'No voice, no low, no howl is heard; the chief sound of life here is a hiss.'Stories and poems by Herman Melville drawn from his years at seaIntroducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 8
'...dreaming of bears, or fire, or water...'The greatest of Elizabethan pamphleteers, Nashe had a magical ability with words, never more so than in The Terrors of the Night, where he mulls over ghosts
'Mind you, it was a pukka, respectable opium-house, and not one of those stifling, sweltering chandoo-khanas that you can find all over the City.'Kipling first became famous for his pungent, harsh and
'Those husbands that I had,Three of them were good and two were bad.The three that I call 'good' were rich and old...' One of the most bawdy, entertaining and popular stories from The Canterbury Tales
'An ass, clothed in the skin of a lion...'Aesop's animal fables are some of the earliest stories ever told, thought to have been composed by a slave in Greek antiquity and giving glimpses of a world t
'Nothing more lonely -' A selection of Basho's most magical haiku Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity
'Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav'n...'In this selection from Milton's great epic poem Paradise Lost, the fallen angels plot their revenge on Heaven after being banished to Hell - and Satan
With one's face in the wind you were almost burned with a shower of Firedrops'A selection from Pepys' startlingly vivid and candid diary, including his famous account of the Great FireIntroducing Litt
'She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth'A selection of Rossetti's most famous poems, from the hallucinatory 'Goblin Market' to 'In the bleak mid-winter' Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 bo
'O let them be left, wildness and wet'As Kingfishers Catch Fire is a selection of Gerard Manley Hopkins' incomparably brilliant poetry, ranging from the ecstasy of 'The Windhover' and 'Pied Beauty' to
'In two I'll slice the hair-seat / of Helga's kiss-gulper' 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 - w
'People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed - a knife - a purse - and a dark lane...'In this provocative and blackly fun
'He was not blind to the fact that murder, like the religions of the Pagan world, requires a victim as well as a priest...'This selection includes three of Wilde's brilliant short stories, all reflect
