraged and blind to risk, he leaks information to Minty, a shabby journalist and fellow victim of life, a decision that will lead to disastrous consequences.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    Mary and her mother live in a one-room tenement flat that is home to the rituals of their bitter love. By day her mother cleans the houses of the Dublin rich, while Mary makes observations as she walks through the city. The imaginitive richness of her insight makes the city come alive as a place that is both strange and wonderful, remote yet friendly. It is this sense of discovery and the bittersweet richness it brings with it that makes this such an unusual but compelling Dublin novel."--Dr. Patricia McManus, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

    Traditional resources—home, parents, lovers, friends, even willpower—are not dependable. And so the characters in these short, compelling stories have learned to depend on small triumphs of wit, irony, and spirit.A widow, surrounded by a small menagerie, comes to terms with her veterinarian husband's death; a young woman entertains her dying friend with trivia and reaffirms her own life; in the aftermath of an abortion, a woman compulsively knits a complete wardrobe for a friend's baby. Buffeted by rude shocks, thwarted by misconnections, the characters recognize that anything can finally become a reason to live.

    Besides the tales of several battles, the novel details the 1552 Siege of Eger, during which Captain István Dobó's 2,000 Hungarian men, women and children inside the county's castle, defeated a Turkish force of 80,000 men. The Hungarian title, Egri csillagok> (literally, "Stars of Eger"), is required reading in Hungarian schools.

    Caligari, for which he received considerable critical acclaim as an innovator of the short story form. His style (fictional and popular figures in absurd situations, e.g., the Batman-inspired "The Joker's Greatest Triumph"), spawned a number of imitators and would help to define the next several decades of short fiction.

    Galdós's Madrid, recast from his youthful wanderings through the city's slums and cafés, includes the egg sellers and faded bullfighters surrounding Fortunata as well as the quieter, sequestered milieu of Jacinta's upbringing. Through Juanito, the lover of both women, the writer reveals Spain as a variegated fabric of delicate traditions and established vices, of shaky politics and rich intrigue. In this vast and colorful world, resonant of Dickens's London and Balzac's France, Galdós presents his characters with a depth, ambiguity, and humor born of the multiplicity of his scene.Galdós's novels enjoyed, for a time, a wide and attentive readership in Spain. As his reputation grew, however, hostility toward his achievements, envy of his success, and political squabbling hampered his progress, stalling his election to the Royal Academy and, in 1912, thoroughly derailing his nomination as Spain's candidate for the Nobel Prize.Though the political controversies that surrounded Galdós's works have long been calmed, this translation by Agnes Moncy Gullón brings alive the tempestuous era in which he lived and wrote, allowing English readers to hear the percussive yet often melodic tones of nineteenth-century Madrid in the correct and casual speech of Jacinta, in the pretty but empty words of Juanito, and in the painfully proper, sometimes vulgar language of Fortunata.

    The daily routine of a man in charge of children at a state welfare organization and the demands that are made upon him are depicted in this novel set in present day Hungary.

    Sixteen years later he moves back into the world of Europeans, among hopeful yet terrified settlers who are staking out their small patch of home in an alien place. To them, Gemmy stands as a different kind of challenge: he is a force that at once fascinates and repels. His own identity in this new world is as unsettling to him as the knowledge he brings to others of the savage, the aboriginal."Breathtaking...To read this remarkable book is to remember Babylon well, whether you think you've been there or not."--The New York Times Book Review

    Like Strindberg at that age, he is a prophet without honor, his achievements having won him distinction only in foreign countries. On the island he has to combat pig-headedness and ignorance, and he is settling down with much self-pity to a long grind, when that creature whom he classifies as only a short remove from the child comes to cause further disturbance - a woman. For a time the uninitiated will suspect that a pretty love story is in the make, but others will observe the scientific analysis which Borg applies to even his happiest moments.

    Subtitled a "psychological novel" by its author, who also called it a biography, the work is actually a highly authentic autobiography. The work is singular for two reasons, the first being its perspective. Moritz was a neglected child of a loveless marriage living in a family near the bottom of the social ladder. It is small wonder that Moritz developed into the eternal outsider. With this background, his description of the struggles he endured in acquiring an education give us an unusually rich picture of that day. This autobiography is also quite singular in that it is not the usual summation by some elderly person of his road to success; rather, it is an examination by a thirty-year-old of how the various forces playing on him in his first twenty years joined to misdirect him into hopes for a theatrical career. With a gift for self-examination doubtless acquired from his Pietistic background, he is able to give a brilliant picture of how he acquired and struggled with his own neuroses, and it is this struggle that gives his book its timeless character.

    Hatterr is one of the most perfectly eccentric and strangely absorbing works modern English has produced. H. Hatterr is the son of a European merchant officer and a lady from Penang who has been raised and educated in missionary schools in Calcutta. His story is of his search for enlightenment as, in the course of visiting seven Oriental cities, he consults with seven sages, each of whom specializes in a different aspect of “Living.” Each teacher delivers himself of a great “Generality,” each great Generality launches a new great “Adventure,” from each of which Hatter escapes not so much greatly edified as by the skin of his teeth. The book is a comic extravaganza, but as Anthony Burgess writes in his introduction, “it is the language that makes the book. . . . It is not pure English; it is like Shakespeare, Joyce, and Kipling, gloriously impure.”

    In this iridescent gem of a novel, Louis de Bernieres returns to the territory he mapped so well in The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts, a South American country of resplendent eccentricity, gargantuan corruption, and terrifying violence, where the ordinary machinery of government has rusted and the only thing that works is magic.

    Here he reveals his delight in re-creating (or making up) colorful stories from the Orient, the Islamic world, and the Wild West, as well as his horrified fascination with knife fights, political and personal betrayal, and bloodthirsty revenge. Sparkling with the sheer exuberant pleasure of story-telling, this wonderful collection marked the emergence of an utterly distinctive literary voice.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    The book's authentic, extraordinarily detailed descriptions of the Black Mass have never been surpassed.

    Disillusioned and loveless, a chain-smoking art history professor who spends her spare time singing in nightclubs and tending to her young daughter finds herself pursued by an erratic, would-be librettist.