Penguin Classics

This is a new edition with a modified syllabus and extensive new material.

'All for one and one for all!' The three musketeers - Porthos, Aramis and Athos - are the most daring swordsmen in France, bodyguards to the king who fight to the death. When D'Artagnan, a headstrong country boy, comes to Paris to join their ranks, they become the greatest friends of his life. And when a villainous plot is hatched against the royal family by the sly Cardinal Richelieu and the seductive spy 'Milady', the four dashing blades must save them at any cost ...

Born and abandoned in Newgate Prison, Moll Flanders is forced to make her own way in life. She duly embarks on a career that includes husband-hunting, incest, bigamy, prostitution and pick-pocketing, until her crimes eventually catch up with her. One of

This is Wilde's masterful and wonderfully entertaining exploration of art and morality, in a chic new deluxe edition. Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life; indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence. The novel was a succes de scandale and the book was later used as evidence ...

The marriage of Gertrude and Walter Morel has become a battleground. Repelled by her uneducated and sometimes violent husband, delicate Gertrude devotes her life to her children, especially to her sons, William and Paul - determined they will not follow their father into working down the coal mines. But conflict is evitable when Paul seeks to escape his mother's suffocating grasp through relationships with women his own age. Set in Lawrence's native Nottinghamshire, "Sons and Lovers" (1913) is a highly autobiographical and compelling portrayal of childhood, adolescence and the clash of generations.

Stung by the difficult reception of Moby Dick, Herman Melville became obsessed with the difficulties of communicating his vision to readers. His sense of isolation lies at the heart of these later works. "Billy Budd, Sailor" is a classic confrontatio n between good and evil, and the story of an innocent young man unable to defend himself against a wrongful accusation. The other stories also illuminate the way fictions are created and shared by society.

Tennessee Williams' controversial Hollywood screenplay "Baby Doll" opens with Archie Lee's teenage bride driving him to distraction, as she has refused to consummate their marriage until the day of her twentieth birthday. Enter wily Sicilian Silva Va ccaro, Archie's rival both in the cotton business and for the affections of the flirtatious Baby Doll, and things reach breaking-point. This volume also contains "Something Unspoken", a brilliantly comic study of a wealthy, manipulative Southern spin ster, and "Summer and Smoke", a sexually charged portrayal of Alma, a sensitive, unmarried minister's daughter, and her childhood love, the wild, sensual doctor's son John.

In these three exotic, steamy dramas Tennessee Williams portrays loss, faded lives and passionate love affairs. "The Rose Tattoo" is set in a bustling, Sicilian-American community, where newly widowed Serafina is paralysed by grief, until she has her romantic illusions about her dead husband shattered and rediscovers her true nature as a fiery prima donna, in a life-affirming celebration of love and sex. Tennessee Williams explores a new 'wild and unrestricted' theatrical form in the colourful t ropical fantasy "Camino Real", while "Orpheus Descending", however, takes us into the dark territory of the Deep South: the corrupt hell of a small, brutal township, where a forbidden and tragic love affair sparks horrific violence.

When "Memoirs" was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the media - though long self-identified as a gay man, Williams' candour about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself, and such revelations by America's greatest living playwright were called "a raw display of private life" by "The New York Times Book Review". As it turns out, more than thirty years later, Williams' look back at his life is not quite so scandalous as it once seemed; he recalls his childhood in Mississippi and St. Louis, his prolonged struggle as a "starving artist," the "overnight" success of "The Glass Menagerie" in 1945, the death of his long-time companion Frank Merlo in 1962, and his confinement to a psychiatric ward in 1969 and subsequent recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, all with the same directness, compassion, and insight that epitomize his plays.

Published in its entirety for the first time, "The Sea is My Brother" is Jack Kerouac's first novel. Described by Kerouac as being about 'man's simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies', the 158-page handwritten manuscript was not published during his lifetime. He wrote in his notes for the project that the characters were 'the vanishing American, the big free by, the American Indian, the last of the pioneers, the last of the hoboes'. This novel follows the fortunes of Wesley Martin, a man who Kerouac said 'loved the sea with a strange, lonely love; the sea is his brother and sentences. He goes down.' Kerouac began this work not long after his first tour as a Merchant Marine on the S.S. Dorchester in the late summer of 1942 during which he kept a journal detailing the gritty daily routine of life at sea. Inspired by the trip, which exemplified Kerouac's love for adventure and the character traits of his fellow shipmates, the journals were spontaneous sketches of those experiences that were woven into a short novel soon after disembarking from the S.S. Dorchester in October of 1942. This edition also contains a number of other fragments of Kerouac's early writing and letters between Kerouac and Sebastian Sampas all from the early 1940s, as well as many images.

His first novel is a revelation ... the writing is vivid, serious and extraordinary ... wonderful' The TimesThe Sea is My Brother is Jack Kerouac's very first novel, begun shortly after his tour as a merchant sailor in 1942. Lost during his lifetime, it is an intense portrait of friendship and brotherhood and a meditation on the desire to escape society, following the fortunes of two men as they impulsively decide to work their passage on the S.S. Westminster: drinking, arguing, playing cards, dodging torpedoes and contemplating the vast, terrible beauty of the sea. Published with fragments of early stories and letters, this visceral work gives a unique insight into the young Kerouac and the formation of his genius.'What's clear from this newly published first novel is that Kerouac was positively fizzing with talent at an early age' Sunday Times

With its imperfect but charming heroine and its witty and subtle exploration of relationships, Emma is often seen as Jane Austen's most flawless work, this Penguin Threads edition includes cover art by Jillian Tamaki and deluxe french flaps. Commissioned by award-winning Penguin art director Paul Buckley, the Penguin Threads series debuts with cover art by Jillian Tamaki for three gift-worthy Penguin Classics. Sketched out in a traditional illustrative manner, then hand stitched using needle and thread, the final covers are sculpt embossed for a tactile, textured, and beautiful book design that will appeal to the Etsy(tm)-loving world of handmade crafts.

Published to coincide with the 2011 centennial of The Secret Garden's publication, this Penguin Threads edition of the classic children's tale includes cover art by Jillian Tamaki and deluxe french flaps. Commissioned by award-winning Penguin art director Paul Buckley, the Penguin Threads series debuts with cover art by Jillian Tamaki for three gift-worthy Penguin Classics. Sketched out in a traditional illustrative manner, then hand stitched using needle and thread, the final covers are sculpt embossed for a tactile, textured, and beautiful book design that will appeal to the Etsy(tm)-loving world of handmade crafts. This book is rough cut. Rough cut is the practice of intentionally leaving the edges of the pages of a book or other publication in a rough "unfinished" state. There might be various reasons for doing this, but typically it is used to give a book a vintage appearance.

"The Canterbury Tales", compiled in the late fourteenth century, is an incisive portrait, infused with Chaucer's wry wit and vibrant, poetical language. He evokes a spectrum of colourful characters, from the bawdy Wife of Bath to the gallant Knight, the fastidious Prioress and the burly, drunken Miller. As they wend their way from Southwark to Canterbury, tales are told to pass the time, and the stories are as diverse as the narrators, encompassing themes such as adultery, revenge, courtly love, lechery, avarice and penitence. As humorous today as when it was written over six centuries ago, "The Canterbury Tales" remains one of the most popular and enjoyable of the classic works of literature.

Burroughs' first novel, a largely autobiographical account of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures and relapses, remains the most unflinching, unsentimental account of addiction ever written. Through junk neighbourhoods in New York, New Orleans and Mexico City, through time spent kicking, time spent dealing and time rolling drunks for money, through junk sickness and a sanatorium, Junky is a field report (by a writer trained in anthropology at Harvard) from the American post-war drug underground. A cult classic, it has influenced generations of writers with its raw, sparse and unapologetic tone. This definitive edition painstakingly recreates the author's original text word for word.

The "Penguin English Library Edition" of "Persuasion" by Jane Austen. 'Her attachment and regrets had, for a long time, clouded every enjoyment of youth; and an early loss of bloom and spirits had been their lasting effect'. "Persuasion", Jane Austen's last novel, is a moving, masterly and elegiac love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities. It tells the story of Anne Elliot, who, persuaded to break off her engagement to the man she loved because he was not successful enough, has never forgotten him. When he returns, he brings with him a tantalizing second chance of happiness. "The Penguin English Library" contains 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.