Mini Modern Classics
Mini Modern Classics Box Set
$250.00 – Boxed set / Penguin Books
The short story is we're going to change the way you read.
2011 is the fiftieth anniversary of the Penguin Modern Classics. To celebrate we're publishing fifty mini Modern Classics. They're full of the best short fiction... Buy or find out more →
The Gifts Of War
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
One of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation, Margaret Drabble is an unmatched observer of postwar English lives, portraying social change, sexual liberation, landscape, class and the messy complications of huma... Buy or find out more →
The Sexes
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
Dorothy Parker captured early twentieth century American society like no one else could. She was a masterful observer of character, a witty, sharply exact composer of dialogue and a poignant reader of the subtleties of r... Buy or find out more →
In The Penal Colony
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
Kafka transformed the possibilities of the short story, his unique imagination giving his dark tales a sense of dream-like logic and unreality, in which their horrors are humorous and unease pervades. In these two storie... Buy or find out more →
The Crime Wave At Blandings
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
One of P. G. Wodehouse's most gloriously funny stories, this is the tale of bumbling Lord Emsworth, whose quiet life reading The Care Of The Pig and pottering among the flowers at Blandings Castle is shattered by an outb... Buy or find out more →
Moon Lake
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
Moon Lake is the story of a summer camp in Mississippi, a surly lifeguard, a rebellious orphan girl, and the fateful day when they learn the secrets of life and death. Pulitzer Prize-winner Eudora Welty's extraordinary s... Buy or find out more →
The Door In The Wall
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
H.G. Wells was a pioneer of science fiction, its first and greatest influence. Here his boundless invention creates three very stories: a poignant parable of a mysterious door, a thrilling account of be-tentacled sea cre... Buy or find out more →
Rich In Russia
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
In these two short stories, Updike's brilliant observational acuity is matched by a light, comic touch. The writer Henry Bech travels to Europe on a hapless cultural exchange, first to Russia, where he struggles to spend... Buy or find out more →
The Last Demon
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
Nobel Prize-winner Isaac Bashevis Singer is best remembered for his short stories, which drew on traditions of folk tales and Yiddish culture to explore good and evil, passion and restraint, religious fervour and persona... Buy or find out more →
Filboid Studge, The Story Of A Mouse That Helped
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
H.H. Munro, better known by his pen name, Saki, wrote wickedly comic satires of upper-class Edwardian life. These seven short stories are macabre and extremely funny: they include a cat that is regrettably taught to spea... Buy or find out more →
Through The Wall
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has been acclaimed as one of Russia's greatest living writers. These five dreamlike and blackly comic stories, two of which are here in English for the first time, tell of lost children, midnight ... Buy or find out more →
La Grosse Fifi
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
These four haunting stories from the author of Wide Sargasso Sea capture moments in the lives of European dilettantes, ingénues, businessmen, soldiers and artists at a time when the world was enjoying freedom after war. ... Buy or find out more →
Chess
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
A group of passengers on a cruise ship challenge the world chess champion to a match. At first, they crumble, until they are helped by whispered advice from a stranger in the crowd – a man who will risk everything to win... Buy or find out more →
The Cornet Player Who Betrayed Ireland
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
Praised as Ireland's Chekhov, Frank O'Connor was a modern master of the short story. From an amateur brass band divided by partisanship to English soldiers who befriend their Irish captors, and from a child's comic confe... Buy or find out more →
A Breath Of Lucifer
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
These haunting tales from India's foremost storyteller, set in the fictional town of Malgudi, are filled with characters from every walk of life. Avaricious merchants, fleshy harlots, foolhardy teachers, beggars and rogu... Buy or find out more →
Terra Incognita
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
These three stories of menace, magic and melancholy display Vladimir Nabokov's astonishing range and inventiveness. Whether describing an escape across a surreal tropical landscape, a fateful meeting or an unexpected – a... Buy or find out more →
Flypaper
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
Of the very first rank of prose stylists, Robert Musil captures a scene's every telling detail and symbolic aspect with a precise and remarkable beauty. In these nine stories and essays, he considers holidaymakers and st... Buy or find out more →
Red Rose, White Rose
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
In Eileen Chang's eloquent and evocative novella, Zhenbao is a devoted son, a diligent worker, and guarded in love. But when he meets a friend's spoilt, spirited, desirable wife, he cannot resist her charms, or keep thei... Buy or find out more →
Bliss
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
Katherine Mansfield's perceptive and resonant writing helped to define the modern short story, observing apparently trivial incidents to create quietly devastating revelations of inner lives. In these three tales, aglow ... Buy or find out more →
Wunderkind
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
Writing about outcasts, dreamers and misfits in the Deep South, Carson McCullers was acclaimed for her sympathetic depictions of loneliness, the need for understanding and the search for love. These four masterly stories... Buy or find out more →
Lunar Caustic
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
In this stark, compelling and greatly autobiographical novella, Malcolm Lowry tells the story of Bill Plantagenet, a piano player and ex-sailor who has lost his band and his mind drinking in New York. As Plantagenet comm... Buy or find out more →
The Colour Out Of Space
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
'It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh (…)'
H.P. Lovecraft was perhaps the greatest twentieth century practit... Buy or find out more →
The Magic Paint
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
'He was blamed for endless disasters, from failed exams to a bridge collapse, an avalanche, even a shipwreck: all due, in the stupid opinion of, first, his fellow-students and, later, his colleagues, to the penetrating p... Buy or find out more →
Odour Of Chrysanthemums
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
'Was this what it all meant - utter, intact separateness, obscured by heat of living?'
D. H. Lawrence's short stories portray complex, flawed interior lives, showing individuals facing momentous emotional events. In thes... Buy or find out more →
They
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
Rudyard Kipling is best known for his novels and poetry, but his short stories reveal a far more sinister and macabre side to his imagination. In these three chilling and psychologically penetrating tales, Kipling portra... Buy or find out more →
Him With His Foot In His Mouth
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
'We were friends, somehow.But in the end, somehow, he intended to be a mortal enemy.All the while that he was making the gestures of a close and precious friend he was fattening my soul in a coop till it was ready for ki... Buy or find out more →
Romance Of The Thin Man And The Fat Lady
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
'Paul stepped off the curb and got hit by a truck. He didn't know what it was that hit him at first, but now, here on his back, under the truck, there could be no doubt.'
One of 50 original and exciting books of short st... Buy or find out more →
Two Gallants
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
James Joyce's naturalistic, unflinching portrayal of ordinary working people in his Dubliners stories was a literary landmark. These four stories from that collection offer glimpses of defeated lives – an unremarkable de... Buy or find out more →
The Delicate Prey
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
'And then one day a solitary figure appeared, moving toward them across the lifeless plain from the west.One man on a camel… '
Paul Bowles's unforgettable short stories portray people facing hostile environments and th... Buy or find out more →
The Widow Ching-Pirate
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
'On days of combat, the crew would mix gunpowder with their liquor'
Borges became famous as a writer of short stories that contained new realities: elaborately conceived, ingenious and gamesome précis of impossible world... Buy or find out more →
Short Treatise On The Joys Of Morphinism
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
Drawing on Hans Fallada's own history of addiction, these two stories are written with a remarkable, tough, spartan clarity. As a man desperately, haplessly tries to get enough morphine to make it through the day and a d... Buy or find out more →
The Expelled
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
'I don't know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I'll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.'
Remorseless and unnerving, but leavened w... Buy or find out more →
Some Of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
'I said that although hanging Colby was almost certainly against the law, we had a perfect moral right to do so because he was our friend, belonged to us in various important senses, and he had after all gone too far.'
D... Buy or find out more →
Dear Illusion (Mini Modern Classics)
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
In this wry, piercing short story from one of the greatest of all British postwar writers, an ageing poet considers the value of his art – and of the critics who've found genius in it. Then, with his final work, he exerc... Buy or find out more →
Hell Screen
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
One of the towering figures of modern Japanese writing, Akutagawa's early career was distinguished by imaginative, beautifully crafted stories of medieval Japan, rich with period detail. These two stories include his gre... Buy or find out more →
The Mark-2 Wife
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Books
William Trevor has been acclaimed as the greatest contemporary writer of short stories in the English language, likened to Chekhov for his insights into human nature. These three tales of obsession, heartbreak, silent so... Buy or find out more →
Bluebeard
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
'Curiosity is the most fleeting of pleasures; the moment is satisfied, it ceases to exist and it always proves very, very expensive.'
Angela Carter's playful and subversive retellings of Charles Perrault's classic fairy ... Buy or find out more →
Canon Alberic's Scrap Book
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
'The lower jaw was thin - what can I call it? - shallow, like a beast's; teeth showed behind the black lips…'
M. R. James is the master of the English ghost story, whose tales are inhabited not by ethereal spirits, but... Buy or find out more →
The Beast In The Jungle
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
'Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and turns of the months and the years, like a crouching beast in the jungle.'
Henry James's devastating and profoundly moving novella is the story of John Marcher,... Buy or find out more →
The Tooth
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
'Her tooth, which had brought her here unerringly, seemed now the only part of her to have any identity. It seemed to have had its picture taken without her; it was the important creature which must be recorded and exami... Buy or find out more →
Living Daylights
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
In the first of these two thrilling stories, the suave and deadly James Bond is sent to Berlin, where a British agent is going to make a break for freedom beneath the barrel of a KGB assassin's gun. While in the second, ... Buy or find out more →
Babylon Revisited
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories defined the 1920s 'Jazz Age' generation, with their glittering dreams and tarnished hopes. In these three tales of a fragile recovery, a cut-glass bowl and a life lost, Fitzgerald portrays, ... Buy or find out more →
Babette's Feast
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
'And it happened when Martine or Philippa spoke to Babette that they would get no answers, and would wonder if she had even heard what they said … Orshe would sit immovable on the three-legged kitchen chair, her strong h... Buy or find out more →
Youth
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
'Then, on a fine moonlight night, all the rats left the ship.'
Five men sit around a mahogany table, drinking claret. As the wine loosens their tongues, one tells a story from his youth, recounting the strange voyage of ... Buy or find out more →
The Strange Crime Of John Boulnois
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Group Uk
The colossus of crime leaned over to the little rustic priest with a sort of sudden interest.
'You have heard of it?' he asked. 'Where have you heard of it?'
'Well, I mustn't tell you his name, of course,' said the littl... Buy or find out more →
The Machine Stops
$5.00 – Paperback book / Penguin Books
'"You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that."'
E.M. Forster is best known for his exquisite novels, but these two af... Buy or find out more →