Penguin Modern Classics

'Perhaps that moment had been exceptional, but still, I felt alive. That pressure on my chest means being alive.'

Forty-nine, with a kind face, no serious ailments (apart from varicose veins on his ankles), a good salary and three moody children, widowed accountant Martín Santomé is about to retire. He assumes he'll take up gardening, or the guitar, or whatever retired people do. What he least expects is to fall passionately in love with his shy young employee Laura Avellaneda. As they embark upon an affair, happy and irresponsible, Martín begins to feel the weight of his quiet existence lift - until, out of nowhere, their joy is cut short.

The intimate, heartbreaking diary of an ordinary man who is reborn when he falls in love one final time, this beloved Latin American novel has been translated into twenty languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, and is now published in Penguin Classics for the first time.

'They are memorials to times and countries whose best is probably past and gone . . . I was lucky to have known them when I did, before darkness began to fall from the air.'

When Laurie Lee first left his country village aged nineteen, he discovered a delight in the outside world that remained undiminished throughout his writing life. This enchanting collection of his 'first loves and obsessions' brings together pieces including recollections of his Gloucestershire childhood celebrated in Cider With Rosie; reflections on life, love and death, such as a moving report from the tragic Welsh village of Aberfan; and evocative travel writings on Tuscany, Mexico and the West Indies, amongst others, before they were transformed by mass tourism. Together they capture a world that is lost forever.

'One of Britain's finest writers' Daily Mail

'There's a formidable, instant charm in the writing that genuinely makes it difficult to put the book down' New Statesman

'Hot damn! Let us rumble, keep going and don't slow down . . . let's have a little fun . . .'

In his much-anticipated memoir, Hunter S. Thompson looks back on a long and productive life. It
is a story of crazed road trips fuelled by bourbon and black acid, of insane judges and giant porcupines, of girls, guns, explosives and, of course, bikes. He also takes on his dissolute youth in Louisville; his adventures in pornography; campaigning for local office in Aspen; and what it's like to accidentally be accused of trying to kill Jack Nicholson.

The last volume of The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, Nexus continues the story of Henry Miller's escapades and quest for freedom. Feeling trapped in Brooklyn and his marriage with the volatile Mona, he becomes more interested in her extravagant friend, Stasia. After a complicated ménage à trois with Mona and Stasia, he is abandoned by both women and decides to sail for Paris to begin his resurrection as a writer. Funny and shocking, erotic and philosophical, the trilogy tells, according to Miller, 'the story of the most tragic suffering any man had endured'.

The second volume of The Rosy Crucifixion, Plexus is the core of the trilogy, the audacious story of a man looking for freedom and the true life of the spirit. It finds the young Henry Miller in the midst of his second tumultuous marriage with the dance hall hostess Mona, as he is constantly challenged by her volatile personality, and takes readers back to his childhood in early 20th-century Brooklyn as well as his first attempts at becoming a writer. Funny and shocking, erotic and philosophical, the trilogy tells, according to Miller, 'the story of the most tragic suffering any man had endured'.

The first novel in the autobiographical Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, Sexus depicts Miller's first stormy marriage and his sexual escapades in New York City with the mysterious dance hall hostess Mona. Published in 1949 in Paris, this picaresque tale was banned in the US and the UK for two decades. Funny and shocking, erotic and philosophical, the trilogy tells, according to Miller, 'the story of the most tragic suffering any man had endured'.

Brazil's foremost twentieth-century poet, in Penguin Classics for the first time

In 1962 de Andrade published Antologia Poética, a personal anthology of poems from his first ten books. This selection draws on de Andrade's anthology to encompass his finest works within his chosen areas of interest: The Individual, Minas Gerais, Family, Friends, Social Confrontation, Experience of Love, Poetry Itself, and An Attempt to Understand Existence

Feted as the most important - and premiere modernist - Brazilian poet of the twentieth century, Carlos Drummond de Andrade appears in Penguin Classics for the first time. His fans and translators have included Mark Strand, Lloyd Schwartz and Elizabeth Bishop.

The work of Drummond reaches ... a coefficient of loneliness that detached from the soil of history, leading the reader to an attitude free of references, trademarks or ideological or prospective - Alfredo Bosi, author and historian
Carlos Drummond de Andrade was born in a Brazilian mining village in 1902. He worked in government for most of his life. He has received widespread recognition for his modernist style of poetry which broke from more traditional rules of verse and meter. He has been embraced as a national poet with a statue placed on the sea front in Rio and his poem 'Friendly Song' printed on Brazilian currency. He died in 1987.

'Peter, Peter, Pumpkin eater
Had a wife and couldn't keep her...'

In this extraordinary, semi-autobiographical novel, Penelope Mortimer depicts a married woman's breakdown in 1960s London. With three husbands in her past, one in her present and a numberless army of children, Mrs Armitage is astonished to find herself collapsing one day in Harrods. Strange, unsettling and shot through with black comedy, this is a moving account of one woman's realisation that marriage and family life may not, after all, offer all the answers to the problems of living.

Every Thursday morning in a living room in Iran, over tea and pastries, eight women meet in secret to discuss forbidden works of Western literature. As they lose themselves in the worlds of Lolita, The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice, gradually they come to share their own stories, dreams and hopes with each other, and, for a few hours, taste freedom. Azar Nafisi's bestselling memoir is a moving, passionate testament to the transformative power of books, the magic of words and the search for beauty in life's darkest moments.

Although she always remained faithful to the basic frameworks established by her father, Anna Freud (1895-1982) was one of the most creative and innovative thinkers in the history of psychoanalysis. A pioneer in child analysis, Anna Freud wrote extensively on both normal and pathological child development. This superb anthology starts with substantial extracts from her classic The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, the first crucial contribution to psychoanalytic theory elaborated by someone other than Sigmund Freud, and follows with fundamental papers on adolescence and analytical technique. Introductory notes and linking passages by specialists Prof. Richard Ekins and Prof. Ruth Freeman make this volume a definitive overview of Anna Freud's career.

A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis - an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life - including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door - becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral.

Shocking, banned and the subject of obscenity trials, Henry Miller's first novel Tropic of Cancer is one of the most scandalous and influential books of the twentieth century -- new to Penguin Modern Classics with a cover by Tracey Emin

Tropic of Cancer redefined the novel. Set in Paris in the 1930s, it features a starving American writer who lives a bohemian life among prostitutes, pimps, and artists. Banned in the US and the UK for more than thirty years because it was considered pornographic, Tropic of Cancer continued to be distributed in France and smuggled into other countries. When it was first published in the US in 1961, it led to more than 60 obscenity trials until a historic ruling by the Supreme Court defined it as a work of literature. Long hailed as a truly liberating book, daring and uncompromising, Tropic of Cancer is a cornerstone of modern literature that asks us to reconsider everything we know about art, freedom, and morality.

'At last an unprintable book that is fit to read' Ezra Pound

'A momentous event in the history of modern writing' Samuel Beckett

'The book that forever changed the way American literature would be written' Erica Jong

A cult modern classic, Tropic of Capricorn is as daring, frank and influential as Henry Miller first novel, Tropic of Cancer -- new to Penguin Modern Classics with a cover by Tracey Emin

A story of sexual and spiritual awakening, Tropic of Capricorn shocked readers when it was published in 1939. A mixture of fiction and autobiography, it is the story of Henry V. Miller who works for the Cosmodemonic telegraph company in New York in the 1920s and tries to write the most important work of literature that was ever published. Tropic of Capricorn paints a dazzling picture of the life of the writer and of New York City between the wars: the skyscrapers and the sewers, the lust and the dejection, the smells and the sounds of a city that is perpetually in motion, threatening to swallow everyone and everything.

'Literature begins and ends with the meaning of what Miller has done' Lawrence Durrell

'The only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past' George Orwell

'The greatest American writer' Bob Dylan

Henry Miller (1891-1980) is one of the most important American writers of the 20th century. His best-known novels include Tropic of Cancer (1934), Tropic of Capricorn (1939), and the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (Sexus, 1949, Plexus, 1953, and Nexus, 1959), all published in France and banned in the US and the UK until 1964. He is widely recognised as an irreverent, risk-taking writer who redefined the novel and made the link between the European avant-garde and the American Beat generation.

The World of Sex is Henry Miller's most important essay, the manifesto in which he explains why sex matters and why he wrote his famously banned novels, Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. Seeking to set the record straight, Miller argues that there is no contradiction between his salacious prose and his philosophy. In the kind of raw language his readers know so well, he narrates his escapades and formulates his philosophical conclusions. Sexuality for Miller is a mysterious realm - exploring it is what leads to self-liberation and self-realisation.

With its astounding hardcover reviews Richard Zenith's new complete translation of THE BOOK OF DISQUIET has now taken on a similar iconic status to ULYSSES, THE TRIAL or IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME as one of the greatest but also strangest modernist texts. An assembly of sometimes linked fragments, it is a mesmerising, haunting 'novel' without parallel in any other culture.

A counter-prophet attempts the impossible to prove his power; a girl sees the hideous fate of her sisters and father in a mirror bought from a gypsy; the death of a prostitute causes an unanticipated uprising; and the lives of every ordinary person since 1789 are recreated in the almighty Encyclopedia of the Dead. These stories about love and death, truth and lies, myth and reality range across many epochs and settings. Brilliantly combining fact and fiction, epic and miniature, horror and comedy, this was Danilo Kiš final work, published in Serbo-Croatian in 1983.