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Investigations of a Dog by Franz Kafka (Penguin) — one of Kafka’s most loved late stories, in which a philosophically obsessed dog investigates the great questions of canine existence with deadpan rigour. A precise satire of intellectual inquiry, a meditation on the limits of bounded knowledge, and a masterpiece of dark Kafkaesque comedy. A Penguin Little Black Classic. Published by Penguin.

Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady by Clarice Lispector (Penguin) — one of Lispector’s most celebrated stories in a beautiful Penguin Little Black Classic. A wealthy woman at a party slips into a reverie that becomes one of the most precise explorations of female interiority in twentieth-century fiction. An essential introduction to a writer who remains unlike anyone else. Published by Penguin.

Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima (Penguin Modern Classics) — the autobiographical novel in which Mishima first exposed the obsessions that would define his life and art: the necessity of performance, the impossibility of authentic selfhood, and the erotic charge of beauty and death. Psychologically precise and genuinely courageous — essential early Mishima and a landmark of postwar Japanese literature.

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Penguin) — Dostoevsky’s most delicate and lyrical work, a novella of romantic longing set during the luminous white nights of St Petersburg. A young man meets Nastenka on a bridge and falls into the most intense four nights of his life — a perfect introduction to Dostoevsky in a beautiful Penguin Little Black Classic edition.

Philosophy in the Bedroom by the Marquis de Sade (Penguin) — the most philosophically explicit of de Sade’s works, presenting his radical libertine philosophy through a dialogic structure that combines argument and narrative. Essential for serious students of the European radical Enlightenment, the history of ideas, and the limits of philosophical reason. Published by Penguin.

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (Penguin Classics) — the great American novel. Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of the white whale drives one of fiction’s most gripping narratives — simultaneously an account of nineteenth-century whaling, a study of obsession, and a philosophical inquiry into the limits of human knowledge. Written in prose of unmatched power. Essential world literature.

Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse (Penguin Modern Classics) — the tormented intellectual Harry Haller, divided between the human and the wolfish, encounters the forces that might liberate him. First published in 1927 and a counterculture classic in the 1960s — one of literature’s most searching investigations into the divided self. Trans. Basil Creighton.

Homo Faber by Max Frisch (Penguin Modern Classics) — UNESCO engineer Walter Faber’s rationalist worldview is shattered when coincidences reveal a suppressed truth about his past. A gripping tragedy and parable about the limits of the technological mind, written in prose perfectly calibrated to its narrator. Trans. Michael Bullock.