Both Lazarillo de Tormesand Pablos and the swindler are determined to attain the trappings of the gentleman, but have little time for the gentlemanly ideals of religion, justice, honour and nobility.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.

    When a man is arrested at a museum for attempting to steal the bullet-ridden suit of a murdered Colombian politician, few notice. But soon this thwarted theft takes on greater meaning as it becomes a thread in a widening web of popular fixations with conspiracy theories, assassinations, and historical secrets; and it haunts those who feel that only they know the real truth behind these killings.This novel explores the darkest moments of a country's past and brings to life the ways in which past violence shapes our present lives. A compulsive read, beautiful and profound, eerily relevant to our times and deeply personal, The Shape of the Ruins is a tour-de-force story by a master at uncovering the incisive wounds of our memories.

    'No Spanish voice was heard during the fifty years of his active intellectual life which could compare with his in the strength of his passion nor in the profound seriousness with which he challenged every complacency...The central idea in all his fiction is the struggle to create faith from doubt and ethics from inner strife.'

    Afterwards he's obsessed with the dream, and brings three of the writers he published on a trip to the same cemetery where Paddy Dignam was buried in James Joyce’s Ulysses, where they hold a funeral for "The Gutenberg Age." And then he notices that he’s being shadowed by a mysterious man who looks exactly like Samuel Beckett...In this witty and poignant novel, perhaps his finest yet, Enrique Vila-Matas traces a journey that connects the worlds of Joyce and Beckett and all they symbolize: great literature and evidence of the difficulties faced by literary authors, publishers, and good readers, their struggle to survive in a society where literature is losing influence.

    late 7th and early 6th centuries B.C.E.), whose work is said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the great library at Alexandria some 500 years after her death. The surviving texts consist of a lamentably small and fragmented body of lyric poetry--among them, poems of invocation, desire, spite, celebration, resignation, and remembrance--that nevertheless enables us to hear the living voice of the poet Plato called the tenth Muse.Stanley Lombardo's translations give us a virtuoso embodiment of Sappho's voice, whose telltale charm, authority, immediacy, directness, intensity, and sudden changes of tone are among the hallmarks of his masterly translation.Pamela Gordon introduces us to the world of Sappho, discusses questions surrounding the transmission of her manuscripts, offers advice on reading these texts, and concludes with an enlightening discussion of same-sex desire in Sappho.

    (7MB Version 1)* Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Chaucer's life and works* Concise introductions to the poems and other texts* Images of how the books were first illustrated, giving your eReader a taste of the medieval texts* Excellent formatting of the poetry* THE CANTERBURY TALES features the original Ellesmere Manuscript illustrations of the pilgrims* Offers two versions of the major texts THE CANTERBURY TALES and TROILUS AND CRISEDYE, each with individual contents tables and links: the Oxford University 1894 scholarly text, with original spellings and line numbers (ideal for students) AND a modernised and annotated text version to help the general reader – now you can truly enjoy Chaucer’s language!* Special criticism section, with essays by writers such as G. K. Chesterton, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce evaluating Chaucer’s contribution to literature* Features four biographies – immerse yourself in Chaucer's medieval world!* Scholarly ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genresCONTENTS:The PoetryTHE ROMAUNT OF THE ROSETHE BOOK OF THE DUCHESSTHE HOUSE OF FAMEANELIDA AND ARCITEPARLEMENT OF FOULESTROILUS AND CRISEYDE (ORIGINAL TEXT)TROILUS AND CRISEYDE (MODERNISED AND ANNOTATED)THE LEGEND OF GOOD WOMENTHE CANTERBURY TALES (ORIGINAL TEXT)THE CANTERBURY TALES (MODERNISED AND ANNOTATED)MINOR POEMSThe Non-FictionBOECETREATISE ON THE ASTROLABEThe CriticismCHAUCER AND HIS TIMES by Grace Eleanor HadowON MR. GEOFFREY CHAUCER by G. K. ChestertonADVENTURES IN CRITICISM by Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-CouchLECTURES ON CHAUCER AND SPENSER by William HazlittExtract from ‘MY LITERARY PASSIONS’ by William Dean HowellsTHE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION by Andrew LangTHE PASTONS AND CHAUCER by Virginia WoolfExtract from ‘INTRODUCTION TO THE PAINTINGS’ by D. H. LawrenceExtract from ‘REALISM AND IDEALISM IN ENGLISH LITERATURE’ by James JoyceThe BiographiesCHAUCER AND HIS ENGLAND by G. G. CoultonCHAUCER by Sir Adolphus William WardCHAUCER’S OFFICIAL LIFE by James Root HulbertBRIEF LIFE OF GEOFFREY CHAUCER by D. Laing PurvesPlease visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting titles

    The father of Russian literature, Pushkin is beloved not only for his poetry but also for his brilliant stories, which range from dramatic tales of love, obsession, and betrayal to dark fables and sparkling comic masterpieces, from satirical epistolary tales and romantic adventures in the manner of Sir Walter Scott to imaginative historical fiction and the haunting dreamworld of "The Queen of Spades." The five short stories of The Late Tales of Ivan Petrovich Belkin are lightly humorous and yet reveal astonishing human depths, and his short novel, The Captain's Daughter, has been called the most perfect book in Russian literature.From the Hardcover edition.

    Of the three, Wang was the consummate master of the short imagistic landscape poem that came to typify classical Chinese poetry. He developed a nature poetry of resounding tranquility wherein deep understanding goes far beyond the words on the page—a poetics that can be traced to his assiduous practice of Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism. But in spite of this philosophical depth, Wang is not a difficult poet. Indeed, he may be the most immediately appealing of China's great poets, and in Hinton's masterful translations he sounds utterly contemporary. Many of his best poems are incredibly concise, composed of only twenty words, and they often turn on the tiniest details: a bird's cry, a splinter of light on moss, an egret's wingbeat. Such imagistic clarity is not surprising since Wang was also one of China's greatest landscape painters. This is a breathtaking poetry, one that in true Zen fashion renders the ten thousand things of this world in such a way that they empty the self even as they shimmer with the clarity of their own self-sufficient identity.

    This crucial collection combines The New Tenant with Amédée and Victims of Duty—the plays Richard Gilman has called, along with The Killer, Ionesco’s “greatest plays, works of the same solidity, fulness, and permanence as [those of] his predecessors in the dramatic revolution that began with Ibsen and is still going on.”In Amédée, the title character and his wife have a problem—not so much the corpse in their bedroom as the fact that it’s been there for fifteen years and is now growing, slowly but surely crowding them out of their apartment.In The New Tenant a similar crowding is caused by an excess of furniture—as Harold Hobson said in the London Times, “there is not dramatist . . . who can make furniture speak as eloquently as Ionesco, and here he makes it the perfect, the terrifying symbol of the deranged mind.”In Victims of Duty, Ionesco parodies the conformity of modern life by plunging his characters into an obscure search for “Mallot with a t.” In these as in all his plays, Ionesco poses and solves his tragicomic dilemmas with the brilliant blend of gravity and hilarity that is the hallmark of the absurdist theater.

    The novel follows Bolívar as he takes his final journey in 1830 down the Magdalena River toward the sea, revisiting the scenes of his former glory and lamenting his lost dream of an alliance of American nations. Forced from power, dogged by assassins, and prematurely aged and wasted by a fatal illness, the General is still a remarkably vital and mercurial man. He seems to remain alive by the sheer force of will that led him to so many victories in the battlefields and love affairs of his past. As he wanders in the labyrinth of his failing powers-and still-powerful memories-he defies his impending death until the last.The General in His Labyrinth is an unforgettable portrait of a visionary from one of the greatest writers of our time.

    Widely regarded as the greatest twentieth century poet who wrote in Spanish, Machado—like his contemporary Rilke—is intensely introspective and meditative. In this collection, the unparalleled translator Willis Barnstone, returns to the poet with whom he first started his distinguished career, offering a new bilingual edition which provides a sweeping assessment of Machado’s work. In addition, Border of a Dream includes a reminiscence by Nobel Laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez and a foreword by John Dos Passos. from "Proverbs and Songs" Absolute faith. We neither are nor will be. Our whole life is borrowedWe brought nothing. With nothing we leave.*You say nothing is created?Don’t worry. With clayof the earth make a cupso your brother can drink. Born near Seville, Spain, Antonio Machado turned to a career in writing and translating in order to help support his family after the death of his father in 1893. His growing reputation as a poet led to teaching posts in various cities in Spain and, eventually, he returned to finish his degree from the University of Madrid in 1918. He remained in Madrid after the outbreak of civil war, committed to the Republican cause, but the violence finally forced him to flee. He died an exile in France. Willis Barnstone is one of America’s foremost translator-poets, bringing into English an extraordinary range of work, from Mao Tse-tung to the New Testament.

    These texts are characterized by a startling and macabre novelty, with elements of the grotesque, fantastic and child-like touching the imagination of the everyday. They express the cultural landscape of Stalinism -- years of show trials, mass atrocities and stifled political life. Their painful, unsettling eloquence testify to the humane and the comic in this absurdist writer's work. The translator Neil Cornwall gives a biographical introduction to his subject, enlarged upon by the poet Hugh Maxton in a contextual assessment of the writing of Flann O'Brien, Le Fanu and Doyle, and of their shared concerns with detective fiction, terror and death. Daniil Kharms 91905-42) died under Stalin. Along with fellow poets and prose-writers of the era -- Khlebnikov, Biely, Mandelstam, Zabolotsky and Pasternak -- he is one of the emerging experimentalists of Russian modernism.

    This is to be the first verse translation of Goethe's poetry in penguin classics and replaces Luke's own 1964 prose translation which has been in print continously since then (life sales 43,000).

    . . A man reading a mystery finds out too late that he is the murderer's victim . . . In the fifteen stories collected here—including "Blow-Up," which was the basis for Michelangelo Antonioni's film of the same name—Julio Cortazar explores the boundary where the everyday meets the mysterious, perhaps even the terrible.Axolotl House taken over Distances Idol of the Cyclades Letter to a young lady in Paris Yellow flower Continuity of parks Night face up Bestiary Gates of heaven Blow-up End of the game At your service Pursuer Secret weapons.

    Time shifts from one consciousness to another in a hypnotic flow of dreams, desires, and memories, a world of ghosts dominated by the figure of Pedro Páramo - lover, overlord, murderer.Rulfo's extraordinary mix of sensory images, violent passions, and unfathomable mysteries has been a profound influence on a whole generation of Latin American writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. To read Pedro Páramo today is as overwhelming an experience as when it was first published in Mexico back in 1955.