Here is Oscar Wilde's most brilliant tour de force, a witty and buoyant comedy of manners that has delighted millions in countless productions since its first performance in London's St. James' Theatre on February 14, 1895.

George Bernard Shaw's witty comedy of manners, Pygmalion includes an introduction by Nicholas Grene in Penguin Classics. Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of the sculptor Pygmalion, who falls in love with his perfect female statue, it is also a barbed attack on the British class system and a statement of Shaw's feminist views.

It includes a map of Kent in the early nineteenth century, and appendices on Dickens's original ending and his working notes, giving readers an illuminating glimpse into the mind of a great novelist at work.Charles Dickens is one of the best-loved novelists in the English language, whose 200th anniversary was celebrated in 2012. His most famous books, including Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield and The Pickwick Papers, have been adapted for stage and sc...

This Norton Critical Edition is again based on the first edition text (1722), the only text known to be Defoe's own. It is accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations and the editor's essay outlining the novel's textual history. "Contexts" collects related documents on criminal transport, contemporary accounts of lives of crime, and colonial laws as they applied to servants, slaves, and runaways.

"Criticism" includes eleven interpretations by Juliet McMaster, Everett Zimmerman, Maximillia...

The second Oxford edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works reconsiders every detail of their text and presentation in the light of modern scholarship. The nature and authority of the early documents are re-examined, and the canon and chronological order of composition freshly established. Spelling and punctuation are modernized, and there is a brief introduction to each work, as well as an illuminating and informative General Introduction.

Included here for the firsttime is the play The Reign ...

The classic translation of the cornerstone work of western philosophy Plato's Republic is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy. Presented in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and three different interlocutors, it is an inquiry into the notion of a perfect community and the ideal individual within it. During the conversation other questions are raised: what is goodness; what is reality; what is knowledge; what is the purpose of education? ...

A New York Times Notable Book

A Time Magazine "Best Comix of the Year"

A San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times Best-seller

Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution.

In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah's regime, the triumph of the Islami...

Self-consciously staging itself in the psychotherapy sessions of a disturbed young man, Peter Shaffer's Equus is a shocking exploration of the limits of faith, of the intersecting worlds of the sacred and profane, and of the paltry value of a 'mundane' life, published in Penguin Modern Classics. When a deranged boy, Alan Strang, blinds six horses with a metal spike he is sentenced to psychiatric treatment. Dr Dysart is the man given the task of uncovering what happened the night Strang commit...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire is the tale of a catastrophic confrontation between fantasy and reality, embodied in the characters of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Arthur Miller. 'I have always depended on the kindness of strangers'Fading southern belle Blanche DuBois is adrift in the modern world.

When she arrives to stay with her sister Stella in a crowded, boisterous corner ...

I was supposed to be having the time of my life. When Esther Greenwood wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to become a writer.