Classics

Fifty new books at e1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetryI am Black and lesbian, and what...

Collected Poems A poetry collection of epic scale and transformative vision from one of the most innovative American poets For over half a century, Jay Wright's poetry has been celebrated...

Selected Poems A dazzling selection from one of the most beloved American poets, whose distinctive verse resonates around the globehear your voicea wild sea pausing in the windFew poets in...

High in the Himalayas sits a dilapidated mansion, home to three people, each dreaming of another time. The judge, broken by a world too messy for justice, is haunted by...

From its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papp's Public Theater & on Broadway, the Obie Award-winning for colored girls who have considered...

The Unpublished Works I am gonna write poems til I die and when I have gotten outta this body I am gonna hang round in the wind and knock over...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksBest known for his hardboiled Harlem Detective series, Chester Himes was also a superb literary writer, beginning his creative life by writing...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books'I am Black because I come from the earth's insidenow take my word for jewel in the open light.'Impassioned and profound, the...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'But how sweet a fruit the 'suppose' must be, that people will sup and sup on it! A juicy fruit, like...

First published in 1963, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time stabbed at the heart of America's so-called "Negro problem." As remarkable for its masterful prose as for its frank and personal...

Introduction by Jamelle Bouie Kenneth Harper, a Black doctor and WWI veteran, returns to his hometown in Georgia to practice medicine after graduating from medical school in the North and...

A superb portrait of a generation of black Americans, this novel established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the twentieth centuryRalph Ellison's blistering and impassioned first novel...

'The greatest find in American crime fiction since Raymond Chandler' Sunday TimesJackson's woman has found him a foolproof way to make money - a technique for turning ten dollar bills into...

Women so empowered are dangerous Written with a 'black woman's anger' and the precision of a poet, these searing pieces by the groundbreaking writer Audre Lorde are a celebration of...

A Biomythography A soaring, sensual coming-of-age novel, by the legendary 'Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet'If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for...

A brave, beautiful book that could double as a handbook to accompany anyone on their journey through cancer Jackie Kay, New StatesmanI would never have chosen this path, but I am...

The most acclaimed volume of poetry by the legendary 'Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet'I have been womanfor a long timebeware my smileI am treacherous with old magicFilled with rage and...

Published in 1962, this is an emotionally intense novel of love, hatred, race and liberal America in the 1960s. Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem and France, ANOTHER COUNTRY tells the...

We are in Harlem, the black soul of New York City, in the era of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. The narrator of Baldwin's novel is Tish nineteen, and pregnant....

A masterful novel about the injustices of the prison system and the humanity that flourishes despite it, by the author of the acclaimed Harlem Detective seriesThrill-seeking white teenager Jimmy Monroe...

A selection from the collected poems of Maya Angelou, translated into te reo Maori by thirty-four wahine from across Aotearoa. Rangona ai ko te reo o te tira wahine. He...

Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Fall 2024 Poetry Books Before Langston Hughes and his literary prowess became synonymous with American poetry, he was an eighteen-year-old on a train to Mexico City,...

Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. When, at sixteen, Janie is caught...

From the time she was born, she had been hemmed into an ever-narrowing space, until now she was very nearly walled in . . . New York City, 1940s. In...

A classic thriller from the Harlem Detective series, where love, jealousy and many-peopled mayhem aboundsBig Joe Pullen is dead and his wake is getting boozy. When the opium-addicted Reverend Short...

Fast-paced and hard-boiled, this Harlem Detectives novel follows a pile of stolen money - or it would if anyone could find it...Alberta Wright drops dead on the street during a...

The searing debut novel by Chester Himes, 'written with youthful panache and a bellyful of anger' (Observer)Robert 'Bob' Jones - crew leader, shipyard worker, educated, employed - is finding life...

The final novel in the trailblazing Harlem Detective series, set in a New York City at boiling pointBawdy and tough-talking, wickedly funny and wantonly sensual, Blind Man With a Pistol is a...

A major hardcover compendium of nonfiction by one of America's most brilliant essayists, timed to the celebration of his centenaryNovelist, essayist, and public intellectual - James Baldwin is widely regarded...

Originally featured in the New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town’ column, these are Jamaica Kincaid’s first impressions of snobbish, mobbish New York. ‘Fresh, risky, improvisational and hard-to-categorize writing’ - Chicago Tribune Talk...

A beautiful commemorative edition of Dr. Martin Luther King's essay "Letter from Birmingham Jail,” part of Dr. King's archives published exclusively by HarperCollins. With an afterword by Reginald Dwayne Betts...

This powerful graphic novel adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s groundbreaking dystopian novel stands beside the acclaimed previous graphic novel adaptations, Kindred, a #1 New York Times bestseller, and Parable of the Sower, winner of...

A story of a marriage, Jamaica Kincaid’s most recent novel is one of her most emotionally and thematically daring works. ‘If revenge is a dish best served cold, See Now Then is...

More than 35 years after its release, Kindred continues to draw in new readers with its deep exploration of the violence and loss of humanity caused by slavery in the United...

‘Ted Chiang is one of the most exciting writers in science fiction . . . These parables are filled with hope and humanism.’ – The Daily Telegraph From the acclaimed author of Stories...

My Dungeon Shook; Down at the Cross 'It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception...

With a new introduction by Robert Jones, Jr, author of The New York Times bestselling novel, The Prophets 'Gloria Naylor is a brilliant word-worker and a breathtaking story-teller. Mama Day is her masterpiece' Tayari Jones...

Into a white millionaire's Caribbean mansion comes Jadine. Then there's Son.Jadine is sophisticated, beautiful, a black American graduate of the Sorbonne. Son is a black fugitive from small-town Florida who...

Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison is one of the finest novelists of our times.Four young women are brutally attacked near an all-black town in rural Oklahoma.The inevitability of this...

The masterful, Pulitzer Prize-winning literary epic about the painful and complex realities of slave life on a Southern plantation. An utterly original exploration of race, trust and the cruel truths...

Amy Tan's bestselling classic novel of mothers and daughters.Four Chinese women, four America daughters - can they learn to understand each other?In 1949 a group of Chinese women, recent immigrants...

A short, powerful memoir from one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century In this deeply personal book, Baldwin reflects on the experiences that shaped him as a...

Memories of Girlhood One of bell hooks' foundational works introduced to the UK for the first time. 'With the emotion of poetry, the narrative of a novel, and the truth...

The first story collection by science fiction legend Ted Chiang and the basis for the Oscar-winning film Arrival. With Stories of Your Life and Others, his masterful debut collection, multiple-award-winning author...

'The overlooked American writer who blows apart modern thinking on race' Telegraph Born to a white mother and an absent black father, and despised for her dark skin, Helga Crane...

Finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Zach Wells is a perpetually dissatisfied geologist-slash-paleobiologist. Expert in a very narrow area – the geological history of a cave forty-four metres...

‘Absorbing in its simplicity about bourgeois banality and the quest for expression’ NEW YORK TIMES  Kevin Pace is working on a painting that he won't allow anyone to see: not his...

An artist, a cop, a cowboy, several fly fishermen and even a reluctant romance novelist inhabit these revealing and often hilarious stories. An old man ends up in a high-speed...

A memoir of politics and activism, from the bestselling and beloved author of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS 'A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal...

A memoir about motherhood and music from the bestselling author of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS 'A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman' BARACK...