Fiction

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

"These impassioned pages require and reward very close attention."--Michael Dirda, Washington Post

In this ambitious book, acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson applies her astute intellect to some of the most vexing topics in the history of human thought--science, religion, and consciousness. Crafted with the same care and insight as her award-winning novels, Absence of Mind challenges postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science. In Robinson's view, scientific reasoning does not denote a sense of logical infallibility, as thinkers like Richard Dawkins might suggest. Instead, in its purest form, science represents a search for answers. It engages the problem of knowledge, an aspect of the mystery of consciousness, rather than providing a simple and final model of reality.

By defending the importance of individual reflection, Robinson celebrates the power and variety of human consciousness in the tradition of William James. She explores the nature of subjectivity and considers the culture in which Sigmund Freud was situated and its influence on his model of self and civilization. Through keen interpretations of language, emotion, science, and poetry, Absence of Mind restores human consciousness to its central place in the religion-science debate.

Haley Bombauer, aka Flash Jackson, confronts the summer of her seventeenth year with glorious anticipation. She envisions herself roaming the hillsides and forests on her beloved horse, venturing farther and farther away from her sleepy hometown and her overprotective mother.

But when Haley falls through the rotted roof of the barn, she is destined to spend the summer in a thigh-high cast, stuck at home with her mother, enduring visits from her spooky grandmother, and pondering the error of her impulsive ways. The year that follows will, in fact, transform not only her life but also the lives of those around her.

Set in Mannville, New York, William Kowalski's signature town, here is the story of one young woman's emergence into a world that, in her words, "was not designed with girls in mind" and her efforts to find a way to fit in without giving up her independence.

In this dazzling collection of stories from one of Russia's most important writers, ordinary realities--and our yearnings to transcend them--lead to miraculous otherworlds. A woman's deceased father appears in her dreams with clues about the afterlife. A man falls in love with a marble statue as his marriage falls apart. A child glimpses heaven through a stained-glass window.

Tolstaya's tales--rendered with the emotional insight of Chekhov, the surreal satire of Gogol, and a unique blend of humor and poetry all her own--transmute the quotidian into aetherial wonders. As these stories explore politics, identity, love, and loss, they cut to the quick of the Russian psyche even as they lay bare human universals. Whether contemplating the intricacies of telegram delivery in Leningrad or the meditative melancholy of holiday aspic, Tolstaya limns the stark elements of existence and our vibrant inner lives in an extraordinary vision of life on earth.

Contemporary translations and adaptations of ancient Greek poet Callimachus by noted writer and critic Stephanie Burt

Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Greeks and Romans, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. In After Callimachus, esteemed poet and critic Stephanie Burt's attentive translations and inspired adaptations introduce the work, spirit, and letter of Callimachus to today's poetry readers.

Skillfully combining intricate patterns of sound and classical precedent with the very modern concerns of sex, gender, love, death, and technology, these poems speak with a twenty-first-century voice, while also opening multiple gateways to ancient worlds. This Callimachus travels the Mediterranean, pays homage to Athena and Zeus, develops erotic fixations, practices funerary commemoration, and brings fresh gifts for the cult of Artemis. This reimagined poet also visits airports, uses Tumblr and Twitter, listens to pop music, and fights contemporary patriarchy. Burt bears careful fealty to Callimachus's whole poems, even as she builds freely from some of the hundreds of surviving fragments. Here is an ancient Greek poet made fresh for our times. An informative foreword by classicist Mark Payne places Burt's renderings of Callimachus in literary and historical context.

After Callimachus is at once a contribution to contemporary poetry and a new endeavor in the art of classical adaptation and translation.

An electronics salesman who has been deserted by his wife agrees to deliver an enigmatic package-- and is rewarded with a glimpse of his true nature. A man who views himself as the son of God pursues a stranger who may be his human father. A mild-mannered collection agent receives a visit from a giant talking frog who enlists his help in saving Tokyo from destruction. The six stories in this collection come from the deep and mysterious place where the human meets the inhuman--and are further proof that Murakami is one of the most visionary writers at work today.

Longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry

The 2016 winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, selected by Carolyn Forché

--from "Transmigration"

Afterland is a powerful, essential collection of poetry that recounts with devastating detail the Hmong exodus from Laos and the fate of thousands of refugees seeking asylum. Mai Der Vang is telling the story of her own family, and by doing so, she also provides an essential history of the Hmong culture's ongoing resilience in exile. Many of these poems are written in the voices of those fleeing unbearable violence after U.S. forces recruited Hmong fighters in Laos in the Secret War against communism, only to abandon them after that war went awry. That history is little known or understood, but the three hundred thousand Hmong now living in the United States are living proof of its aftermath. With poems of extraordinary force and grace, Afterland holds an original place in American poetry and lands with a sense of humanity saved, of outrage, of a deep tradition broken by war and ocean but still intact, remembered, and lived.

Includes the essay "Notes on Camp," the inspiration for the 2019 exhibition Notes on Fashion: Camp at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes the groundbreaking essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation," as well as her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought.

This edition has a new afterword, "Thirty Years Later," in which Sontag restates the terms of her battle against philistinism and against ethical shallowness and indifference.

Advance Praise

"What a marvel this book is. In taut, lyrical prose shot through with moments of wry humor, Jocelyn Davis brings ancient India to life so thoroughly that the gulf between past and present disappears completely: we feel as if she is telling our own story. Riveting and deeply moving, The Age of Kali is the work of an immensely gifted novelist."

-Abigail DeWitt, author of News of Our Loved Ones, Lili, and Dogs

"To lovers of the Indian epics, this book is a devious, heretical topsy-turvying of the Mahabharata; to Hindu fundamentalists, dangerous, blasphemous, a book to be burnt; to the general reader, a brilliant, enthralling, complex fantasy that will linger in your mind long after you have finished it."

-Krishnan Venkatesh, author of Do You Know Who You Are? Reading the Buddha's Discourses

The Mahabharata, often called "India's Iliad," tells of several generations of the royal family of Kuru: their ambitions, loves, moral dilemmas, and battles for a kingdom. As tradition has it, the heroes are the five Pandava brothers and their shared wife, Draupadi; the villain is their power-mad cousin, Duryodhana.

But what if tradition got it wrong? What if Duryodhana, despite his flaws, were the real hero-with a passionate heart buried under his emotional and physical scars-and the supposedly noble Pandavas were the evil ones? What if Draupadi and the many other women of the tale were rebels behind the scenes? And what if, thanks to a young girl who ferreted out the family secrets and kept them hidden for years, the truth could at last be told?

Sweeping, fast-paced, and packed with gripping characters, THE AGE OF KALI turns a famous work of world literature inside out, bringing forth voices long silenced. In the end, three questions remain: Who won? Who lost? And who was to blame?

One of the leading cultural critics of his generation, Albert Murray was also the author of an extraordinary quartet of semi-autobiographical novels, vivid impressionistic portraits of black life in the Deep South in the 1920s and '30s and in prewar New York City. Train Whistle Guitar (1974) introduces Murray's recurring narrator and protagonist, Scooter, a "Southern jackrabbit raised in a briarpatch" too nimble ever to receive a scratch. Scooter's education in books, music, and the blue-steel bent-note blues-ballad realities of American life continues in The Spyglass Tree (1991), Murray's "Portrait of the Artist as a Tuskegee Undergraduate." The Seven League Boots (1996) follows Scooter as he becomes a bass player in a touring band not unlike Duke Ellington's, and The Magic Keys (2005), in which Scooter at last finds his true vocation as a writer in Greenwich Village, is an elegaic reverie on an artist's life. Editors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Paul Devlin round out the volume with a selection of Murray's remarkable poems, including 11 unpublished pieces from his notebooks, and two rare examples of his work as a short story writer.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

It was with Alexis that, in 1928, Marguerite Yourcenar began her career as a novelist. The book remains one of the stellar literary debuts of the century. Yourcenar has created a moving meditation on the relationship between pleasure and love.

"The rich, many colored subtlety of her great novels -- Memoirs of Dadrian; The Abyss; Alexis; Coup de Grace; and others -- is reminiscent of their intricate tapestries, while her sublime mystical appreciation of Nature and its beauty evokes the golden age of landscape painting in the Low Countries." - The Paris Review