Each little book in the Penguin Modern series offers a concentrated hit of its author’s work. From complete stories to essays and speeches to poems, these books celebrate the groundbreaking writers who today define the radical spirit of Penguin Modern Classics

• Letter from Birmingham Jail

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  1

  This landmark missive from one of the greatest activists in history calls for direct, non-violent resistance in the fight against racism, and reflects on the healing power of love.

• Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber

  Allen Ginsberg

  2

  Profane and prophetic verses about sex, death, revolution and America by the great icon of Beat poetry.

• The Breakthrough

  Daphne du Maurier

  3

  A scientist's attempt to solve the mystery of life after death has chilling consequences, in this eerie tale from a virtuoso writer of suspense.

• The Custard Heart

  Dorothy Parker

  4

  Wise-cracking and heartbreaking, these tales of women on the edge by the legendary wit Dorothy Parker show the darkness beneath the surface of the Jazz Age.

• Three Japanese Short Stories

  Akutagawa & Others

  5

  Three beguiling, strange, funny and hair-raising tales of imprisonment, memory and atrocity from early twentieth-century Japan.

• The Veiled Woman

  Anaïs Nin

  6

  Transgressive desires and sexual encounters are recounted in these four pieces from one of the greatest writers of erotic fiction.

• Notes on Nationalism

  George Orwell

  7

  Biting and timeless reflections on patriotism, prejudice and power, from the man who wrote about his nation better than anyone.

• Food

  Gertrude Stein

  8

  From apples to artichokes, these glittering, fragmented, painterly portraits of food by the avant-garde pioneer Gertrude Stein are redolent of sex, laughter and the joy of everyday life.

• The Three Electroknights

  Stanislaw Lem

  9

  From a giant of twentieth-century science fiction, these four miniature space epics feature crazy inventors, surreal worlds, robot kings and madcap machines.

• The Great Hunger

  Patrick Kavanagh

  10

  By turns tragic and comic, irascible and exalted, these are some of the most beloved poems by a writer who transformed Irish verse.

• The Legend of the Sleepers

  Danilo Kiš

  11

  Sleepers awake in a remote cave and the ancient mystic Simon Magus attempts a miracle, in these two magical, otherworldly tales from one of the greatest voices of twentieth-century Europe.

• The Black Ball

  Ralph Ellison

  12

  Stories of belonging and alienation, violence and beauty, racial injustice and unexpected kindness, from a writer of soaring emotion and lyricism.

• Till September Petronella

  Jean Rhys

  13

  Four searing stories of women - lost, adrift, down but not quite out - that span the course of a lifetime, from a Caribbean childhood to ruinous adulthood, to old age and beyond.

• Investigations of a Dog

  Franz Kafka

  14

  How does a dog see the world? How do any of us? In this playful and enigmatic story of a canine philosopher, Kafka explores the limits of knowledge.

• Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady

  Clarice Lispector

  15

  Three intoxicating tales of three women - their secret desires, fears and madness - from a giant of Brazilian literature.

• An Advertisement for Toothpaste

  Ryszard Kapuscinski

  16

  The great traveller-reporter finds an even stranger and more exotic society in his own home of post-war Poland than in any of the distant lands he has visited.

• Create Dangerously

  Albert Camus

  17

  Camus argues passionately that the artist has a responsibility to challenge, provoke and speak up for those who cannot, in his powerful Nobel Prize speech and lecture.

• The Vigilante

  John Steinbeck

  18

  In these searing stories set in California's Salinas Valley, one of America's greatest, most humane writers explores mob violence, a disturbing encounter and a bitter betrayal.

• I Have More Souls Than One

  Fernando Pessoa

  19

  Written in the voices of four different fictional alter egos, these rich, strange and mesmeric verses by Portugal's greatest poet express a maelstrom of conflicted thoughts and feelings.

• The Missing Girl

  Shirley Jackson

  20

  Malice, paranoia and creeping dread lie beneath the surface of ordinary American life in these chilling miniature masterworks of unease.

• Four Russian Short Stories

  Gazdanov & Others

  21

  In these stories, four writers - all exiles from revolutionary Russia - explore four deaths in a world in which old certainties have crumbled.

• The Distance of the Moon

  Italo Calvino

  22

  These exuberant, endlessly inventive stories interweave scientific fact with wordplay, whimsy and cosmic flights of fancy in a strange and wondrous universe.

• The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House

  Audre Lorde

  23

  From the self-described 'black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet', these soaring, urgent essays on the power of women, poetry and anger are filled with darkness and light.

• The Skeleton's Holiday

  Leonora Carrington

  24

  These dreamlike, carnivalesque fables by one of the leading lights of the Surrealist movement are masterpieces of invention and grand-guignol humour.

• The Finger

  William S. Burroughs

  25

  A deliberately severed finger, a junky's Christmas miracle and a Tangier con-artist, among others, feature in these hallucinogenic sketches and stories from the infamous Beat legend.

• The End

  Samuel Beckett

  26

  From the master of the absurd, these two stories of unnamed vagrants contending with decay and death combine bleakness with the blackest of humour.

• New York City in 1979

  Kathy Acker

  27

  A tale of art, sex, blood, junkies and whores in New York's underground, from cult literary icon Kathy Acker.

• Africa's Tarnished Name

  Chinua Achebe

  28

  Electrifying essays on the history, complexity and appropriation of a continent, from the father of modern African literature.

• Notes on Camp

  Susan Sontag

  29

  These two classic essays were the first works of criticism to break down the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture, and made Susan Sontag a literary sensation.

• The Red Tenda of Bologna

  John Berger

  30

  A dreamlike meditation on memory, food, paintings, a fond uncle and the improbable beauty of Bologna, from the visionary thinker and art critic.

• The Gigolo

  Françoise Sagan

  31

  A middle-aged woman breaks with her young lover; a husband is suspected of infidelity; a dying man reflects on his extramarital affairs, in these shimmering, bittersweet tales of desire and disillusionment.

• Glittering City

  Cyprian Ekwensi

  32

  Untrustworthy, charming Fussy Joe spins tall tales and breaks hearts in this rollicking story set in the 'sensational city' of 1960s Lagos.

• Piers of the Homeless Night

  Jack Kerouac

  33

  Soaring, freewheeling snapshots of life on the road across America, from the Beat writer who inspired a generation.

• Why Do You Wear a Cheap Watch?

  Hans Fallada

  34

  Darkly funny, streetwise tales of low-lifes, grifters and ordinary people trying to make ends meet in pre-War Germany.

• The Duke in His Domain

  Truman Capote

  35

  This mesmerizing profile of an insecure, vulnerable young Marlon Brando, brooding in a Kyoto hotel during a break from filming, is a peerless piece of journalism.

• Leaving the Yellow House

  Saul Bellow

  36

  A stubborn, hard-drinking elderly woman living in a desert town finds herself faced with an impossible choice, in this caustically funny, precisely observed tale from an American prose master.

• The Cracked Looking-Glass

  Katherine Anne Porter

  37

  A passionate, unfulfilled woman considers her life and her marriage in this moving novella by one of America's finest short story writers.

• Dark Days

  James Baldwin

  38

  Drawing on Baldwin's own experiences of prejudice in an America violently divided by race, these searing essays blend the intensely personal with the political to envisage a better world.

• Letter to My Mother

  Georges Simenon

  39

  Georges Simenon's stark, confessional letter to his dead mother explores the complexity of parent-child relationships and the bitterness of things unsaid.

• Death the Barber

  William Carlos Williams

  40

  Filled with bright, unforgettable images, the deceptively simple work of William Carlos Williams revolutionized American verse, and made him one of the greatest twentieth-century poets.

• The Problem that Has No Name

  Betty Friedan

  41

  The pioneering Betty Friedan gave voice to countless American housewives - who, despite being sold a dream of the perfect home and family, silently wondered 'Is this all?' - and set the women's movement in motion.

• The Dialogue of Two Snails

  Federico García Lorca

  42

  A dazzling selection of the beautiful, brutal and darkly brilliant work of Spain's greatest twentieth-century poet, from his beloved Gypsy Ballads to pieces appearing in English for the first time.

• Of Dogs and Walls

  Yuko Tsushima

  43

  Two luminous, tender stories from one of Japan's greatest twentieth-century writers, showing how childhood memories, dreams and fleeting encounters shape our lives.

• Madame du Deffand and the Idiots

  Javier Marías

  44

  Five sparkling, irreverent brief portraits of famous literary figures (including libertines, eccentrics and rogues) from Spain's greatest living writer.

• The Haunted Boy

  Carson McCullers

  45

  These moving stories by one of the great masters of Southern gothic portray love, sorrow and our search for happiness and understanding.

• The Garden of Forking Paths

  Jorge Luis Borges

  46

  Fantastical tales of mazes, puzzles, lost labyrinths and bookish mysteries, from the unique imagination of a literary magician.

• Fame

  Andy Warhol

  47

  The legendary pop artist Andy Warhol's hilarious, gossipy vignettes and aphorisms on the topics of love, fame and beauty.

• The Survivor

  Primo Levi

  48

  From the writer who bore witness to the twentieth century's darkest days, these verses of beauty and horror include the poem that inspired the title of his memoir, If This Is a Man.

• Lance

  Vladimir Nabokov

  49

  These three dazzling stories of obsession, mania and an extra-terrestrial nightmare feature all the wit, dexterity and inventiveness that are the hallmarks of Nabokov's genius.

• Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer

  Wendell Berry

  50

  The great American poet, novelist and farmer argues for a life lived slowly, and the value of home.