In this epic tale from the Viking Age that ranges across Scandinavia and Viking Britain, two poets compete for the love of Helga the Fair - with fatal consequences. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin\"s 80th birthday....

Moonlight, sake, spring blossom, idle moments, a woman\"s hair - these exquisite reflections on life\"s fleeting pleasures by a thirteenth-century Japanese monk are delicately attuned to nature and the senses. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin\"s 80th birthday....

In these witty, Machiavellian aphorisms, unlikely Spanish priest Baltasar Gracian shows us how to exploit friends and enemies alike to thrive in a world of deception and illusion. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin\"s 80th birthday....

Autobiographical stories from one of Japan\"s masters of modernist story-telling. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin\"s 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries....

A selection taken from Walt Whitman\"s Leaves of Grass Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin\"s 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries....

\"Because of his baldness and hairiness, he announced it was a capital offence for anyone either to look down on him as he passed or to mention goats in any context.\" The biography of the brutal, crazed and incestuous Roman Emperor Caligula, who tried to appoint his own horse consul....

Exuberant and ingenious, Lear's best-loved poems tell of jumblies, quangle wangles and luminous noses. One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946....

From the father of American literature, four sparkling comic tales of extraordinary animals and parables subverted. \"Pale terror goes before him, death and devastation follow!\" From the father of American literature, four sparkling comic tales of extraordinary animals and parables subverted....

\"But I, being poor, have only my dreams; / I have spread my dreams under your feet...\" By turns joyful and despairing, some of the twentieth century\"s greatest verse on fleeting youth, fervent hopes and futile sacrifice....

\"Things are not simple but complex. If he bit Mr. Browning he bit her too. Hatred is not hatred; hatred is also love.\" Virginia Woolf\"s delightful biography of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning\"s spaniel, which asks what it means to be human - and to be dog....

Glittering with Austen\"s subversive young imagination, this wickedearly novella features a devious, adulterous anti-heroine. \"Of what a mistake were you guilty in marrying a Man of his age! - just old enough to be formal, ungovernable and to have the Gout - too old to be agreable, and too young to die....

\"What matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now.\" A hugely influential collection for writers and artists of all kinds, Rilke\"s profound and lyrical letters to a young friend advise on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself....

In this provocative and blackly funny essay, Thomas de Quincey considers murder in a purely aesthetic light and explains how practically every philosopher over the past two hundred years has been murdered - \"insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him\"....

\"Why do I know a few more things? Why am I so clever altogether?\" Self-celebrating and self-mocking autobiographical writings from Ecce Homo, the last work iconoclastic German philosopher Nietzsche wrote before his descent into madness....

'I could see that she was still terribly afraid, but I didn't soften anything; instead, seeing that she was afraid I deliberately intensified it.' In this short story, Dostoyevsky masterfully depicts desperation, greed, manipulation and suicide. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday....