Classic Fiction

Some of our favorite classic stories, modern classics, and classic stories reimagined.

Updated September 11, 2025
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Things fall apart
Achebe, Chinua.
Paper Book
The most widely read book in modern African literature, presented here in stunning hardcover, tells two overlapping, intertwining stories, both of which center around a fearless Igbo warrior in Nigeria in the late 1800s, before and after the European colonization of the continent. ...
Watership Down
Adams, Richard
Paper Book
Now with a new introduction by Madeline Miller, the New York Times bestselling author of The Song of Achilles and Circe. The 50th anniversary edition of Richard Adam's timeless classic, the tale of a band of wild rabbits struggling to hold onto their place...
Little women
Alcott, Louisa May
Paper Book
Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth - four "little...
Bless me, Ultima
Anaya, Rudolfo A.
Paper Book
Full of "sensual dreams [and] unexplained phenomena," this "best-known and most-respected" coming-of-age classic from the godfather of Chicano literature follows a young boy growing up in the llano, or plains, of post-World War II New Mexico, and the generous curandera who introduces him to the...
Persuasion
Austen, Jane
Paper Book
Of all Jane Austen's great and delightful novels, Persuasion is widely regarded as the most moving--the entrancing story of a second chance at love. Anne Elliot, daughter of the snobbish, spendthrift Sir Walter Elliot, is a woman of quiet charm and deep feelings. When she...
The silence of the girls
Barker, Pat
Paper Book
A Washington Post Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, The Economist, Financial Times   Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award Finalist for the Women's Prize for Fiction Here is the story of the Iliad as we've never...
Fahrenheit 451
Bradbury, Ray
Paper Book
Celebrate the 40th anniversary of this timeless classic with a special edition featuring a new foreword by the author and a message that is as relevant today as when it was first published. Since the late 1940s, Ray Bradbury has been revered for his works of science fiction and fantasy. With more...
Jane Eyre
Bront,? Charlotte
Paper Book
Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Charlotte Bront 's first published novel, Jane Eyre...
The good earth
Buck, Pearl S.
Paper Book
Nobel Laureate Pearl S. Buck's epic Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and Oprah Book Club selection about a vanished China and one family's shifting fortunes. Though more than seventy years have passed since this remarkable novel won the Pulitzer Prize, it has retained its popularity and...
A clockwork orange
Burgess, Anthony
Paper Book
Anthony Burgess's modern classic of youthful violence and social redemption, reissued to include the controversial last chapter not previously published in this country, with a new introduction by the author. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Kindred
Butler, Octavia E.
Paper Book
Experience the novel that redefined American literature by the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower, MacArthur "Genius," and Nebula and Hugo award winner Selected by The Atlantic as one of the "most consequential novels of the past 100 years"...
O pioneers!
Cather, Willa
Paper Book
The novel that first made Willa Cather famous--a powerfully mythic tale of the American frontier told through the life of one extraordinary woman One of America's greatest writers, Cather established her talent and her reputation with this extraordinary novel--the first of her...
Don Quixote
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de
Paper Book
Edith Grossman's definitive English translation of the Spanish masterpiece, a landmark work of early modern literature, in an expanded P.S. edition Widely regarded as one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, this classic of Spanish literature, Don Quixote,...
The awakening
Chopin, Kate
Paper Book
A new edition of Kate Chopin's controversial masterpiece, an essential novel in the canon of early feminism--with an introduction by Carmen Maria Machado, award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties. "Whatever came, she had resolved never again to belong to...
The woman in white
Collins, Wilkie
Paper Book
Wilkie Collins's classic thriller took the world by storm on its first appearance in 1859, with everything from dances to perfumes to dresses named in honor of the "woman in white."  The novel's continuing fascination stems in part from a distinctive blend of melodrama, comedy, and realism;...
The last of the Mohicans
Cooper, James Fenimore
Paper Book
The story is set in the British province of New York during the French and Indian War, and concerns--in part--a Huron massacre (with passive French acquiescence) of between 500 to 1,500 Anglo-American troops, who had honorably surrendered at Fort William Henry, plus some women and servants; the...
The red badge of courage
Crane, Stephen
Paper Book
First published in 1895, America's greatest novelof the Civil War was written before 21-year-oldStephen Crane had "smelled even the powder of asham battle." But this powerful psychologicalstudy of a young soldier's struggle with thehorrors, both within and without, that war strikes thereader with...
Robinson Crusoe
Defoe, Daniel
Paper Book
This classic story of a shipwrecked mariner on a deserted island is perhaps the greatest adventure in all of English literature. Fleeing from pirates, Robinson Crusoe is swept ashore in a storm possessing only a knife, a box of tobacco, a pipe-and the will to survive. His is the saga of a man alone:...
Great expectations
Dickens, Charles
Paper Book
One of Charles Dickens's most fascinating novels, Great Expectations follows the orphan Pip as he leaves behind a childhood of misery and poverty after an anonymous benefactor offers him a chance at the life of a gentleman. From the young Pip's first terrifying encounter with...
Crime and punishment
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Paper Book
A masterpiece of guilt and redemption that transforms the sordid story of an old woman's murder into the nineteenth century's profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel. * ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME ...
Invisible man
Ellison, Ralph.
Paper Book
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * NATIONAL BESTSELLER * In this deeply compelling novel and epic milestone of American literature, a nameless narrator tells his story from the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be. One of The Atlantic<...
James : a novel
Everett, Percival
Paper Book
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER * #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view * In development as a feature film to be...
The sound and the fury : the corrected text
Faulkner, William
Paper Book
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time * One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years From the Modern Library's new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by William Faulkner--also available are Snopes,...
The great Gatsby
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Paper Book
The only edition of the beloved classic that is authorized by Fitzgerald's family and from his lifelong publisher. This edition is the enduring original text, updated with the author's own revisions, a foreword by his granddaughter, and with a new introduction by National Book...
A room with a view
Forster, E. M.
Paper Book
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One hundred years of solitude
Garca? Mr?quez, Gabriel
Paper Book
Now a Netflix original series! "One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. . . . García Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound,...
Wives and daughters
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn
Paper Book
Set in English society before the 1832 Reform Bill, Wives and Daughters centres on the story of youthful Molly Gibson, brought up from childhood by her father. When he remarries a new stepsister, Cynthia, enters Molly's quiet life. Loveable but worldly and troubling, Cynthia's arrival alters Molly's...
Cold Comfort Farm
Gibbons, Stella
Paper Book
"Quite simply one of the funniest satirical novels of the last century." --Nancy Pearl, NPR's Morning Edition The deliriously entertaining Cold Comfort Farm is "very probably the funniest book ever written" (The Sunday Times, London), a...
Lord of the flies
Golding, William
Paper Book
William Golding's profound tale of stranded youth, survival, and the shadowy depths of human nature, with an afterword by Lois Lowry "Lord of the Flies is one of my favorite books. I still read it every couple of years."--Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games...
A haunting on the hill
Hand, Elizabeth
Paper Book
From award-winning author Elizabeth Hand comes the first-ever novel authorized to return to the world of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House--an "eerily beautiful, strangely seductive, and genuinely upsetting" (Alix E. Harrow) new ...
Far from the madding crowd
Hardy, Thomas
Paper Book
Far From the Madding Crowd, published in 1874, is the book that made Hardy famous.  Bathsheba Everdene is a prosperous farmer in Hardy's fictional Wessex county whose strong-minded independence and vanity lead to disastrous consequences for her and the three very...
The scarlet letter
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Paper Book
The canonical American masterpiece of sin, guilt, and revenge, in an authoritative new edition from Penguin Classics with a foreword by Tom Perrotta   At once retrospective and radically new, The Scarlet Letter portrays seventeenth-century Puritan New England, a time...
Catch-22 : a novel
Heller, Joseph
Paper Book
Named one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read * One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years One of the funniest books ever written, Joseph Heller's masterpiece about a bomber squadron in the Second World War's...
The sun also rises
Hemingway, Ernest
Paper Book
This authorized edition celebrates the 100th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway's first novel--a quintessential story of the Lost Generation--with an introduction by bestselling author Colm Tóibín. "The ideal companion for troubled times: equal parts Continental escape and...
Their eyes were watching God
Hurston, Zora Neale.
Paper Book
Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person -- no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.
Ayesha at last
Jalaluddin, Uzma
Paper Book
As seen on The Today Show! One of the best summer romance picks! A modern-day Muslim Pride and Prejudice for a new generation of love. Ayesha Shamsi has a lot going on. Her dreams of being a poet have been set aside for a teaching job so she can pay off her debts to her...
Meg & Jo
Kantra, Virginia
Paper Book
A heartwarming modern novel inspired by Little Women, to coincide with the release of the new film in early 2020.
Zorba the Greek
Kazantzakis, Nikos
Demon Copperhead : a novel
Kingsolver, Barbara
Paper Book
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE * WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION New York Times Readers' Pick: Top 100 Books of the 21st Century * An Oprah's Book Club Selection * An Instant New York Times Bestseller * An Instant Wall Street Journal Bestseller * A #1 Washington Post...
Paul takes the form of a mortal girl : a novel
Lawlor, Andrea
Paper Book
"In these irreverent pages, a shapeshifter gets a crash course in gender and sexuality by inhabiting both sides of the binary and arriving precisely somewhere in the middle." --O, The Oprah Magazine "HOT" (Maggie Nelson) * "TIGHT" (Eileen Myles) * "DEEP" (Michelle Tea)<...
To kill a mockingbird
Lee, Harper.
Paper Book
"Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel--a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem...
Main Street
Lewis, Sinclair
Paper Book
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The call of the wild
London, Jack
Paper Book
Stolen from his home and family, a dog named Buck must quickly learn the harsh law of survival among the men and dogs of the gold-crazed North. His intelligence, courage, and cunning transform him into a feared leader. As wolves attack and men grow desperate, Buck must heed the call of the wild....
Moby-Dick
Melville, Herman
Paper Book
Introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick Illustrations by Rockwell Kent Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS'sThe Great American Read First published in 1851, Herman Melville's masterpiece is, in Elizabeth Hardwick's words, "the...
Circe : a novel
Miller, Madeline
Paper Book
This #1 New York Times bestseller is a "bold and subversive retelling of the goddess's story" that brilliantly reimagines the life of Circe, formidable sorceress of The Odyssey (Alexandra Alter, TheNew York Times). In the house of Helios,...
Beloved : a novel
Morrison, Toni.
Paper Book
Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend...
The tale of Genji
Murasaki Shikibu
Paper Book
  In the early eleventh century Murasaki Shikibu, a lady in the Heian court of Japan, wrote what many consider to be the world's first novel, more than three centuries before Chaucer. The Heian era (794--1185) is recognized as one of the very greatest periods in Japanese literature,...
Lolita
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich
Paper Book
Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as a classic not to the controversy its subject matter aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness. With an introduction by Martin Amis. When it was...
Hello beautiful : a novel
Napolitano, Ann
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * MORE THAN ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD! From the author of Dear Edward comes a "powerfully affecting" (People) family story that asks: Can love make a broken person whole? "Another tender tearjerker...
The things they carried : a work of fiction
O'Brien, Tim
Paper Book
A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking work of Vietnam War fiction and a meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. ...
Cry, the beloved country
Paton, Alan.
Paper Book
Cry, the Beloved Country is a beautifully told and profoundly compassionate story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set in the troubled and changing South Africa of the 1940s. The book is written with such keen empathy and understanding that to read it is to share fully in the...
The bell jar
Plath, Sylvia.
Paper Book
One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels "A coming-of-age masterpiece." --Boston Globe "It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath's voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal." --USA Today A beautifully designed Harper Perennial...
True grit : a novel
Portis, Charles.
Paper Book
#1 New York Times bestseller "An epic and a legend." --Washington Post "Quite simply, an American masterpiece." --Boston Globe "Charles Portis had a wonderful talent--original, quirky, exciting." --Larry...
All quiet on the Western Front
Remarque, Erich Maria
Paper Book
The masterpiece of the German experience during World War I, considered by many the greatest war novel of all time--with an Oscar-winning film adaptation now streaming on Netflix.   "[Erich Maria Remarque] is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank."--...
Wide Sargasso Sea
Rhys, Jean.
Paper Book
Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon the publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of fiction's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Set in the Caribbean, its heroine is Antoinette Cosway, a...
Wild and distant seas : a novel
Roberts, Tara Karr
Paper Book
Evangeline Hussey has made a home for herself on Nantucket, though she knows she is still an outsider to the island's small, close-knit community, one that by 1849 has started to feel the decline of a once-thriving whaling industry. Her husband, Hosea, and the life they built together, was once...
The catcher in the rye
Salinger, J. D.
Paper Book
The "brilliant, funny, meaningful novel" (The New Yorker) that established J. D. Salinger as a leading voice in American literature--and that has instilled in millions of readers around the world a lifelong love of books.     "If you...
Frankenstein : or, The modern Prometheus
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Paper Book
Obsessed by creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life by electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear....
A thousand acres
Smiley, Jane.
Paper Book
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER * The only hardcover edition of the "powerful and poignant" (The New York Times Book Review) twentieth-century reimagining of Shakespeare's King Lear * With a new introduction by Lucy Hughes-Hallett * EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY CONTEMPORARY CLASSICS ...
A tree grows in Brooklyn
Smith, Betty
Paper Book
A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick A special 75th anniversary edition of the beloved American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the twentieth century. From the moment she entered the world, Francie Nolan needed to be made of stern stuff, for ...
Angle of repose
Stegner, Wallace
Paper Book
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER * A "masterful" (Boston Globe) portrait of four generations in an American family and the traditions of our national past "Brilliant . . . Two stories, past and present, merge to produce what important fiction must: a sense of the enhancement...
The grapes of wrath
Steinbeck, John
Paper Book
The 75th anniversary hardcover edition of Steinbeck's crowning literary achievement First published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads,...
Dracula
Stoker, Bram
Paper Book
'it was butcher work...the horrid screeching as the stake drove home; the plunging of writhing form, and lips of bloody foam'Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic shocker introduced Count Dracula to the world, an ancient creature bent on bringing his contagion to London, the very heart of the British Empire....
Uncle Tom's cabin, or, Life among the lowly
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Paper Book
Harriet Beecher Stowe's timeless and moving novel, an incendiary work that fanned the embers of the struggle between free and slave states into the fire of the Civil War. Uncle Tom's Cabin is the story of the slave Tom. Devout and loyal, he is sold and sent down south,...
Address unknown
Taylor, Kathrine Kressmann.
Audiobook
A rediscovered classic and international bestseller that recounts the gripping tale of a friendship destroyed at the hands of Nazi Germany  In this searing novel, Kathrine Kressmann Taylor brings vividly to life the insidious spread of Nazism through a series of...
Vanity fair
Thackeray, William Makepeace
Paper Book
A panoramic satire of English society during the Napoleonic Wars, Vanity Fair is William Makepeace Thackeray's masterpiece. At its center is one of the most unforgettable characters in nineteenth-century literature: the enthralling Becky Sharp, a charmingly ruthless social climber who is...
War and peace
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
Paper Book
War and Peace centers broadly on Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the best-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves behind...
A confederacy of dunces
Toole, John Kennedy
Paper Book
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize "A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue."--The New York Times Book Review A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero,...
Fathers and sons
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich
Ebook
From " one of the greatest Russian writers . . . perhaps the best novel about the generational divide between parents and children" (Russia Beyond).   This iconic Russian work of domestic fiction is thought to be the greatest literary...
The adventures of Tom Sawyer
Twain, Mark
Paper Book
Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read Sparkling with mischief, jumping with youthful adventurousness, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer is one of the most splendid re-creations of childhood in all of literature. It is a lighthearted...
A journey to the centre of the earth
Verne, Jules
Paper Book
An ancient book is opened by the eccentric Professor Lidenbrock and his life - and the life of his nephew Axel - is changed for ever. An old piece of paper has tumbled from the book, a priceless parchment that will lead them on a terrifying journey to find what lies at the centre of the Earth. A...
Slaughterhouse-five, or, The children's crusade : a duty-dance with death
Vonnegut, Kurt.
Paper Book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Kurt Vonnegut's masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five is "a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century" (Time). Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time * One of...
The age of innocence
Wharton, Edith
Paper Book
One of Wharton's most renowned novels--and the first by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize--exquisitely details the struggle between love and responsibility through the experiences of men and women in Gilded Age New York. * With an introduction by Peter Washington The novel...
The picture of Dorian Gray
Wilde, Oscar
Paper Book
HarperCollins is proud to present our range of timeless literary classics. 'How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrid, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young... If it was only the other way!' Wilde's first and only published novel recounts the story...
The man who lived underground : a novel
Wright, Richard
Paper Book
Fred Daniels, a black man, is picked up randomly by the police after a brutal murder in a Chicago neighbourhood and taken to the local precinct where he is tortured until he confesses to a crime he didn't commit. After signing a confession, he escapes from the precinct and takes up residence in the...

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