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. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). Dante's works available in Penguin Classics are Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, The Divine Comedy and Vita Nuova.

    As our story opens, the Bennet sisters are enjoying a peaceful life in the English countryside. They idle away the days reading, gardening, and daydreaming about future husbands - until a funeral at the local parish goes strangely and horribly awry.Suddenly corpses are springing from the soft earth - and only one family can stop them. As the bodies pile up, we watch Elizabeth Bennet evolve from a naive young teenager into a savage slayer of the undead. Along the way, two men vie for her affections: Master Hawksworth is the powerful warrior who trains her to kill, while thoughtful Dr. Keckilpenny seeks to conquer the walking dead using science instead of strength. Will either man win the prize of Elizabeth's heart? Or will their hearts be feasted upon by hordes of marauding zombies? Complete with romance, action, comedy, and an army of shambling corpses, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls will have Jane Austen rolling in her grave - and just might inspire her to crawl out of it!(Description from back cover of trade paperback edition)

    This new collection brings together the famous poems that made his name as a defining figure of the counterculture. They include the apocalyptic 'Howl', which became the subject of an obscenity trial when it was first published in 1956; the moving lament for his dead mother, 'Kaddish'; the searing indictment of his homeland, 'America'; and the confessional 'Mescaline'. Dark, ecstatic and rhapsodic, they show why Ginsberg was one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.

    That the marriage should fail and poor Lilia die tragically are only to be expected. But that Lilia should have had a baby - and that the baby should be raised as an Italian! - are matters requiring immediate correction by Philip Herriton, his dour sister Harriet, and their well-meaning friend Miss Abbott.

    A scholar, wit, lawyer and statesman, he wrote widely on politics, philosophy and science - declaring early in his career that 'I have taken all knowledge as my province'. In this, his most famous work, he considers a diverse range of subjects, such as death and marriage, ambition and atheism, in prose that is vibrant and rich in Renaissance learning. Bacon believed that rhetoric - the force of eloquence and persuasion - could lead the mind to the pure light of reason, and his own rhetorical genius is nowhere better expressed than in these vivid essays.

    Atop an Underwood brings together more than sixty previously unpublished works that Kerouac wrote before he was twenty-two, ranging from stories and poems to plays and parts of novels, including an excerpt from his 1943 merchant marine novel, The Sea Is My Brother. These writings reveal what Kerouac was thinking, doing, and dreaming during his formative years, and reflect his primary literary influences. Readers will also find in these works the source of Kerouac's spontaneous prose style. Uncovering a fascinating missing link in Kerouac's development as a writer, Atop an Underwood is essential reading for Kerouac fans, scholars, and critics.

    Alexander's relationship with Hilda erodes his sense of honor and eventually proves disastrous when a bridge he is constructing begins to collapse. Alexander's Bridge is an instructive, thought-provoking study of a man's growing awareness of his loss of integrity. Newly designed and typeset in a modern 6-by-9-inch format by Waking Lion Press.

    It is a revision of Thomas Killigrew's play "Thomaso", or "The Wanderer" (1664), and features multiple plot lines, dealing with the amorous adventures of a group of Englishmen and women in Naples at Carnival time. According to Restoration poet John Dryden, it "lacks the manly vitality of Killigrew's play, but shows greater refinement of expression." The play stood for three centuries as "Behn's most popular and most respected play."

    Its author, Hans Christian Andersen, made the literary fairy tale so much his own that even today no writer has surpassed him.This collection, with an introduction and fresh new renderings of the tales by Neil Philip, includes not just "The Little Mermaid" but also such favorites as "The Tinderbox," "The Emperor's New Clothes," "The Steadfast Tin Soldier," and "The Little Match Girl."Philip also includes some lesser known tales that reflect different facets of Andersen's genius, such as the tall tale "The Flying Trunk," with its witty story-within-a-story, the charming fantasy of "Little Ida's Flowers," the comic fable "The Collar," and a story about the magic of everyday reality, "The Gardener and His Master."A special feature of the book is the inclusion of several fairy tales of spiritual search and redemption, including "The Bell," "The Toad," and, of course, "The Little Mermaid."The book is illustrated throughout by Isabelle Brent's magical watercolors, lavishly embellished with gold leaf, making this handsome volume a book the whole family will treasure.

    S. Byatt knows that fairy tales are for grownups. And in this ravishing collection she breathes new life into the form.Little Black Book of Stories offers shivers along with magical thrills. Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two middle-aged women, childhood friends reunited by chance, venture into a dark forest where once, many years before, they saw–or thought they saw–something unspeakable. Another woman, recently bereaved, finds herself slowly but surely turning into stone. A coolly rational ob-gyn has his world pushed off-axis by a waiflike art student with her own ideas about the uses of the body. Spellbinding, witty, lovely, terrifying, the Little Black Book of Stories is Byatt at the height of her craft.

    The collection contains thirty stories that take us from the islands of the Pacific Ocean to England, France and Spain. They all reveal Maugham's acute and often sardonic observation of human foibles and his particular genius for exposing the bitter reality of human relationships.Somerset Maugham learnt his craft from Maupassant, and these stories display the remarkable talent that made him an unsurpassed storyteller.

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    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. Next to nothing is known about Homer's life. His works available in Penguin Classics are The Homeric Hymns, The Iliad and The Odyssey.

    Like Emily Dickinson, she lived in self-imposed isolation, writing of God and lost love with a sensuality and passion that seemed to emanate from the soul.This edition of 53 works combines a number of her best-known sonnets, ballads, and shorter lyrics with her long masterpiece, the narrative fable Goblin Market. A haunting fairy tale in verse, Goblin Market was once labeled a children's poem, yet its intricate symbolism and themes of temptation, sin, and redemption mark it for an adult audience. Among other works included in this choice collection are "The Convent Threshold," "Up-hill," "Cousin Kate," "Winter: My Secret," "Maude Clare," "No, Thank You, John," and "After Death."

    Now, back home in the Yorkshire moors, duty-bound to a blind father and an alcoholic brother, an ambitious Charlotte refuses to sink into hopelessness. With her sisters, Emily and Anne, Charlotte conceives a plan to earn money and pursue a dream: The Brontës will publish. In childhood the Brontë children created fantastical imaginary worlds; now the sisters craft novels quite unlike anything written before. Transforming her loneliness and personal sorrow into a triumph of literary art, Charlotte pens her 1847 masterpiece, Jane Eyre.Charlotte’s novel becomes an overwhelming literary success, catapulting the shy and awkward young woman into the spotlight of London’s fashionable literary scene—and into the arms of her new publisher, George Smith, an irresistibly handsome young man whose interest in his fiercely intelligent and spirited new author seems to go beyond professional duty. But just as life begins to hold new promise, unspeakable tragedy descends on the Brontë household, throwing London and George into the background and leaving Charlotte to fear that the only romance she will ever find is at the tip of her pen. But another man waits in the Brontës’ Haworth parsonage—the quiet but determined curate Arthur Nicholls. After secretly pining for Charlotte since he first came to work for her father, Arthur suddenly reveals his heart to her.Romancing Miss Brontë is a fascinating portrayal of an extraordinary woman whose life and work articulated our deepest human longing: to love and be loved in return.