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	Aristotle - Poetics In his near-contemporary account of Greek tragedy, Aristotle examines the dramatic elements of plot, character, language and spectacle that combine to produce pity and fear in the audience, and asks why we derive pleasure from this apparently painful process. Taking examples from the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, The Poetics introduces into literary criticism such central concepts as mimesis ('imitation'), hamartia ('error'), and katharsis ('purification). Aristotle explains how the most effective tragedies rely on complication and resolution, recognition and reversals, centring on characters of heroic stature, idealized yet true to life. One of the most powerful, perceptive and influential works of criticism in Western literary history, the Poetics has informed serious thinking about drama ever since. Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0140446362 Published: 1996 Paperback: 144 pages, 129 x 198 mm Price: £7.99


	Lewis Carroll - The Annotated Alice Where did the Cheshire Cat get its grin? The bestselling Annotated Alice was the first work to decode the wordplay and mathematical riddles in Carroll's classic stories. This Definitive Edition combines the notes of Gardner's 1960s edition, together with hundreds of newer discoveries. Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0140289291 Published: 2001 Paperback: 368 pages, 129 x 198 mm Price: £9.99


	Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy - Volume 1: Inferno The acclaimed translation of the Inferno that retains all of the style, power and meaning of the original. This vigorous translation of the Inferno preserves Dante's simple, natural style and captures the swift movement of the original Italian verse. Mark Musa's blank verse rendition of the poet's jouney through the circles of Hell re-creates for the modern reader the rich meanings that Dante's poem had for his contemporaries. Musa's introduction and commentaries on each of the cantos brilliantly illuminate the text. Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0142437220 Published: 2003 Paperback: 432 pages, 129 x 198 mm Price: £7.99


	Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote 'Didn't I tell you they were only windmills? And only someone with windmills on the brain could have failed to see that!' Voted the greatest book of all time by the Nobel Institute, Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading romances of chivalry that he determines to become a knight errant and pursue bold adventures, accompanied by his squire, the cunning Sancho Panza. As they roam the world together, the aging Quixote's fancy leads them wildly astray. At the same time the relationship between the two men grows in fascinating subtlety. Often considered to be the first modern novel, Don Quixote is a wonderful burlesque of the popular literature its disordered protagonist is obsessed with. Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0140449094 Published: 2003 Paperback: 1056 pages, 129 x 198 mm Price: £9.99


	The Poetic Edda The collection of Norse-Icelandic mythological and heroic poetry known as the Poetic Edda contains the great narratives of the creation of the world and the coming of Ragnarok, the Doom of the Gods. The mythological poems explore the wisdom of the gods and giants, narrating the adventures of the god Thor against the hostile giants and the gods' rivalries amongst themselves. The heroic poems trace the exploits of the hero Helgi and his valkyrie bride, the tragic tale of Sigurd and Brynhild's doomed love, and the terrible drama of Sigurd's widow Gudrun and her children. Many of the poems predate the conversion of Scandinavia to Christianity, allowing us to glimpse the religious beliefs of the North. Since the rediscovery of the Poetic Edda in the seventeenth century, its poetry has fascinated artists as diverse as Thomas Gray, Richard Wagner and Jorge Luis Borges. This translation includes a genealogy of the gods and giants, and an index of names. Publisher: Oxford World's Classics ISBN: 0192839462 Published: 1999 Paperback: 367 pages Price: £8.99


	Anne Frank - The Diary of a Young Girl Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main in Germany in 1929. She moved to Holland with her family when the Nazis became powerful in Germany. During the Second World War the Nazis occupied Holland and created a police state. The Nazis believed that some races, such as Jews and gypsies, did not deserve the right to live and they started to arrest, transport and kill them. Anne and her family were Jews and were afraid for their lives and so they went into hiding. The family hid in the Secret Annexe at the back of a warehouse from July 1942 until August 1944 when they were discovered by the Nazis. During the terrible time in hiding and constantly in fear of discovery, Anne was growing from a young girl into a woman and she recorded her thoughts and experiences in a diary. The occupants of the Secret Annexe were betrayed just before the War ended, and were taken off to concentration camps. Anne died of typhus in 1945, just a few months before her sixteenth birthday. Her diary was found after the War and was later published by her father, the only surviving member of the family. It has become a bestseller throughout the world and is an extraordinary piece of writing from such a young girl. It reminds us of the horror of prejudice and persecution as well as telling one girl's remarkable story. One can't help but wonder what sort of writing Anne might have produced if she had survived the horrors of World War II. Publisher: Puffin ISBN: 0141315180 Published: 2002 Paperback: 352 pages Price: £6.99


	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Faust (Part One) The medieval myth of Faust's pact with the devil preoccupied Goethe for most of his working life and in the thirty years during which he worked on Part One he reshaped the legend to dramatize his own very personal concerns as a poet. His version depicts Faust as the greatest scholar of his age, master of every branch of learning - from philosophy and law to medicine and theology - only to recognise that the true secrets of existence remain hidden from mankind. To gain this knowledge, he must sacrifice the very thing that makes him human: his own soul. Reflecting Goethe's preoccupation with the exhilaration and terrors of human creativity, Faust offers an ironic perspective on the constant striving in the Age of Enlightenment to challenge the limits of man's advancement through art and science. Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0140440127 Published: 1973 Paperback: 208 pages, 129 x 198 mm Price: £6.99


	Homer - The Odyssey The epic tale of Odysseus and his ten-year journey home after the Trojan War forms one of the earliest and greatest works of Western literature. Confronted by natural and supernatural threats - shipwrecks, battles, monsters and the implacable enmity of the sea-god Poseidon - Odysseus must test his bravery and native cunning to the full if he is to reach his homeland safely and overcome the obstacles that, even there, await him. E. V. Rieu's translation of the Odyssey was the very first Penguin Classic to be published, and has itself achieved classic status. For this edition, his text has been sensitively revised and a new introduction added. Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0140449116 Published: 2003 Paperback: 416 pages, 129 x 198 mm Price: £4.99


	Victor Hugo - Les Misérables 'He was no longer Jean Valjean, but No. 24601.' Victor Hugo's tale of injustice, heroism and love follows the fortunes of Jean Valjean, an escaped convict determined to put his criminal past behind him. But his attempts to become a respected member of the community are constantly put under threat: by his own conscience, when, owing to a case of mistaken identity, another man is arrested in his place; and by the relentless investigations of the dogged policeman Javert. It is not simply for himself that Valjean must stay free, however, for he has sworn to protect the baby daughter of Fantine, driven to prostitution by poverty. A compelling and compassionate view of the victims of early nineteenth-century French society, Les Misérables is a novel on an epic scale, moving inexorably from the eve of the battle of Waterloo to the July Revolution of 1830. Publisher: Penguin Classics ISBN: 0140444300 Published: 1982 Paperback: 1232 pages Price: £9.99


	Henrik Ibsen - A Doll's House and Other Plays 'You've never loved me, you've only found it pleasant to be in love with me.' The plays in this volume, each written a decade apart, demonstrate different sides of Henrik Ibsen's genius, but all deal with themes of alienation from society and the breaking down of convention. A Doll's House (1879) portrays a woman questioning her duty to her husband and seeking to escape from the stifling confines of her marriage - a theme that shocked contemporary audiences and established Ibsen's name outside Scandinavia. In The League of Youth (1869), his first prose drama, Ibsen created a vivid comedy about a hypocritical politician, and in The Lady from the Sea (1888) he depicts a woman who longs for the life she enjoyed by the sea before she was married. Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0140441468 Published: 1973 Paperback: 336 pages, 129 x 198 mm Price: £7.99


	James Joyce - Ulysses Literature, as Joyce tells us through the character of Stephen Dedalus, 'is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'. Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, Ulysses has survived bowderlization, legal action and bitter controversy. An undisputed modernist classic, its ceaseless verbal inventiveness and astonishingly wide-ranging allusions confirm its standing as an imperishable monument to the human condition. Declan Kiberd says in his introduction that Ulysses is 'An endlessly open book of utopian epiphanies. It holds a mirror up to the colonial capital that was Dublin on 16 June 1904, but it also offers redemptive glimpses of a future world which might be made over in terms of those utopian moments.' This edition is the standard Random House/Bodley Head text that first appeared in 1960. Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0141182806 Published: 2000 Paperback: 1040 pages, 129 x 198 mm Price: £9.99


	Franz Kafka - The Trial 'Somebody must have laid false information against Josef K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.' From this first sentence onwards, Josef K. is on trial for his right to exist in a novel which, more than any other, is infinitely perceptive about the nature of terror. Idris Parry introduces his remarkable translation with an essay in which he points to the autobiographical elements in The Trial, in particular Kafka's broken engagement to Felice Bauer. Publisher: Penguin Classics ISBN: 0141182903 Published: 2000 Paperback: 208 pages Price: £7.99


	The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works The Oxford Complete Works is edited by some of the world's finest Shakespeare scholars and presents the plays as they were acted by Shakespeare's company. This second edition combines clearly written editorial material with a user-friendly layout of the text. Also included is a general introduction, glossary, bibliography and index of first lines of Sonnets. Publisher: Oxford University Press Editors: Stanley Wells et al. ISBN: 0199267170 Published: 2005 Paperback: 1422 pages, 234 x 172 mm Price: £30.00


	August Strindberg - Three Plays (The Father, Miss Julie, Easter) The three plays in this volume focus on the tumultuous relationships between men and women, whether they are father and daughter, brother and sister or lovers. Miss Julie is a ruthlessly realistic depiction of an upper class woman's seduction of a servant, emphasizing the differences and the antagonism between them. In The Father a man is brought to madness and driven out of his home by the suspicion that his daughter is not his own child, while Easter centres on a family in need of redemption for its sins and suffering, finding forgiveness at a season of rebirth. Strindberg's acute psychological analysis and his dramatization of naked emotion within a naturalistic domestic setting make him one of the great innovators of the modern theatre. Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0140440828 Published: 1975 Paperback: 176 pages, 129 x 198 mm Price: £8.99


	Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace 'Almost in the centre of this sky...shone the huge, brilliant comet of the year 1812 - the comet which was said to portend all manner of horrors and the end of the world.' Napoleon's invasion of Russia forms the backdrop for Tolstoy's literary masterpiece. At its centre are Pierre Bezuhov, searching for meaning in his life; cynical Prince Andrei, ennobled by suffering in the war; and Natasha Rostova, whose impulsiveness threatens to destroy her happiness. As Tolstoy follows the changing fortunes of these characters and their families, scenes of domestic life are juxtaposed with magnificent battle sequences, creating a view of humanity that is both epic and intimate. Often considered the greatest novel in any language, War and Peace is also a philosophical meditation on the tension between free will and fate as the forces of history move inexorably forward. Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0140444173 Published: 1982 Paperback: 1472 pages, 129 x 198 mm Price: £9.99