**Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse’s iconic countercultural novel about the search for authenticity in an inauthentic world, in a new translationA Penguin Classic**At first glance, Harry Haller seems like a respectable, educated man. In reality, he is the Steppenwolf: wild, strange, alienated from society, and repulsed by the modern age. But as he is drawn into a series of dreamlike and sometimes savage encounters—accompanied by, among others, Mozart, Goethe, and the bewitc...

'What matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now.'A hugely influential collection for writers and artists of all kinds, Rilke's profound and lyrical letters to a young friend advise on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself.One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works...

The ten letters collected here are arguably the most famous and beloved letters of our century. Written when Rainer Maria Rilke was himself still a young man with most of his greatest work before him, they are addressed to a student who had sent Rilke some of his work, asking for advice about becoming a writer. The two never met, but over a period of several years Rilke wrote him these ten letters, which have been enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of readers.

Sitting at his desk, Bernardo Soares imagined himself free forever of Rua dos Douradores, of his boss Vasques, of Moreira the book-keeper, of all the other employees, the errand boy, the post boy, even the cat. But if he left them all tomorrow and discarded the suit of clothes he wears, what else would he do? Because he would have to do something. And what suit would he wear? Because he would have to wear another suit. A self-deprecating reflection on the sheer distance between the loftine...

With its blend of Eastern mysticism and Western culture, Nobel Prize-winning author Hermann Hesse's best-known and most autobiographical work is one of literature's most poetic evocations of the soul's journey to liberation."Hermann Hesse is the greatest writer of the century."—San Francisco ChronicleHarry Haller is a sad and lonely figure, a reclusive intellectual for whom life holds no joy. He struggles to reconc...

'... a human being, an intellectual human being who constantly bends the entire force of his mind on the ridiculous task of forcing a wooden king into the corner of a wooden board, and does it without going mad!'A group of passengers on a cruise ship challenge the world chess champion to a match. At first, they crumble, until they are helped by whispered advice from a stranger in the crowd - a man who will risk everything to win. Stefan Zweig's acclaimed novella Ch...

The acclaimed author details her bohemian life in 1930s Paris—including her famous affair with Henry Miller—in the classic first volume of her diaries.Born in France to Cuban parents, Anais Nin began keeping a diary at the age of eleven and continued the practice for the rest of her life. Confessional, scandalous, and thoroughly absorbing, her diaries became one of the most celebrated literary projects of the twentieth century. Writing candidly of her marriages and...

A tale of genius in which Thomas Mann explores the artist's relation to life.First published in 1912, Death in Venice tells how Gustave von Aschenbach, a writer utterly absorbed in his work, arrives in Venice as the result of a 'youthfully ardent thirst for distant scenes', and meets a young boy by whose beauty he becomes obsessed. His pitiful pursuit of the object of his affection and its inevitable and pathetic climax are told here with the particular skill the a...

"Kurt Beals makes this 1927 classic of psychedelic dreams sparkle in new technicolor splendor. Talk to your doctor about possible side effects." —Martin Puchner, author of The Language of Thieves: My Family's Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to EliminateThis revolutionary translation is the only way to experience the novel as Hesse envisioned it nearly one hundred years ago.The quest for self-discovery never ends, especially for Harry Ha...

‘Steppenwolf’ (originally Der Steppenwolf) is the tenth novel by German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse. Originally published in Germany in 1927, it was first translated into English in 1929. The novel was named after the German name for the steppe wolf. The story in large part reflects a profound crisis in Hesse's spiritual world during the 1920s. Steppenwolf was wildly popular and has been a perpetual success across the decades, but Hesse later asserted that the book was largely misunderstood...

"My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks: I had better go to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the nerves of her suicide."So begins Peter Handke's extraordinary confrontation with his mother's death. In a painful and courageous attempt to deal with the almost intolerable horror of her suicide, he sets out to piece together the facts of her life, as h...

A rich and well-known writer, returning home to Vienna from one of many holidays, finds a long letter from an unknown woman. As a teenager she had lived with her poor widowed mother in the same building and had fallen totally in love with both the opulent cultured lifestyle of her neighbour and the handsome charming man himself. This passion was not lessened by the flow of attractive women spending the night with him or by her being removed to Innsbruck when her mother remarried. At age 18...