Classics

'It was at the time when I was wandering around hungry in Kristiania, that strange city no one leaves before it has set its mark on them...' Hunger is the first-person story of a young man desperately trying to establish himself in the city as a writer, living in shabby lodgings where he can seldom afford to pay the rent, eating almost nothing, and engaging spasmodically and manically with landladies, eccentric elderly men, policemen, shopkeepers, pawnbrokers, and others on the way. He wanders around the streets, sits on benches trying to write, spends a night locked in a pitch-dark police cell, thinks, slides into remarkably inventive reveries, speculates on his mental health, his ethical comportment, his relation to the divinity, the topics he might write about. The traces of a consistent narrative logic are uncertain and blurred; the voice of the narrator keeps shifting between pragmatic appraisal of his situation, wild fantasies, manic outbursts, anger, and despair. This is a story that lies on the threshold of modernism, anticipating many of the dislocations that narrative will be subject to in the decades to come. This new translation seeks to restore the startling freshness and epidermal unease of Hamsun's breakthrough story of 1890. It remains faithful to the style and voice of the text, the shifts of tense, the indirect free style, and the constant changes of register as the inner monologue moves between poetic sensitivity, wild fantasies, manic outbursts, and hyperbolic emotion. Tore Rem's introduction provides an updated and fresh account of the genesis of Hunger, its book history and its reception. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Todd, Randy, and Carter are teenagers, grammar school boys who come across a younger boy while roaming the countryside around their commuter town. They decide to hold him hostage in a small cave in an abandoned quarry and then consider what to do next. In Lord of the Flies, William Golding needed a plane crash and a tropical island to bring out the capacity for violence and evil in his English schoolboys. Jane White, a mother and housewife living in Godalming when she wrote Quarry , needed only a chance encounter in fields not unlike those around her own development.Quarry is among the most unsettling novels of its time. White’s teenaged kidnappers ride bikes, worry about exams, and have to get home in time for supper. Yet they also imprison and torture another boy with the cold calculating objectivity that Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” Written in cool, realistic prose, Quarry creates a situation that seems fantastic and too horrifying to be true yet sustains an atmosphere of normality that only increases its power to shock. It is both a gripping and believable account of a crime and a parable filled with complex symbolism. “Nothing since A High Wind in Jamaica probes the depths of innocence with such terror and finesse as Jane White’s novel,” declared Newsday.

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'To die will be an awfully big adventure.' Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up, is one of the immortals of children's literature. J. M. Barrie first created Peter Pan as a baby, living in secret with the birds and fairies in the middle of London, but as the children for whom he invented the stories grew older, so too did Peter, reappearing in Neverland, where he was aided in his epic battles by the motherly and resourceful Wendy Darling. Since then Peter Pan has become a cultural icon and symbol for escapism and innocence, remaining popular with both children and adults. In this collected edition, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst brings together five of the main versions of the Peter Pan story, from Peter Pan's first appearance in The Little White Bird, to his novelisation of the story, the stage version, and unrealised silent film script. This edition contains an introduction and notes, detailed explanatory notes, original illustrations, and appendices that include Barrie's coda to the play that was only performed once. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Little treasures, the FLAME TREE COLLECTABLE CLASSICS are chosen to create a delightful and timeless home library. Each stunning, gift edition features deluxe cover treatments, ribbon markers, luxury endpapers and gilded edges. The unabridged text is accompanied by a Glossary of Victorian and Literary terms produced for the modern reader. An enduring children’s classic, The Secret Garden (1911) is as enchanting as it is moving. Orphaned after the death of her parents in a cholera epidemic, Mary Lennox is sent from India to her uncle’s home in England, the remote Misselthwaite Manor. Alienated from her surroundings, she initially takes against the cold, gloomy house and the seemingly barren Yorkshire landscape. However, her spirits begin to improve as she sets out in search of the manor’s long-neglected secret garden. As Mary unlock the mysteries of her new home, a powerful tale of redemption and regeneration unfolds.

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Little treasures, the FLAME TREE COLLECTABLE CLASSICS are chosen to create a delightful and timeless home library. Each stunning, gift edition features deluxe cover treatments, ribbon markers, luxury endpapers and gilded edges. The unabridged text is accompanied by a Glossary of Victorian and Literary terms produced for the modern reader. Mischievous and smart, Tom Sawyer, is one of American literature’s most beloved literary characters. Originally published in 1876, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer chronicles the exploits of Tom and his friends – including Twain’s other lovable rogue, Huckleberry Finn – as they witness a murder, play at being pirates along the Mississippi River, hunt for treasure and even attend their own funeral. Inspired by Twain’s own boyhood, this spirited classic is full of hi-jinks, not to mention a good deal of suspense. The FLAME TREE COLLECTABLE CLASSICS are chosen to create a delightful and timeless home library.

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A spellbinding selection of short stories in the original Italian alongside their English translationsThis new dual-language edition of ten stories selected from The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories celebrates some of the very best twentieth-century literature from Italy. Each story appears in the original Italian alongside an expert English translation, providing unique cultural insight and literary inspiration for language learners. Ranging from a spellbinding tale of the supernatural to a powerful portrait of post-war Italy, this revelatory collection includes works from beloved authors, Italo Calvino, Fausta Cialente, Alba de Céspedes, Grazia Deledda, Natalia Ginzburg, Elsa Morante, Lalla Romano, Umberto Saba, Alberto Savinio, and Elio Vittorini.

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