Böcker i Penguin Modern Classics-serien

Discusses the fraudulence and feeble-mindedness of life in the Britain of the 1930s.

THE DHARMA BUMS appeared just one year after the author's explosive ON THE ROAD had put the Beat Generation on the literary map and Kerouac on the best-seller list. The same expansiveness, humour and contagious zest for life that sparked the earlier novels sparks this one too, but through a more cohesive story. The books follow two young men engaged in a passionate search for dharma or truth. Their major adventure is the pursuit of the Zen way, which takes them climbing into the high sierras to seek the lesson of solitude.With an Introduction by Kerouac expert, Ann Douglas.

'A brilliantly and preposterously funny book' Guardian'A flawless comic novel ... I loved it then, as I do now. It has always made me laugh out loud' Helen Dunmore, The TimesJim Dixon has accidentally fallen into a job at one of Britain's new red brick universities. A moderately successful future in the History Department beckons - as long as Jim can stave off the unwelcome advances of fellow lecturer Margaret, survive a madrigal-singing weekend at Professor Welch's, deliver a lecture on 'Merrie England' and resist Christine, the hopelessly desirable girlfriend of Welch's awful son Bertrand. Inspired by Amis's friend, the poet Philip Larkin, Jim Dixon is a timeless comic character, adrift in a hopelessly gauche and pretentious world, in a witty campus novel that skewers the hypocrisies and vanities of 1950s academic life.With an introduction by David Lodge

A dapper Paris doctor dispenses a treatment for dissatisfied wives. A mother auditions for her first porn movie. A writer working on a study of pain makes himself the subject of his experiments. A voyeur mistakes a murderer for a fellow peeping tom... these are some of the characters observed by the narrator of these chilling stories.

Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the seminal novel of the 1960s that has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the awesome powers that keep them all imprisoned.

Having spent some time in Rome, Antonio - the handsomest young man in Catania - returns to his native town with the reputation of being a playboy and with a long list of amorous adventures behind him. To please his father, Antonio agrees to marry the beautiful Barbara. A year after their marriage however - scandal erupts. Barbara is still a virgin! The bride s family attempt to annul the marriage and Antonio s honour seems irrevocably lost.

An extraordinary collection of thematically linked essays, including THE UNCANNY, SCREEN MEMORIES and FAMILY ROMANCES.Leonardo da Vinci fascinated Freud primarily because he was keen to know why his personality was so incomprehensible to his contemporaries. In this probing biographical essay he deconstructs both da Vinci's character and the nature of his genius. As ever, many of his exploratory avenues lead to the subject's sexuality - why did da Vinci depict the naked human body the way hedid? What of his tendency to surround himself with handsome young boys that he took on as his pupils? Intriguing, thought-provoking and often contentious, this volume contains some of Freud's best writing.

A collection of some of Freud's most famous essays, including ON THE INTRODUCTION OF NARCISSISM; REMEMBERING, REPEATING AND WORKING THROUGH; BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE; THE EGO AND THE ID and INHIBITION, SYMPTOM AND FEAR.

Romantic, heroic, comic and tragic, unconventional school mistress Jean Brodie has become an iconic figure in post-war fiction. Her glamour, unconventional ideas and manipulative charm hold dangerous sway over her girls at the Marcia Blaine Academy who become the Brodie 'set', introduced to a world of adult games that they will never forget.

Tristao Raposo, a nineteen-year old black child of the Rio slums, spies Isabel Leme, an eighteen-year-old upper-class white girl, across the hot sands of Copacabana Neach, and presents her with a ring. Their flight into marriage takes them from urban banality to the farthest reaches of Brazil's wild west....

Nothing in his previous life could have prepared Colonel Hakim Felix Ellellou for his new role as the President of Kush. Neither the French army nor his American university provided a grounding in the subtle skills of revolutionary dictatorship. Still less did they expect him to acquire four wives...

Nedra and Viri are a married couple whose favoured life is centred around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach.

In the humid air of 16th-century Peru, Atahuallpa, the Sun-God King, meets Pizarro the Conquistador, representative of the Spanish Empire at its insatiable. While the Inca King is convinced of his own immortality, the Spaniard is cynical and greedy, leading to a collision of power and authority. Soon both men are locked in a struggle for survival.

At the Diamond County Home for the Aged, the inmates prepare for the annual ritual of the Poorhouse Fair. The elderly residents take pride in the self-respect they gain from this one day. But when the fair goes less well than the folks had hoped, they blame Conner, the new prefect of the home. Together, they begin to revolt against the man.

This play, written during Brecht's exile to the United States and set in pre-Communist China, is a parable of a young woman torn between obligation and reality, between love and practicality, and between her own needs and those of her friends and neighbours.

The story behind The Actual belongs to Harry Trellman, an aging, astute businessman who has never belonged anywhere.

Dean Corde is a man of position and authority at a Chicago university. He accompanies his wife to Bucharest where her mother, a celebrated figure, lies dying in a state hospital. As he tries to help her grapple with an unfeeling bureaucracy, news filters through to him of problems left behind in Chicago. A student had been been murdered and Corde had directed that charges be pressed against two black youths, but controversy and pressure are mounting against the university administration. Further, a series of articles written by Corde has offended influential Chicagoans whom he had counted as friends. Corde is troubled: at home the centre is not holding firm, in Eastern Europe authority is cruel and dehumanising.

In the mid-1970s, Saul Bellow visited Israel and To Jerusalem and Back is his account of his time there. Immersing himself in its landscape and culture, he records the opinions, passions and dreams of Israelis of varying viewpoints from Prime Minister Rabin, novelist Amos Oz and the editor of an Arab-language newspaper to a kibbutznik escaped from the Warsaw ghetto and the barber at Bellow s hotel. Through meditations steeped in history and literature he adds his own reflections on being Jewish in the twentieth century. Bellow s exploration of a beautiful and troubled city is a powerful testament to the unique spirit and challenges of Israel, its history and its future.

Brings together writings by dramatists, directors and thinkers who have had a profound effect on the theatre since mid nineteenth century, from Adolphe Appia to Emile Zola. Here, Antonin Artaud sets out a manifesto for a Theatre of Cruelty, and Bernard Shaw defends himself as a realist, while W B Yeats describes the creation of a People's Theatre.

This is the definitive collection of short stories by Saul Bellow. Abundant, precise, various, rich and exuberant, the stories display the stylistic and emotional brilliance which characterizes this master of prose. Some stories recount the events of a single day, some are contained in a wider frame; each story is a characteristic combination of observation and a celebration of humanity.

Victor, a New York cop nearing retirement, moves among furniture in the disused attic of a house marked for demolition. Cabinets, desks, a damaged harp, an overstuffed armchair - the relics of a lost life of affluence he's finally come to sell. But when his brother Walter, who he hasn't spoken to in years, arrives, the talk stops being just about whether Victor's been offered a fair price for the furniture, and turns to the price that one and not the other of them paid when their father lost both his fortune and the will to go on ...

The story of In America is inspired by the emigration to America in 1876 of Helena Modrzejewska, Poland's most celebrated actress, accompanied by her husband, Count Karol Chlapowski, her fifteen-year-old son, Rudolf, the young journalist and future author of Quo Vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz, and a few friends; their brief sojourn in Anaheim, California; and Modrzejewska's subsequent triumphant career on the American stage under the name Helena Modjeska.

An erotic glimpse into the Hungary of the early twentieth century. It collects ten short stories focusing on the poor and dispossessed and describing the human condition and the futility of life.

Matthew's parents are worried. At eleven, he's much too old to have an imaginary friend, yet they find him talking to and arguing with a presence that even he admits is not physically there. This presence - Chocky - causes Matthew to ask difficult questions and say startling things: he speaks of complex mathematics and mocks human progress. Then, when Matthew does something incredible, it seems there is more than the imaginary about Chocky. Which is when others become interested and ask questions of their own: who is Chocky? And what could it want with an eleven-year-old boy? A story of innocence and alien contact, Chocky is a sinister tale of manipulation and experimentation from afar.

The Divided Self, R.D. Laing's groundbreaking exploration of the nature of madness, illuminated the nature of mental illness and made the mysteries of the mind comprehensible to a wide audience. First published in 1960, this watershed work aimed to make madness comprehensible, and in doing so revolutionized the way we perceive mental illness. Using case studies of patients he had worked with, psychiatrist R. D. Laing argued that psychosis is not a medical condition, but an outcome of the 'divided self', or the tension between the two personas within us: one our authentic, private identity, and the other the false, 'sane' self that we present to the world. Laing's radical approach to insanity offered a rich existential analysis of personal alienation and made him a cult figure in the 1960s, yet his work was most significant for its humane attitude, which put the patient back at the centre of treatment.Includes an introduction by Professor Anthony S. David.'One of the twentieth century's most influential psychotherapists' Guardian'Laing challenged the psychiatric orthodoxy of his time ... an icon of the 1960s counter-culture' The Times

The Cowards (1958) is Josef Skvorecky's blackly comic tale of post-war politics that was immediately banned on publication. In 1945, in Kostelec,Danny is playing saxophone for the best jazz band in Czechoslovakia. Their trumpeter has just got out of a concentration camp, their bass player is only allowed in the band since he owns the bass, and the love of Danny's life is in love with somebody else. But Danny despairs most about the bourgeoisie patriots in his town playing at revolution in the face of the approaching Red Army - not least because it ruins the band's chance of any good gigs.

Alex Leamas is tired. It's the 1960s, he's been out in the cold for years, spying in the shadow of the Berlin Wall for his British masters. He has seen too many good agents murdered for their troubles. Now Control wants to bring him in at last - but only after one final assignment.

In his carnivalesque and riotously inventive Pricksongs & Descants Robert Coover remakes old stories: of Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, and Beauty (who married her Beast and spends a lifetime suffering his doggy stink). And he reshapes his own: a man makes repeating, re-imagined journeys in an office elevator (while his fellow riders taunt and tempt him), and in the seminal, fractal 'The Babysitter' every moment in a single night is played and replayed, every hope and threat of sex and violence done and undone. Coover's dark, wilfil, comic imagination revels brilliantly in contradictions, a master of chaos.

The Haunted Life is the coming-of-age story of Peter Martin, a college track star determined to idle away what he knows will be one of his last innocent summers in his tranquil New England home town. But with the war escalating in Europe and his two closest friends both plotting their escapes, he realises how sheltered his upbringing has been. As he surveys the competing influences of his youth, he struggles to determine what might lead to an intellectually authentic life. The Haunted Life is ultimately a meditation on intellectual truth, male friendship and the desire for movement - all themes that would dominate Kerouac's later work.