198 x 129 mm

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (Penguin Modern Classics) — one of the great satirical novels of the twentieth century, in which a fictional religion called Bokononism, a Caribbean dictator, and a substance called ice-nine converge on the end of the world with hilarious and devastating results. Funnier than it has any right to be about the end of everything. Essential Vonnegut. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

The Outsider by Albert Camus (Penguin Modern Classics) — the novel that launched absurdism as a cultural movement. Meursault’s flat, affectless narration of a crime he barely understands generates one of the most quietly devastating philosophical provocations in modern fiction. This fresh, acclaimed translation restores the neutrality of Camus’s original French. One of the essential European novels. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

The Chandelier by Clarice Lispector (Penguin Modern Classics) — Lispector’s second novel, published in Brazil in 1946 and only recently available in English. Virgínia’s vivid inner life collides with the external world of a Brazilian city in a novel of extraordinary strangeness and beauty, written in prose that operates at the absolute frontier of what language can do. Essential Lispector. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac (Penguin Modern Classics) — Kerouac’s most spiritually sincere novel, replacing the horizontal motion of On the Road with the vertical discipline of mountain climbing and Zen meditation. His portrait of the poet Gary Snyder as Japhy Ryder remains one of American literature’s most convincing portraits of how a person can be fully, completely alive. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac (Penguin Modern Classics) — the novel that launched the Beat Generation and defined a way of being alive that has influenced every writer, musician, and filmmaker who came after it. Written in three weeks of inspired composition, it has the energy and immediacy of something too urgent to be edited. Essential American literature. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

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.