Aesop lived in the early sixth century BC on the island of Samos, which lies off the coast of modern Turkey. He originally came from Thrace which was a separate country in those days, though it now forms part of Greece and Bulgaria. Very little is known about his life except that he worked as a slave on Samos for a master called Iadmon, and that he became a very famous storyteller. He was so famous that almost any fable which could have been told by him became attributed to him.

Aesop

Afsaneh Knight

Afsaneh Moqadam

Afua Hirsch is a writer, filmmaker, and journalist. She is the author of Brit(ish), the Sunday Times bestseller that explores Britishness, identity and belonging, for which she was awarded the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize for Non-Fiction. She co-presented Enslaved, a 6-part series about the transatlantic slave trade with Samuel L Jackson. She is the presenter of the Audible podcast series We Need To Talk About the British Empire, and Africa Rising, an ongoing flagship series about art and culture for the BBC, through her production company Born in Me Productions. She is a longtime columnist for the Guardian and is a professor of journalism at the University of Southern California.

Afua Hirsch

AGAPI STASSINOPOULOS is an author, blogger and international speaker who inspires audiences around the world. She has spoken at many corporations and conferences, such as Nike Women, Starbucks,Time Inc., Virgin, Johnson &amp; Johnson and the American Heart Foundation. She was born in Athens and trained in London at RADA before gaining a Master’s in psychology at the University of Santa Monica. She has collaborated with her sister, Arianna Huffington, to develop talks and seminars, and has worked with the Oprah Winfrey network. She is currently hosting a new podcast series in collaboration with The Huffington Post, entitled ‘Sundays with Agapi’, which includes guided meditations and interviews with prominent guests. She lives in Los Angeles.

Agapi Stassinopoulos

Agatha Christie

Aggie MacKenzie

Aghnia Mardiyah is a London-based Illustrator and Character Designer with a passion for children's books and animation. She is drawn to fun, bright and vibrant colours. When she isn't disappearing under piles of work, she loves to travel! Exploring foreign places, exciting new sights and sensations is what inspires her the most!

Aghnia Mardiyah

Agnes Callard is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Her primary areas of specialization are ancient philosophy and ethics. She has written for The New York Times, New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s, Boston Review, and penned a monthly column for the Point. From 2019 to 2020, she held a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for the research that contributes to this book.

Agnes Callard

Agnes Jekyll

Agnes Bertha Marshall (24 August 1855-29 July 1905) was an English culinary entrepreneur who became a leading cookery writer, dubbed the 'Queen of Ices'. Her 1888 cookery book included a recipe for 'cornets with cream', possibly the earliest publication of the edible ice cream cone. Marshall was born in Walthamstow. She wrote four books: Ices Plain and Fancy: The Book of Ices (1885), Mrs A B Marshall's Book of Cookery (1888), Mrs A B Marshall's Larger Cookery Book of Extra Recipes (1891) and Fancy Ices (1894).

Agnes Marshall

Agnes Prus

Agri Ismaïl is a Kurdish author based in Sweden who has worked as a corporate lawyer in London, Dubai, and Iraqi Kurdistan. His work has been published in The White Review, The Rumpus, Litro, 3:AM Magazine, and Asymptote amongst other places. His piece 'Haunted Home' won the 2016 Stack award for best non-fiction for The Outpost, runner-up in the Lifted Brow &amp; RMIT non/fictionLab Prize for Experimental Non-Fiction, and he was longlisted for the 2017/2018 Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize. Hyper is his first novel.

Agri Ismaïl

Aharon Appelfeld authored more than 45 acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction and received many international awards including the MLA Commonwealth Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction prize, the prix Médicis étranger, the Israel prize, and the Nelly Sachs prize. Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now part of Ukraine) in 1932, he survived the Holocaust and passed away in Israel in 2018.

Aharon Appelfeld

Ahmadou Kourouma

Ahmed Alnaouq is a Palestinian journalist and human rights activist based in London. He is the co-founder and director of We Are Not Numbers and a journalist with Palestine Deep Dive. Ahmed holds a degree in English Literature from Al-Azhar university in Gaza, and an MA in International Journalism from Leeds University, where he was a Chevening Scholar. 
 
Pam Bailey is a social-justice activist and journalist based in Washington DC. She lived and worked in the Gaza Strip following the 2008/9 Israeli assault, and co-founded We Are Not Numbers. Today, in addition to her ongoing dedication to the Palestinian cause, she dedicates herself to two nonprofits that advocate for people detained in American prisons -- including one she co-founded in 2020, called More Than Our Crimes.

Ahmed Alnaouq

Ahmed Errachidi

Ahmed Rashid

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

Ahron Bregman is the author of four books about Israel and the Arabs: The Fifty Years War (with Jihan el Tahri), Israel's Wars, A History of Israel and Elusive Peace. He teaches at the Department of War Studies, King's College London.

Ahron Bregman

Ai Qing is regarded as one of the finest modern Chinese poets, whose free verse was influential in the development of new poetry in China.

Ai Qing

Ai Weiwei

Aidan Chambers was born in County Durham in 1934. After national service in the Royal Navy he became a teacher and then, for seven years, a monk. His young adult novels have been widely acclaimed, with POSTCARDS FROM NO-MAN'S LAND winning the prestigious Carnegie Medal and the US Michael L Printz Award. With his wife Nancy he ran Signal magazine and he has served as the president of the School Library Association. His devoted services to children's literature were recognised by his receipt of the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2002.

Aidan Chambers

Aidan Higgins was born in 1927. Langrishe Go Down, his first novel, won the James Tait Black memorial Prize and the Irish Academy of Letters Award, and was later filmed for television with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. His second novel, Balcony of Europe, was shortlisted for the 1972 Booker Prize. The novel Lions of the Grunewald appeared in 1993 and a collection of shorter fiction, Flotsam and jetsam, in 1996. Donkey's Years and Dog Days were the first two volumes of the Higgins Bestiary which concludes with this volume.

Aidan Higgins

Aidan Mathews

Aidan Potts

Aidan Smith

Aidan Storey

Aidan Trimble is the Chief Instructor to the Federation of Shotokan Karate and a former British, European and World Karate Champion, winning the world title in Tokyo - the home of Karate. Aidan has trained with some of the world's leading teachers of 'traditional' and 'sport' karate and is now an award-winning instructor and teacher who is in demand throughout the world. He can be contacted via www.fsk-karate.com.

Aidan Trimble

Aiden Aslin is a British-born resident of Ukraine. Living in Mykolaiv with his fiancé, he joined the Ukrainian marines in 2018 and was called to the frontline ahead of the Russian invasion in February 2022. He was one of over a thousand soldiers who surrendered after the month-long siege at the Mariupol steelworks, whereupon he was singled out for his British passport. His surrender, captivity, treatment and subsequent release received global media attention.

Aiden Aslin

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Vladimir Nabokov

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

The last major collection of Nabokov's published material, Think, Write, Speak brings together a treasure trove of previously uncollected texts from across the author's extraordinary career. Each phase of his wandering life is included, from a precocious essay written while still at Cambridge in 1921, through to his fame in the aftermath of the publication of Lolita to the final, fascinating interviews given shortly before his death in 1977. 
 
 Introduced and edited by his biographer Brian Boyd, this is an essential work for anyone who has been drawn into Nabokov's literary orbit. Here he is at his most inspirational, curious, misleading and caustic. The seriousness of his aesthetic credo, his passion for great writing and his mix of delight and dismay at his own, sudden global fame in the 1950s are all brilliantly delineated here.

Think, Write, Speak

Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor

Ved Mehta

Book 3 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta. 
 
Ved continues the story of Ved Mehta's two earlier memoirs, Daddyji, a biographical portrait of his father, and Mamaji, an exploration of his mother and her history. The focus here turns toward Mehta's childhood, his education in an Indian orphanage for the blind, and the general experience of blind people in India.

Vedi

Continents of Exile: 3

Laurie Lee

'Living in our valley was like broad beans in a pod, so snug and enclosed and protective.' 
 
 Laurie Lee walked out of his childhood village one summer morning to travel the world, but he was always drawn back to his beloved Slad Valley, eventually returning to make it his home. 
 
 In this never-before-published portrait of his Cotswold home, Laurie Lee guides us through its landscapes, and shares memories of his village youth - from his favourite pub, The Woolpack, to winter skating on the pond, the church through the seasons, local legends, learning the violin and playing jazz records in the privy on a wind-up gramophone. 
 
 Filled with wry humour and a love of place, Down in the Valley is a writer's tribute to the landscape that shaped him, and where he found peace.

Down in the Valley

A Writer's Landscape

Kobo Abe

In Tokyo, in the middle of the night, an uncalled-for ambulance arrives to spirit away a man's wife, though she is perfectly healthy. He sets out on an epic journey to find her, around the labyrinthine corners of a strange and enormous hospital. Days into his search, having encountered countless strange characters, odd sexual experiments and the unmistakable feeling of being watched, he is suddenly appointed to be the hospital's chief of security, and his new boss is convinced that he is a horse. Throughout it all, he will never stop searching for his wife.

Secret Rendezvous

'This is the record of a box man' 
 
The streets of Tokyo have been seeing a strange phenomenon recently - people who have decided to live their lives in a box on the street. Behind their cut-out eyeholes, they sit and watch from behind their four cardboard walls. Our nameless narrator, at first repulsed by the box men, slowly becomes drawn in to the anonymity and voyeuristic life inside a box. As his identity slowly slips away and he becomes obsessed with watching an intriguing young nurse, we too become privy to the schizophrenic and seductive unreality of a box man's life.

The Box Man

Mr Nemuro, a respected salesman, disappeared over half a year ago, but only now does his alluring yet alcoholic wife hire a private eye. The nameless detective has but two clues: a photo and a matchbook. With these, he embarks upon an ever-more-puzzling pursuit that leads him into the depths of Tokyo's dangerous underworld, where he begins to lose the boundaries of his own identity. Surreal, fast-paced and hauntingly dreamlike, Abe's masterly novel delves into the unknowable mysteries of the human mind.

The Ruined Map

E. M. Cioran

'Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one's reach.' 
 
In The Trouble With Being Born, E. M. Cioran grapples with the major questions of human existence: birth, death, God, the passing of time, how to relate to others and how to make ourselves get out of bed in the morning. 
 
In a series of interlinking aphorisms which are at once pessimistic, poetic and extremely funny, Cioran finds a kind of joy in his own despair, revelling in the absurdity and futility of our existence, and our inability to live in the world. 
 
Translated by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and critic Richard Howard, The Trouble With Being Born is a provocative, illuminating testament to a singular mind.

The Trouble With Being Born

Sylvia Townsend  Warner

Lolly Willowes, always so gentle and accommodating, suddenly announces that she is moving, alone, to the countryside. To her overbearing family in London, it is a disturbing and inexplicable act of defiance. But Lolly will not be swayed, and in the depths of the English countryside she gradually discovers not only freedom and independence, but also, unexpectedly, her true vocation: witchcraft.

Lolly Willowes

Penguin Modern Classics

Thomas Bernhard

'I hate walking, he says, it seems so pointless to me. I walk, and while I am walking I keep thinking how I hate walking' 
 
Old Masters (1985) is Thomas Bernhard's devilishly funny story about the friendship between two old men. For over thirty years Reger, a music critic, has sat on the same bench in front of a Tintoretto painting in a Viennese museum, thinking and railing against contemporary society, his fellow men, artists, the weather, even the state of public lavatories. His friend Atzbacher has been summoned to meet him, and through his eyes we learn more about Reger - the tragic death of his wife, his thoughts of suicide and, eventually, the true purpose of their appointment. At once pessimistic and exuberant, rancorous and hilarious, Old Masters is a richly satirical portrait of culture, genius, nationhood, class, the value of art and the pretensions of humanity.

Old Masters

A Comedy

Kornel Filipowicz

The Second World War. Poland. Our narrator has no intention of being a hero. He plans to survive this war, whatever it takes. 
 
Meticulously he recounts his experiences: the slow unravelling of national events as well as uncomfortable personal encounters on the street, in the café, at the office, in his love affairs. He is intimate but reserved; conversational but careful; reflective but determined. As he becomes increasingly and chillingly alienated from other people, the reader is drawn into complicit acquiescence. We are forced to consider what it means to be heroic and how we ourselves would behave in the same circumstances. 
 
Written in 1961, this is the masterpiece of one of the great Polish writers of the 20th century.

The Memoir of an Anti-Hero

Bohumil Hrabal

In the autumn of 1965, flush with the unexpected success of his first published books, the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal bought a weekend cottage in Kersko, about an hour's drive east of Prague. From then until his death in 1997, he divided his time between Prague and Kersko, where he wrote and tended to a community of cats. Over the years, his relationship with them grew deeper, becoming a measure of the pressures, both private and public, that impinged on his life as a writer. 
 
All My Cats, written in 1983 after a serious car accident, is the chronicle of a cat lover who becomes overwhelmed by his cats and his life and is driven to the brink of madness by the dilemmas his indulgent love for the animals has created.

All My Cats

Leslie Marmon Silko

Tayo, a young Second World War veteran of mixed ancestry, is coming home. But, returning to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation, he finds himself scarred by his experiences as a prisoner of war, and further wounded by the rejection he finds among his own people. Only by rediscovering the traditions, stories and ceremonies of his ancestors can he start to heal, and find peace. 
 
'An exceptional novel ... a cause for celebration' Washington Post 
 
'The most accomplished Native American writer of her generation' The New York Times Book Review

Ceremony

Albert Camus

This volume contains some of Camus' most powerful political writing as he reflects on moral responsibility and the role of the artist in the world. 'Letters to a German Friend' was Camus' first wartime intervention, written in 1943 in order 'to make our battle more effective'. 'Reflections on the Guillotine' is his impassioned polemic against the death penalty. And in his Nobel speeches, Camus argues against 'Art for art's sake' and brilliantly sets out his vision of the artist's responsibilities.

Committed Writings

Sam Selvon

Moses thinks he's got it made. Originally a poor Caribbean immigrant, he is now the proud landlord of a ramshackle house in Shepherd's Bush, London. He has visions of being master of his own domain, writing his memoirs while his trusty sidekick and handyman, Bob, does all the work. But Moses' problems are far from over... 
 
Soon a Black Power group take over the basement, headed by the indomitable - but very sexy - Brenda, and an illegal people-smuggling ring is discovered upstairs. Not to mention harassment from racist police, sheep-slaughtering in the back yard and a Black Panther (the human kind) on the loose. 
 
Will Moses' elaborately constructed castle in the air be demolished by these unruly forces? 
 
Following the fortunes of characters from Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, Moses Ascending is a hilarious and telling depiction of 1970s Britain.

Moses Ascending

This volume contains some of Camus' most intimate writing, as he reflects on his identity and childhood in Algeria and celebrates the beauty of the Mediterranean. The Wrong Side and the Right Side, Camus' first book and most openly autobiographical work, describes his early years in a working-class neighbourhood in Algiers and includes memorable portraits of his mother, grandmother and uncle. Nuptials rejoices in the sun, landscape and sea, and the physical and spiritual freedom they offer to even the poorest. And in Summer Camus evocatively depicts the sunlit cities of Algiers and Oran.

Personal Writings

Jack Kerouac

Gerard Duluoz was born in 1917, 'a sickly little kid with a rheumatic heart'. Based on Jack Kerouac's memories of the beloved older brother who died when he was a boy, Visions of Gerard is unique among his novels for its dreamlike evocation of the sensations of childhood - wisdom, anguish, intensity, innocence, joy and pain. Described by Kerouac as 'my most serious sad and true book', it forms the first volume of his memoir cycle The Duluoz Legend, and is a haunting exploration of the precariousness of life. 
 
'Called a "pain-tale" by Kerouac, it's the story of an almost divine, Buddha-like child racked with sickness and suffering' Guardian

Visions of Gerard

Michel Foucault

Aesthetics offers a focused study on the philosophy, literature and art which informed Foucault's engagement with ethics and power, including brilliant commentaries on the work of de Sade, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Wagner.

Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology

Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984

The Essential Works of Michel Foucault offers the definitive collection of his articles, interviews and seminars from across thirty years of his extraordinary career. This first volume, Ethics, contains the summaries of Foucault's renowned courses at the Collège de France, as well as key writings and candid interviews on ethical matters: from the role of the intellectual and philosopher in society to friendship, sexuality and the care of the self and others.

Ethics

Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984

The third and final volume of the Essential Works of Foucault series, Power brings together his writings on the issues that he helped make the core agenda of Western political culture: medicine, prisons, psychiatry, government and sexuality, in particular showing his concerns with human rights, discrimination and exclusion. It also includes articles and open letters published directly in response to the issues of the time, calling for reform in abortion, asylum and the death penalty. All the pieces here bring a new sense of Foucault's huge influence on the politics of personal freedom.

Power

The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984

Peter Handke

We join the young Austrian teenager Filib Kobal's journey from his home in Carinthia to Slovenia on the trail of his older brother Gregor, whom he never knew. He is armed only with two of Gregor's books: a copy book from agricultural school, and a Slovenian-German dictionary, in which Gregor has marked certain words. To piece together an image of his brother, he pours over Gregor's notebook and marked dictionary. In the latter, he discovers new words which translate into timeless images of the earth and its people. Filip finds he can associate himself with this discovery. The resulting investigation of the laws of language and naming becomes a transformative investigation of himself and the world around him.

Repetition

Society Must Be Defended is taken from a series of lectures given by Foucault at the Collége de France in 1975-76. Using war to analyse power relations, he contends that politics is ultimately a continuation of battlefield violence, and that ingrained ideas of sovereignty and individual rights are attempts to refute the fact that all power relations are based on domination. Coloured with brilliant historical examples, Foucault draws from many periods in both England and France, with wonderful digressions into subjects as diverse as classical French tragedy and the gothic novel.

Society Must Be Defended

Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76

The Foucault Reader is the ideal introduction to one the most stimulating and influential writers of the past century. It includes detailed excerpts from all his richly textured historical studies - including Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality - as well as many of his best interviews.

The Foucault Reader

Set in London in 1965, The Housing Lark follows a group of West Indian friends as they attempt to buy a house together in the city they now call home, while also navigating racist attitudes, sexual politics, exploitative landlords and brushes with the law. Written with Selvon's characteristic exuberance and humour, this is a vivid and moving depiction of the migrant experience, peopled by a compelling cast of schemers, dreamers and hustlers.

The Housing Lark

One evening, when Marianne and her husband, Bruno, are dining out together to celebrate his return from a business trip, Marianne listens to him speak and realizes suddenly yet finally that Bruno will leave her. Whether at that moment, or in years to come, she will be deserted. And instinctively Marianne knows she must fend for herself and her young son now, before that time comes. 
 
She sends Bruno away and settles down to a life alone, at first experiencing moments of panic, restlessly wandering in rooms grown stifling. The stillness of the house wears her down, and she starts taking long walks, or visiting with her close friend, Franziska. 
 
Gradually, what began as a selfish escape from the prospects of the future becomes in fact liberation. The environment she'd always hated - a no man's land of identical houses, with all curtains drawn - recedes; her relationships with those dear to her become less threatening, less necessary; and Marianne finds a new pattern for her life and the strength to go on alone.

The Left-Handed Woman

Virginia Woolf

A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics. Woolf's blazing writing on female creativity, the role of the writer, and the silent fate of Shakespeare's imaginary sister remains a powerful reminder of a woman's need for financial independence and intellectual freedom.

A Room of One's Own

Penguin Classics

Roberto Calasso

Throughout his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, Proust repeatedly refers to colours as Tiepolo Pink or Tiepolo Red. Who exactly was the artist that he so memorable transformed into colour? 
 
The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches, palaces and villas, creating frescoes that are among the glories of Western art. The life of an epoch swirled around him - but though his contemporaries admired him, they failed to understand him. 
 
Few have attempted to tackle Tiepolo's series of bizarre and haunting etchings, but Roberto Calasso rises to the challenge, interpreting them as chapters in a dark narrative that contains the secret of Tiepolo's art. Blooming ephebes, Oriental sages, owls, snakes: we will find them all within the pages of this book, along with Venus, Time, Moses, angels, Cleopatra and Beatrice of Burgundy - a gypsyish company always on the go. 
 
Calasso makes clear that Tiepolo was more than a dazzling intermezzo in the history of painting. Rather, he represented a particular way of meeting the challenge of form: endowed with a seemingly effortless style, Tiepolo was the last incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue sprezzatura, the art of not seeming artful.

Tiepolo Pink

Joseph Brodsky

Self-educated, intense, impulsive and unmoored, Joseph Brodsky emerged in mid-century Russia as a poetic virtuoso, recognized by such greats as Anna Akhmatova as their worthy heir. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972. Together, the poems in this volume unfold the project that, as Brodsky saw it, the condition of exile presented: 'to set the next man - however theoretical he and his needs may be - a bit more free'. 
 
This edition includes poems translated by Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, and poems written in English or translated by the author himself. It surveys Brodsky's tumultuous life and illustrious career, and presents many of the poems that secured his reputation as one of the century's major voices.

Selected Poems

1968-1996

What are Kafka's stories about? Are they dreams? Allegories? Symbols? Things that happen every day? But where and when? 
 
In this remarkable book, Roberto Calasso sets out not to dispel the mystery but to let it be illuminated by its own light. With his unique vision, imagination, and intellectual acumen, Calasso attempts to enter the flow, the tortuous movement, the physiology of the stories to discover what they are meant to signify and to delve into the most basic question: Who is K.?

Ana María Matute

"This is an old and wicked island. An island of Phoenicians and merchants, of bloodsuckers and frauds." 
 
Ana María Matute's 1959 novel (original title Primera memoria) is a stifling story of rebellious adolescence, narrated by Matia, as she struggles against her domineering grandmother, schemes with her mercurial cousin Borja and begins to fall in love with the strange boy Manuel. 
 
Steeped in myth, fairy tale and biblical allusion, the novel depicts Mallorca as an enchanted but wicked island, a lost Eden and Never Never Land combined, where the sun burns through stained glass windows and the wind tears itself on the agaves. Ostensibly concerned with Matia's anxieties about entering the adult world, this internal conflict is set against the much wider, deeper, and more frightening conflict of the civil war as it plays out almost secretly on the island, set in turn against the backdrop of the Inquisition's mass burning of Jews in previous centuries. These two conflicts shimmer at the edges of Matia's highly subjective account of her life on the island, where life is drawn along painful and divisive lines.

The Island

In the Middle Ages there were gaols and dungeons, but punishment was for the most part a spectacle. In this provocative work, Michel Foucault argues that the development of the Western system of prisons, police and legal hierarchies have merely shifted the focus of social control from our bodies to our souls.

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