Timeless Classics
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These classics have withstood the test of time, becoming milestones in every reader's journey. Maybe you read them back in school or maybe you're reading them for the 5th time, but the stories and messages remain relevant today.
Here is a list of classics that sparked movements, spawned genres, and allowed us to understand culture, thinking, and the very existence of being.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Penguin Orange Collection)
Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a seminal novel of the 1960s. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants—a counterculture classic that inspired the 1975 film adaptation, widely considered one of the greatest movies ever made.
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The Crucible (Penguin Orange Collection)
One of the true masterpieces of twentieth-century American theater, The Crucible brilliantly explores the threshold between individual guilt and mass hysteria, personal spite and collective evil. It is a play that is not only relentlessly suspenseful and vastly moving, but that compels readers to fathom their hearts and consciences in ways that only the greatest theatre can.
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We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Shirley Jackson's beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family's dark secret. Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate. This edition features a new introduction by Jonathan Lethem.
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The first of J. D. Salinger's four books to be published, The Catcher in the Rye is one of the most widely read and beloved of all contemporary American novels.
'The handbook of the adolescent heart' — The New Yorker
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A sharp and poignant snapshot of the crises of youth - from the acclaimed author of The Catcher in the Rye. First published in the New Yorker as two sequential stories, 'Franny' and 'Zooey' offer a dual portrait of the two youngest members of J. D. Salinger's fictional Glass family.
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The Remains of the Day (Faber Modern Classics)
This is a haunting evocation of lost causes and lost love, and an elegy for England at a time of acute change. Stevens, the long-serving butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside, but also into his own past. Reflecting on his years of service, he must re-examine his life in the face of changing Britain, and question whether his dignity and properness have come at a greater cost to himself.
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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Penguin Clothbound Classics)
This collection of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes includes many of the famous cases—and great strokes of brilliance—that made the legendary detective one of fiction’s most popular creations. With his devoted amanuensis Dr Watson, Holmes emerges from his smoke-filled room in Baker Street to grapple with the forces of treachery, intrigue and evil.
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In this novel—a story of irreconcilable loves and infidelities—Milan Kundera addresses himself to the nature of twentieth-century 'Being'. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. We feel, says the novelist, 'the unbearable lightness of being'—not only as the consequence of our private acts but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.
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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 together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own.
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Little Women (The Penguin English Library Edition)
The charming story of the March sisters, Little Women has been adored by generations. Readers have rooted for Laurie in his pursuit of Jo's hand, cried over little Beth's death, and dreamed of travelling through Europe with old Aunt March and Amy. Future writers have found inspiration in Jo's devotion to her writing. In this simple, enthralling tale, both parts of which are included here, Louisa May Alcott has created four of American literature's most beloved women.
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Among the seminal texts of the 20th century, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a rare work that grows more haunting as its futuristic purgatory becomes more real. Published in 1949, the book offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmarish vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff's attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of modern life—the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the language—and his ability to construct such a thorough version of hell.
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Three generations of Palestinian-American women living in Brooklyn are torn between individual desire and the strict mores of Arab culture in this heart-wrenching story of love, intrigue and courage. Set in an America at once foreign to many and staggeringly close at hand, A Woman Is No Man is an intimate glimpse into a controlling and closed cultural world, and a universal tale about family and the ways silence and shame can destroy those we have sworn to protect.
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Bell Jar (50th Anniversary Edition)
The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath's only novel. Renowned for its intensity and outstandingly vivid prose, it broke existing boundaries between fiction and reality and helped to make Plath an enduring feminist icon. It was published under a pseudonym a few weeks before the author's suicide.
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Ariel, first published in 1965, contains many of Sylvia Plath's best-known poems, written in an extraordinary burst of creativity just before her death in 1963. Including poems such as Lady Lazarus, Edge, Daddy and Paralytic, it was the first of four collections to be published by Faber & Faber. Ariel is the volume on which Sylvia Plath's reputation as one of the most original, daring and gifted poets of the twentieth century rests.
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The Little Prince (Penguin Clothbound Classics)
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in 1943. Nearly eighty years later, this fable of love and loneliness has lost none of its power. The narrator is a downed pilot in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the apparition of a little prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. And so begins their dialogue, which stretches the narrator's imagination in all sorts of surprising, childlike directions.
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A plane crashes on a desert island. The only survivors are a group of schoolboys. By day, they explore the dazzling beaches, gorging fruit, seeking shelter, and ripping off their uniforms to swim in the lagoon. At night, in the darkness of the jungle, they are haunted by nightmares of a primitive beast. Orphaned by society, they must forge their own; but it isn't long before their innocent games devolve into a murderous hunt...
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The Great Gatsby (Penguin Modern Classics)
Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. Day and night his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby—young, handsome, fabulously rich—always seems alone in the crowd, watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. Beneath the shimmering surface of his life he is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. And soon this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel.
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When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen shows the folly of judging by first impressions and superbly evokes the friendships, gossip and snobberies of provincial middle-class life.
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Jean-Paul Sartre's first published novel, Nausea is both an extended essay on existentialist ideals and a profound fictional exploration of a man struggling to restore a sense of meaning to his life. The book chronicles an introspective historian's struggle with the realisation that he is an entirely free agent in a world devoid of meaning; a world in which he must find his own purpose and then take total responsibility for his choices.
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