Penguin Classic Crime

A wonderfully wicked new anthology from the editor of The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime It is the Victorian era and society is both entranced by and fearful of that suspicious character known as the New Woman. She rides those new- fangled bicycles and doesn't like to be told what to do. And, in crime fiction, such female detectives as Loveday Brooke, Dorcas Dene, and Lady Molly of Scotland Yard are out there shadowing suspects, crawling through secret passages, fingerprinting corpses, and sometimes committing a lesser crime in order to solve a murder. In The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime, Michael Sims has brought together all of the era's great crime-fighting females- plus a few choice crooks, including Four Square Jane and the Sorceress of the Strand.

Los Angeles. In no other city do sex, celebrity, money, and crime exert such an irresistible magnetic field. And no writer has mapped that field with greater savagery and savvy than James Ellroy. With this fever-hot collection of reportage and short fiction, he returns to his native habitat and portrays it as a smog-shrouded netherworld where"every third person is a peeper, prowler, pederast, or pimp." From the scandal sheets of the 1950s to this morning's police blotter, Ellroy reopens true crimes and restores human dimensions to their victims. Sublimely, he resurrects the rag Hush-Hush magazine. And in a baroquely plotted novella of slaughter and corruption he enlists the forgotten luminaries of a lost Hollywood. Shocking, mesmerizing, and written in prose as wounding as an ice pick, Crime Wave is Ellroy at his best.

The essential guide to twentieth-century literature around the world For six decades the Penguin Modern Classics series has been an era-defining, ever-evolving series of books, encompassing works by modernist pioneers, avant-garde iconoclasts, radical visionaries and timeless storytellers. This reader's companion showcases every title published in the series so far, with more than 1,800 books and 600 authors, from Achebe and Adonis to Zamyatin and Zweig. It is the essential guide to twentieth-century literature around the world, and the companion volume to The Penguin Classics Book. Bursting with lively descriptions, surprising reading lists, key literary movements and over two thousand cover images, The Penguin Modern Classics Book is an invitation to dive in and explore the greatest literature of the last hundred years.

The great Raymond Chandler once noted that "the detective or mystery story . . . has become so thoroughly explored that the real problem for a writer now is to avoid writing a mystery while appearing to do so." And that is precisely what the contributors in this masterful anthology have accomplished. For in The Vintage Book of Classic Crime, Michael Dibdin has assembled fifty-four of the most stylish, original and subversive examples of the literature of murder. Whether written by eminent practitioners such as James M. Cain or Dashiell Hammett, or distinguished "amateurs" like Ernest Hemingway or Franz Kafka, the stories, essays, and novel excerpts in this volume push past their genre's familiar conventions to explore what makes crime CRIME. Suspenseful and exhilarating, hard-boiled and high art, the result is a dazzling gallery of murder that reveals how daring and controversial crime writing can be. Contributors and stories include: James M. Cain, "The Postman Always Rings Twice"' Raymond Chandler, "Pick-up on Noon Street"; Anton Chekhov, "The Shooting Party"; Umberto Eco; William Faulkner, "Smoke"; Dashiell Hammett, "The Glass Key"; Ernest Hemingway, "The Killers"; George V. Higgins, "Trust"; Patricia Highsmith, "Strangers on a Train"; P.D. James and T.A. Critchley, "The Maul and the Pear Tree"; James Joyce; Franz Kafka; Elmore Leonard; Walter Mosley, "A Red Death"; Edgar Allan Poe,"The Tell-tale Heart"; Georges Simenon, "Maiget's Memoirs"; Isaac Bashevis Singer, "Under the Knife"; Julian Symons, "The Man Who Killed Himself"; Barbara Vine, "A Dark-Adapted Eye"; James Thurber; Oscar Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Gray"; and Emile Zola, "Therese Raquin."

A celebrated new translation of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece reveals the “social problems facing our own society” (Nation). Published to great acclaim and fierce controversy in 1866, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment has left an indelible mark on global literature and on our modern world. Declared a PBS “Great American Read,” Michael Katz’s sparkling new translation gives new life to the story of Raskolnikov, an impoverished student who sees himself as extraordinary and therefore free to commit crimes—even murder—in a work that best embodies the existential dilemmas of man’s instinctual will to power. Embracing the complex linguistic blend inherent in modern literary Russian, Katz “revives the intensity Dostoevsky’s first readers experienced, and proves that Crime and Punishment still has the power to surprise and enthrall us” (Susan Reynolds). With its searing and unique portrayal of the labyrinthine universe of nineteenth-century St. Petersburg, this “rare Dostoevsky translation” (William Mills Todd III, Harvard) will captivate lovers of world literature for years to come.