The driver’s seat
£5.99Lise is driven to distraction by her office job so, leaving everything, she flies south on holiday. But what is she looking for? Infinity and eternity attend Lise’s last terrible day in an unnamed southern city.
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Closely watched trains
£5.99‘Closely Watched Trains’, which became the award-winning Jiri Menzel film of the Prague Spring, is a classic of postwar literature which justifies Hrabal’s reputation as one of the best Czech writers of today.
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Secretary
£5.99A writer engulfed by a new obsession, an occasional sex-worker, a runaway, a teenager entering the workplace: these four tales of desire and dislocation explore the rough edges of relationships and the inner lives of women negotiating their precarious place in the world. In these coolly compelling and quietly devastating stories, Gaitskill evokes with razor-sharp precision the pleasure, pain, fear and longing that haunt modern life.
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Sunflower sutra
£5.99Allen Ginsberg’s poetry fomented a social and political revolution, and with its rawness and spontaneity changed the course of the American lyric. To read his profane and prophetic verses, about sex, death and America, as well as the humour of his humiliations and self-transformations, is to stretch consciousness and grasp an entire era.
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Beauty
£5.99‘People should fall in love with their eyes closed. Just close your eyes. Don’t look.’ From Warhol’s romantic relationships to his thoughts on interior design, these candid, highly entertaining musings – on love, sex, beauty, work and space – give an intimate glimpse into the mind of one of the most iconic figures in twentieth-century culture.
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An episode in the life of a landscape painter
£5.99It is 1837 and a brilliant German artist sets out to cross the mountains between Chile and Argentina. Perhaps nobody before him has been able to paint the sights that unfold: vast chasms, surreal plants and animals. But then something goes appallingly wrong.
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The lady bandit
£5.99Priests with shotguns, scheming lovers and a necrophiliac gravedigger haunt the fables of Emilia Pardo Bazán, the formidable Spanish aristocrat, intellectual and feminist. These stories paint a rich and variegated image of Old Spain – sometimes tender, often provocative, always entertaining. But if you decide to visit, beware the Lady Bandit, whose strong, rough hands might grab your neck, and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze.
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Sailing to Byzantium
£5.99‘Penguin Archive’ features 90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. This is one title in the collection celebrating one of the greatest and most innovative poets of the 20th century.
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Strange news from another planet
£5.99Of course, very few people go through the gate and abandon the beautiful phenomenon of the outside world for the interior reality that they intuit. A visitor to a zoo discovers he can understand the animals talking, a young man turns into a mountain and a bird guides a boy to another planet in this selection of dream-like and visionary fairy tales from the great German-Swiss master.
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The maverick pig
£5.99Razor-sharp, pugnacious and blackly funny, Wang Xiaobo’s essays established him as one of China’s most popular – and subversive – writers. From the political power of silence to the irrepressible spirit of a pig he met while working in a commune, these reflections on life and literature in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution provide a rare glimpse of a fearless satirical genius.
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The wrath of Achilles
£5.99On the fields of Troy, war is raging. At its centre is Achilles: godlike, swift-footed, the greatest champion of the Greeks. But when his pride is wounded and he refuses to fight, the thread of fate begins to spin. From frenzied rampages to intimate moments of grief, this selection from Homer’s ‘Iliad’ traces the tale of a warrior whose name echoes through the ages, and whose story remains as powerful as ever.