Bøker i Penguin Modern Classics-serien

'Powerful . . . unputdownably gripping' Guardian'The island itself. Its throbbing heat as if in a belljar under the sun, the scorpion in his son's bed, the deafening sound of cicadas'During his first holiday on the island of Porquerolles Dr Mahe caught a glimpse of something irresistible. As the memory continues to haunt him, he falls prey to a delusion that may offer an escape from his conventional existence - or may destroy him. This is the first English translation of The Mahe Circle, Simenon's dark, malevolent depiction of an ordinary man trapped in mundanity and consumed by obsession. 'Extraordinary . . . Simenon is one of the most important writers of the 20th century' Independent

Based on a real-life love triangle and later made into Fran ois Truffaut's famous New Wave film, Henri-Pierre Roche's Jules et Jim is a paean to youth set in free-spirited Paris before the First World War. Jules and Jim live a carefree, bohemian existence: they write in cafes, travel when the mood takes them, and share the women they love without jealousy. Like Lucie, flawless, an abbess, and Odile, impulsive, mischievous, almost feral. But it is Kate - with a smile the two friends have determined to follow always, but capricious enough to jump in the Seine from spite - who steals their hearts most thoroughly. Henri-Pierre Roche was in his mid-seventies when he wrote this, his autobiographical debut novel. The inspiration for the legendary film directed by Fran ois Truffaut, it captures perfectly with excitement and great humour the tenderness of three people in love with each other and with life.This Penguin Modern Classics edition is translated by Patrick Evans with an introduction by Agn s C. Poirier and an afterword by Fran ois Truffaut.Henri-Pierre Roche (1879-1959) was born in Paris. After studying art at the Academie Julian, he became a journalist and art dealer, mixing with the avant-garde artistic set; his friends and acquaintances included the artists Michel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, and in 1905 he introduced Gertrude Stein to Pablo Picasso. In 1916, following his discharge from the French army, Roche went to New York and set up a Dadaist magazine, The Blind Man, with Duchamp and the artist Beatrice Wood. It wasn't until his seventies that he wrote the semi-autobiographical Jules et Jim (1953); his second novel, Les deux anglaises et le continent, was published in 1956.If you enjoyed Jules et Jim, you might like Raymond Radiguet's The Devil in the Flesh, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'A perfect hymn to love and perhaps to life'Fran ois Truffaut, director of Jules et Jim and The 400 Blows

Tristes Tropiques begins with the line 'I hate travelling and explorers', yet during his life Claude Levi-Strauss travelled from wartime France to the Amazon basin and the dense upland jungles of Brazil, where he found 'human society reduced to its most basic expression'. His account of the people he encountered changed the field of anthropology, transforming Western notions of 'primitive' man. Tristes Tropiques is a major work of art as well as of scholarship. It is a memoir of exquisite beauty and a masterpiece of travel writing: funny, discursive, movingly detailing personal and cultural loss, and brilliantly connecting disparate fields of thought. Few books have had as powerful and broad an impact.

Tells the story of one little boy and his journey through childhood life up to his mid-teens. This title provides an insight into psychotherapy - how it works and what it can mean to people on a practical level.

Presents an analysis of the structures of social encounters from the perspective of the dramatic performance. This title shows us how people use such 'fixed props' as houses, clothes, and job situations; how they combine in teams resembling secret societies; and, how they adopt discrepant roles and communicate out of character.

Asylums is an analysis of life in "total institutions"--closed worlds like prisons, army camps, boarding schools, nursing homes and mental hospitals. It focuses on the relationship between the inmate and the institution, how the setting affects the person and how the person can deal with life on the inside.

The dwarf, the disfigured, the blind man, the homosexual, the ex-mental patient and the member of a racial or religious minority all share one characteristic: they are all socially "abnormal". This a study of of the ways in which a stigmatized person can develop a more positive social identity.

If you can't prove something, it is literally senseless - so argues Ayer in this irreverent and electrifying book. Statements are either true by definition (as in maths), or can be verified by direct experience. Ayer rejected metaphysical claims about god, the absolute, and objective values as completely nonsensical. Ayer was only 24 when he finished LANGUAGE, TRUTH & LOGIC, yet it shook the foundations of Anglo-American philosophy and made its author notorious. It became a classic text, cleared away the cobwebs in philosophical thinking, and has been enormously influential.