The Penguin Classics Marvel Collection presents the origin stories, seminal tales, and characters of the Marvel Universe to explore Marvel's transformative and timeless influence on an entire genre of fantasy.

It is impossible to imagine American popular culture without Marvel Comics. For decades, Marvel has published groundbreaking visual narratives that sustain attention on multiple levels: as metaphors for the experience of difference and otherness; as meditations on the fluid nature of identity; and as high-water marks in the artistic tradition of American cartooning, to name a few.

Drawing upon multiple comic book series, this collection includes Captain America's very first appearances from 1941 alongside key examples of his first solo stories of the 1960s, in which Steve Rogers, the newly resurrected hero of World War II, searches to find his place in a new and unfamiliar world. As the contents reveal, the transformations of this American icon thus mark parallel transformations in the nation itself.

A foreword by Gene Luen Yang and scholarly introductions and apparatus by Ben Saunders offer further insight into the enduring significance of Captain America and classic Marvel comics.

The Penguin Classics black spine paperback features full-colour art throughout.

The Manipulator

I can manipulate the emotions of anyone who lets me.
I will make you hurt, make you cry, make you laugh and sigh.
But my words don't affect him. Especially not when I plead for him to leave.
He's always there, watching and waiting.
And I can never look away.
Not when I want him to come closer.

The Shadow

I didn't mean to fall in love.
But now that I have, I can't stay away.
I'm mesmerized by her smile, by her eyes, and the way she moves.
The way she undresses...
I'll keep watching and waiting. Until I can make her mine.
And once she is, I'll never let her go.
Not even when she begs me to.

While not required, it is highly suggested to read the novella, Satan's Affair, first.

Author's Note: This book ends on a cliffhanger. For CWs, please check the author's website.

Scarlett Vandermeer is swimming upstream. A junior at Stanford and a student athlete who specializes in platform diving, Scarlett prefers to keep her head down, concentrating on getting into med school and on recovering from the injury that almost ended her career. She has no time for relationships - at least, that's what she tells herself.

Swim captain, world champion, all-around aquatics golden boy Lukas Blomqvist thrives on discipline. It's how he wins gold medals and breaks records: complete focus with every stroke. On the surface, Lukas and Scarlett have nothing in common. Until a well-guarded secret slips out, and everything changes.

So they start an arrangement. And as the pressure leading to the Olympics heats up, so does their relationship. It was supposed to be just a temporary, mutually satisfying fling. But when staying away from Lukas becomes impossible, Scarlett realizes that her heart might be treading into dangerous water...

Emma Bekker se debuutpundel Skryn (poësie) is goed ontvang en die eerste druk het uitverkoop. Hierdie bundel kortverhale getuig van dieselfde fyn waarneming, musikaliteit, verbeeldingrykeid en sensualiteit. Dit gaan hier oor struktuur, oor lae van betekenis en gevoel, oor die skelette van stories wat met vel oorgetrek word. Die verhale is soms donker, soms humoristies, altyd vreesloos en eroties gelaai. Die onderwerpe strek van ’n porn-ster se hartseer oor sy ma se dood tot ’n uitbundige relaas van ’n skoolkonsert.

In the space of a single day, everything Fortuna thought she knew was exposed as lies and illusion. Alliances have shifted and roles are forever changed. And she now finds herself a prisoner in the Seelie Court.

It is here that Fortuna learns the board for this game is even bigger than she believed. New players emerge from the shadows and the stakes are higher than ever before. There’s no time for pain or healing—just survival.

At least, that’s what Fortuna thinks. Then the game leads her to an opponent who doesn't fight with magic or swords. An opponent that not even she can beat.

It turns out she didn’t even know the meaning of fear... until now.

TRIGGER WARNING: This novel contains scenes or themes of torture, slavery, and PTSD.

From the New York Times bestselling author comes an inventive, utterly propulsive murder-mystery in reverse, tracing a marriage back in time to uncover the dark secret at its heart.

Thom and Wendy Graves have been married for over twenty-five years. They live in a beautiful Victorian on the north shore of Massachusetts. Wendy is a published poet and Thom teaches English literature at a nearby university. Their son, Jason, is all grown up. All is well…except that Wendy wants to murder her husband.

What happens next has everything to do with what happened before. The story of Wendy and Thom’s marriage is told in reverse, moving backward through time to witness key moments from the couple’s lives—their fiftieth birthday party, buying their home, Jason’s birth, the mysterious death of a work colleague—all painting a portrait of a marriage defined by a single terrible act they plotted together many years ago.

Eventually we learn the details of what Thom and Wendy did in their early twenties, a secret that has kept them bound together through the length of their marriage. But its power over them is fraying, and each of them begins to wonder if they would be better off making sure their spouse carries their secrets to the grave.

Durban men’s hostels are a relic of the apartheid government used as settlements formery for migrant workers. Over the years they have morphed into dangerous territory where killing, extortion and allied crimes thrive. A local research paper by the Germany-based Global Initiative Against Organised Crime suggests that between March 2014 and January 2019, more than 120 people died as a result of violence perpetrated by hitmen based at Glebelands Hostel in Umlazi, a former ‘township’ in south Durban. The killings have bled beyond the hostel, throughout KZN and even into neighbouring provinces. This is a staggering statistic for a community of around 22 000 people living in a housing complex that covers less than two square kilometres. The paper further reveals that one of Durban’s largest hostel complexes, Glebelands consists of 71 blocks. Accommodation varies from large, very old, dilapidated blocks, to the much smaller, newer family units. Crime is well-embedded here and it is often reported as fact that police and politicians alike also benefit with contract killers and the abundance of hitmen often hired from the bloody hostel. Hitmen are groomed from an early age especially by those in the taxi industry.

Blood, Blades and Bullets follows the story of Mazwi Nxumalo, a naïve school dropout teenager from rural Nongoma who is unwittingly recruited into the dark world of Glebelands hostel hitmen. Coming from a poverty-stricken family, the odds are stacked against him. He is also running away from a mysterious man and his goons that he busted executing a man in a local forest. After getting in tune with the ways of the Durban taxi ranks and industry, he is soon trained in shooting, surprisingly by rogue cop friends of his handler, Zenzele. He returns one more time to Nongoma where, in a rage, kills his friend, former schoolmate and striking partner in the local football team after learning he had impregnated his high school sweetheart.

Angry at his protégé and fearing that he would soon be out of control, Zenzele decides it’s time for the traditional cleansing and strengthening ceremony, ukuthwala. Mazwi emerges almost invincible from this ritual and rite of passage to become an unstoppable but flawed killing machine. As the bodies pile up, including of those cops investigating his crimes, so is his irrepressible obsession with his doctored bullets and one woman whom his handlers believe will be his Achilles heel.

Everly Plum is a Bridesmaid for Hire: whatever you need her to do on your special day, she'll be there to do it. So when Hardy Hopper, a billionaire, approaches Everly for help with his friends' wedding, she's more than happy to step in.

But Hardy has an extra assignment for her: his ex-girlfriend will be the maid of honour opposite his role as best man, and Hardy wants Everly's help to get her back.

There's only one problem: Everly may just have a tiny crush on her businessman employer. She knows there are rules about this, she knows her clients are off the table. So why can't she stop thinking about him?

One toxic family. Eight suspicious guests. Everyone is guilty. But who is a killer?

Welcome to the McAlpine Lodge: a secluded mountain getaway, it’s the height of escapist luxury living.

Except that everyone here is lying. Lying about their past. Lying to their family. Lying to themselves.

Then one night, Mercy McAlpine – until now the good daughter – threatens to expose everybody's secrets. Just hours later, Mercy is dead.

In an area this remote, it’s easy to get away with murder. But Will Trent and Sara Linton – investigator and medical examiner for the GBI – are here on their honeymoon.

And now, with the killer poised to strike again, the holiday of a lifetime becomes a race against the clock…

The action-packed official adaptation of the video game Alien: Isolation and a revealing look into the lives of Ellen Ripley and her daughter, Amanda Ripley.

From birth, Amanda Ripley's life is riddled with hardship. Her parents live on the edge of poverty, so her mother--Ellen Ripley--seeks off-world contracts that lead to a position aboard the commercial hauler Nostromo. Then when the deep-space vessel disappears, Amanda passes into adulthood focused on discovering one thing: WHAT HAPPENED TO ELLEN RIPLEY?

Amanda's quest pulls her into the underbelly of society, where few can be trusted. On Luna she meets someone who seems the exception--Private Zula Hendricks of the Colonial Marines but their relationship is short-lived. Just as Amanda appears to hit rock bottom... a lead appears.

To follow it, she must travel to the remote Sevastopol Station. There she hopes to find the answers she seeks. But the station is in ruins, and death stalks the corridors in the form of a deadly alien the likes of which she never could have imagined.

An artfully designed box set of Pulitzer Prize–winning author Cormac McCarthy’s final masterpiece, told in two volumes, each a New York Times bestseller.

The Passenger is a fast-paced and sprawling novel while Stella Maris is a tightly controlled coda, told entirely in dialogue. Together they relate the thrilling story of a brother and sister, haunted by loss, pursued by conspiracy, and longing for a death they cannot reconcile with God.

The Passenger
1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western, a salvage diver, zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from the boat deck into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit—by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul. Stella Maris
1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western is twenty years old when she arrives at a psychiatric facility with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers.

“You must be our new neighbors!” Mrs. Lowell gushes and waves across the picket fence. I clutch my daughter’s hand and smile back: but the second Mrs. Lowell sees my husband a strange expression crosses her face. In that moment I make a promise. We finally have a family home. My past is far, far behind us. And I’ll do anything to keep it that way…

I used to clean other people’s houses—now, I can’t believe this home is actually mine. The charming kitchen, the quiet cul-de-sac, the huge yard where my kids can play. My husband and I saved for years to give our children the life they deserve.

Even though I’m wary of our new neighbor Mrs. Lowell, when she invites us over for dinner it’s our chance to make friends. Her maid opens the door wearing a white apron, her hair in a tight bun. I know exactly what it’s like to be in her shoes. But her cold stare gives me chills…

The Lowells’ maid isn’t the only strange thing on our street. I’m sure I see a shadowy figure watching us. My husband leaves the house late at night. And when I meet a woman who lives across the way, her words chill me to the bone: Be careful of your neighbors.

Did I make a terrible mistake moving my family here?

I thought I’d left my darkest secrets behind. But could this quiet suburban street be the most dangerous place of all?

Waldo is ravenous. Horny. Blunt. Naive. Wise. Impulsive. Lonely. Angry. Hurting. Endlessly wanting. And the thing she wants most of all? Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher.

Mr Korgy, with the wife and the kid and the mortgage and the bills, with the dead dreams and the atrophied looks and the growing paunch. She doesn’t know why she wants him. Is it his passion? His life experience? The fact that he knows books and films that she doesn’t? Or are they actually kindred spirits, sharing the same filter with which they each take in the world around them? Or, perhaps, it’s just enough that he sees her when no one else does.

Marvel Comics presents the all-new Ms. Marvel, the groundbreaking heroine that has become an international sensation.

Kamala Khan is an ordinary girl from Jersey City - until she is suddenly empowered with extraordinary gifts. But who truly is the all-new Ms. Marvel? Teenager? Muslim? Inhuman? Find out as she takes the Marvel Universe by storm!

As Kamala discovers the dangers of her newfound powers, she unlocks a secret behind them as well. Is Kamala ready to wield these immense new gifts? Or will the weight of the legacy before her be too much to handle? Kamala has no idea either. But she's comin' for you, New York!

A rugged mountain town seemed like the perfect escape from a life in shambles.

But on day one, she ran full tilt into the world's hottest single dad, and now all her plans are ruined.

As a chart-topping country singer with a recent streak of bad press, it's hard for Skylar Stone to find any peace. But she finds it in Rose Hill. With a little boy and a little girl who steal her heart just as thoroughly as their dad.
Weston Belmont.

The man is a shameless flirt. He oozes confidence and masculinity in a way that's downright distracting. And in bed? He's addictive.

Everything with him is wild and impulsive, and Skylar is desperate to regain some control.

But no one has supported her like West does. And no one has ever made her feel as loved as he does either.
So, while Skylar's brain says settling down with a small-town horse trainer is impossible...her heart says she's right where she belongs.

Still, her life as a celebrity haunts her. It has the power to pull she and West apart.

She can see in his eyes that he wants her to stay. And she wants that too.

But she knows better than anyone that you don't always get what you want.

Lane is in the middle of an identity crisis. Her friends are all partnered up, her career is leading nowhere, and she’s just not happy. So, after a night out celebrating her birthday, she makes one hell of an impulse purchase: a giant yellow forty-eight passenger school bus that she intends to make a home.

With little-to-no renovation experience, but a large sum of inheritance money, Lane enlists the help of her friend Matt – mechanic by trade, handyman by practice, and hottie by nature.

While their mutual attraction is undeniable, Matt’s a total family guy with ‘settle down with me’ tattooed across his forehead, whereas Lane is entirely commitment averse. Matt and Lane have silently agreed that friendship is the only thing that can ever exist between them. So when Matt offers to help her with the bus, and in the bedroom, Lane’s sure it can never work… can it?

Nadia en haar nefie Xavie is op Groenplaas in die Overberg grootgemaak deur hul ouma, Sylvia McKinney, die “stammoeder van lieg”. Hulle twee kyk terug op hul kinderjare en probeer die dinge ontbloot waaroor daar in hul familie geswyg word.

Kompoun vertel die verhaal van vriendskap tussen ’n groep nefies en niggies, gesmee deur oorlewing in ’n harde werklikheid, en hoe hulle van die ouer geslag wegbreek, maar ook vind dat die verstrengelde bande van familie ’n mens nie maklik laat los nie.

This is a story about wholeness and holes. The ones inside us and the ones that give us refuge; about the intersection of two lives from different backgrounds and circumstances, pulled together by the pain of loss.

Emanuel is a young refugee from Congo, surviving alone on the streets of Durban after being separated from his mother while escaping the turmoil of conflict. Winter is a reclusive writer whose life has come to a standstill after the loss of her young son, whose disappearance has never been solved.

As their fatelines cross, it is not immediately apparent what the nature of the pull between them is. Emanuel in particular is resistant to Winter's overtures.

It is when she takes him with her to the Antbear Cabin, her writing refuge, that the bond between them slowly begins to form. Painful realisations surface as each recognises in the other a reflection of what they have lost. There, in the cabin of peace overlooking the steep valley of storms, the stories of Winter and Emanuel begin, finally, to reveal themselves. Each must take the difficult journey back through the heart of the wound in order to heal and learn to love - and live - again.

The author of the “sexy, insightful, and utterly charming” (BuzzFeed) Kiss Her Once for Me returns with a new queer rom-com following once childhood best friends forced together to drive their former teacher across the country.

A long time ago, Logan Maletis and Rosemary Hale used to be friends. They spent their childhood summers running through the woods, rebelling against their conservative small town, and dreaming of escaping. But then an incident the summer before high school turned them into bitter rivals. After graduation, they went ten years without speaking.

Now in their thirties, Logan and Rosemary find they aren’t quite living the lives of adventure they imagined for themselves. Still in their small town and working as teachers at their alma mater, they’re both stuck in old patterns. Uptight Rosemary chooses security and stability over all else, working constantly, and her most stable relationship is with her label maker. Chaotic and impulsive Logan has a long list of misguided ex-lovers and an apathetic shrug she uses to protect herself from anything real. And as hard as they try to avoid each other—and their complicated past—they keep crashing into each other. Including with their cars.

But when their beloved former English teacher and lifelong mentor tells them he has only a few months to live, they’re forced together once and for all to fulfill his last wish: a cross-country road trip. Stuffed into the gayest van west of the Mississippi, the three embark on a life-changing summer trip—from Washington state to the Grand Canyon, from the Gulf Coast to coastal Maine—that will chart a new future and perhaps lead them back to one another.

Twenty years as an army brat and Ember Howard knew, too. The soldiers at the door meant her dad was never coming home. What she didn't know was how she would find the strength to singlehandedly care for her crumbling family when her mom falls apart.

Then Josh Walker enters her life. Hockey star, her new next-door neighbor, and not to mention the most delicious hands that insist on saving her over and over again. He has a way of erasing the pain with a single look, a single touch. As much as she wants to turn off her feelings and endure the heartache on her own, she can't deny their intense attraction.

Until Josh's secret shatters their world. And Ember must decide if he's worth the risk that comes with loving a man who could strip her bare.

The legacy of the Black Dagger Brotherhood continues in a spin-off series from the #1 New York Times bestselling author…

Paradise, blooded daughter of the king’s First Advisor, is ready to break free from the restrictive life of an aristocratic female. Her strategy? Join the Black Dagger Brotherhood’s training center program and learn to fight for herself, think for herself...be herself. It’s a good plan, until everything goes wrong. The schooling is unfathomably difficult, the other recruits feel more like enemies than allies, and it’s very clear that the Brother in charge, Butch O’Neal, a.k.a. the Dhestroyer, is having serious problems in his own life.

And that’s before she falls in love with a fellow classmate. Craeg, a common civilian, is nothing her father would ever want for her, but everything she could ask for in a male. As an act of violence threatens to tear apart the entire program, and the erotic pull between them grows irresistible, Paradise is tested in ways she never anticipated--and left wondering whether she’s strong enough to claim her own power...on the field, and off.

Feyre is a huntress. And when she sees a deer in the forest being pursued by a wolf, she kills the predator and takes its prey to feed herself and her family. But the wolf was not what it seemed, and Feyre cannot predict the high price she will have to pay for its death ...

Dragged away from her family for the murder of a faerie, Feyre discovers that her captor, his face obscured by a jewelled mask, is hiding even more than his piercing green eyes suggest. As Feyre's feelings for Tamlin turn from hostility to passion, she learns that the faerie lands are a far more dangerous place than she realized. And Feyre must fight to break an ancient curse, or she will lose him forever.

Sarah J. Maas is a global #1 bestselling author. Her books have sold more than nine million copies and been translated into 37 languages. Discover the sweeping romantic fantasy for yourself.

Legendary storyteller Stephen King goes into the deepest well of his imagination in this spellbinding novel about a seventeen-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a parallel world where good and evil are at war, and the stakes could not be higher - for their world or ours.

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself - and his dad. Then, when Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and her aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in the backyard. Sometimes strange sounds emerge from it.

Charlie starts doing jobs for Mr. Bowditch and loses his heart to Radar. Then, when Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie a cassette tape telling a story no one would believe. What Bowditch knows, and has kept secret all his long life, is that inside the shed is a portal to another world.

King's storytelling in Fairy Tale soars. This is a magnificent and terrifying tale about another world than ours, in which good is pitted against overwhelming evil, and a heroic boy - and his dog - must lead the battle.

Flight attendant turned New York Times bestselling author T. J. Newman - whose first book Falling was an instant international bestseller and the biggest thriller debut of 2021 - returns for her second book, an edge-of-your-seat thriller about a commercial jetliner that crashes into the ocean, and sinks to the bottom with passengers trapped inside, and the extraordinary rescue operation to save them.

Six minutes after takeoff, Flight 1421 crashes into the Pacific Ocean. During the evacuation, an engine explodes and the plane is flooded. Those still alive are forced to close the doors—but it’s too late. The plane sinks to the bottom with twelve passengers trapped inside.

More than two hundred feet below the surface, engineer Will Kent and his eleven-year-old daughter Shannon are waist-deep in water and fighting for their lives. Their only chance at survival is an elite rescue team on the surface led by professional diver Chris Kent - Shannon’s mother and Will’s soon-to-be ex-wife - who must work together with Will to find a way to save their daughter and rescue the passengers from the sealed airplane, which is now teetering on the edge of an undersea cliff.

There’s not much time.

With devastating emotional power and heart-stopping suspense, Drowning is an unforgettable thriller about a family’s desperate fight to save themselves and the people trapped with them - against impossible odds.

A forbidden, secret affair proves that all's fair in love and science - from Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author Ali Hazelwood.

Rue Siebert might not have it all, but she has enough: a few friends she can always count on; the financial stability she yearned for as a kid; and a successful career as a biotech engineer at Kline, one of the most promising start-ups in the field of food science. Her world is stable, pleasant, and hard-fought. Until a hostile takeover and its offensively attractive front man threatens to bring it all crumbling down.

Eli Killgore and his business partners want Kline, period. Eli has his own reasons for pushing this deal through - and he's a man who gets what he wants. With one burning exception: Rue. The woman he can't stop thinking about. The woman who's off-limits to him.

Torn between loyalty and an undeniable attraction, Rue and Eli throw caution out the lab and the boardroom windows. Their affair is secret, no-strings-attached, and has a built-in deadline: the day one of their companies will prevail. But the heart is risky business - one that plays for keeps.