Politics is about: a) a threesome; b) politics

Moshe loves Nana. But love can be difficult -- especially if you want to be kind. And Moshe and Nana want to be kind to someone else.

They want to be kind to their best friend, Anjali.

Politics explores crucial problems of sexual etiquette. What should the sleeping arrangements be in a menage-a-trois? Is it polite to read while two people have sex beside you? Is it permissible to be jealous?

In The Possessed, Witold Gombrowicz, considered by many to be Poland’s greatest modernist, draws together the familiar tropes of the Gothic novel to produce a darkly funny and playful subversion of the form. With dreams of escaping his small-town existence and the limitations of his status, a young tennis coach travels to the heart of the Polish countryside where he is to train Maja Ochołowska, a beautiful and promising player whose bourgeois family has fallen upon difficult circumstances. But no sooner has he arrived than his relationship with his pupil develops into one of twisted love and hate, and he becomes embroiled in the fantastic happenings taking place at the dilapidated castle nearby. Haunted kitchens, bewitched towels, conniving secretaries and famous clairvoyants all conspire to determine the fate of the young lovers and the mad prince residing in the castle. Translated directly into English for the first time by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, The Possessed is a comic masterpiece that, despite being a literary pastiche, has all the hallmarks of Gombrowicz's typically provocative style.

It's the eighteenth-century and Celine is in trouble 'Unlike anything else you'll read this (or any other) year' SALMAN RUSHDIE, Booker Prize-winning author of Midnight's Children 'A radically beautiful new novel' SHEILA HETI, author of Pure Colour 'A book filled with imaginative leaps, brave decisions and tiny details that give delight' COLM TÓIBÍN, author of Brooklyn 'Sharp and witty and burningly original: a book that feels joyfully new' KATHERINE RUNDELL, author of Super-Infinite Paris, 1775: Celine's husband is mostly absent. Her parents are elsewhere. And meanwhile men are inventing stories about her - about her affairs, her sexuality, her orgies and addictions. All these stories are lies, but the public loves them - spreading them like a virus. Celine can only watch as her name becomes a symbol for everything rotten in this society ruled by men high on colonial genocide, natural destruction, and crimes against women. To survive, Celine and her friends must band together in search of justice, truth and beauty. Fantastical, funny and blindingly bright, The Future Future follows one woman on an urgently contemporary quest to clear her name and change the world.

It's the eighteenth-century and Celine is in trouble 'Unlike anything else you'll read this (or any other) year' SALMAN RUSHDIE, Booker Prize-winning author of Midnight's Children 'A radically beautiful new novel' SHEILA HETI, author of Pure Colour 'A book filled with imaginative leaps, brave decisions and tiny details that give delight' COLM TÓIBÍN, author of Brooklyn 'Sharp and witty and burningly original: a book that feels joyfully new' KATHERINE RUNDELL, author of Super-Infinite Paris, 1775: Celine's husband is mostly absent. Her parents are elsewhere. And meanwhile men are inventing stories about her - about her affairs, her sexuality, her orgies and addictions. All these stories are lies, but the public loves them - spreading them like a virus. Celine can only watch as her name becomes a symbol for everything rotten in this society ruled by men high on colonial genocide, natural destruction, and crimes against women. To survive, Celine and her friends must band together in search of justice, truth and beauty. Fantastical, funny and blindingly bright, The Future Future follows one woman on an urgently contemporary quest to clear her name and change the world.

First in a two volume collection of short stories by the acclaimed author of 'Empire of the Sun', 'Crash' and 'Super-Cannes'. The new edition is introduced by Adam Thirwell. With eighteen novels over four decades - from 'The Drowned World' in 1962 to his final novel 'Kingdom Come' in 2006 - J.G. Ballard is known as one of Britain's most celebrated and original novelists. However, during his long career he was also a prolific writer of short stories; in fact, many people consider that he is at his best in the short-story format. These highly influential stories have appeared in magazines such as New Worlds, Amazing Stories and Interzone, and in several separate collections, including 'The Terminal Beach', 'The Venus Hunters', 'Vermilion Sands', 'Low-Flying Aircraft' and 'Myths of the Near Future'. Set out in the original order of publication and frequently the point of conception for ideas he further developed in his novels, these stories provide an unprecedented opportunity to see the imagination of one of Britain's greatest writers at work. This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard's works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including Robert Macfarlane, Iain Sinclair, James Lever and Ali Smith) and brand-new cover designs from the artist Stanley Donwood.

The second in a two volume collection of short stories by the acclaimed author of 'Empire of the Sun', 'Crash' and 'Super-Cannes'. The new edition is introduced by Adam Thirwell. With eighteen novels over four decades - from 'The Drowned World' in 1962 to his final novel 'Kingdom Come' in 2006 - J.G. Ballard is known as one of Britain's most celebrated and original novelists. However, during his long career he was also a prolific writer of short stories; in fact, many people consider that he is at his best in the short-story format. These highly influential stories have appeared in magazines such as New Worlds, Amazing Stories and Interzone, and in several separate collections, including 'The Terminal Beach', 'The Venus Hunters', 'Vermilion Sands', 'Low-Flying Aircraft' and 'Myths of the Near Future'. Set out in the original order of publication and frequently the point of conception for ideas he further developed in his novels, these stories provide an unprecedented opportunity to see the imagination of one of Britain's greatest writers at work. This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard's works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including Robert Macfarlane, Iain Sinclair, James Lever and Ali Smith) and brand-new cover designs from the artist Stanley Donwood.

Read the masterful story of romance and revolution behind the hit BBC TV series. Les Miserables is a novel peopled by colourful characters from the nineteenth-century Parisian underworld; the street children, the prostitutes and the criminals. In telling the story of escaped convict Jean Valjean, and his efforts to reform his ways and care for the little orphan girl he rescues from a life of cruelty, Victor Hugo drew attention to the plight of the poor and oppressed. Sensational, dramatic, packed with rich excitement and filled with the sweep and violence of human passions, Les Miserables is one of the greatest stories ever told. NOW A MAJOR BBC TV ADAPTATION STARRING DOMINIC WEST, OLIVIA COLEMAN AND DAVID OYELOWO 'There are plenty of translations of this extensive, exuberant novel that cut out anything superfluous. But God is in the detail...This is the one to read' Jeanette Winterson

Is there any such thing as revolutionary literature? Can literature, in fact, be political at all? These are the questions Roland Barthes addresses in "Writing Degree Zero," his first published book and a landmark in his oeuvre. The debate had engaged the European literary community since the 1930s; with this fierce manifesto, Barthes challenged the notion of literature's obligation to be socially committed. Yes, Barthes allows, the writer has a political and ethical responsibility. But the history of French literature shows that the writer has often failed to meet it--and from Barthes's perspective, literature is committed to little more than the myth of itself. Expert and uncompromising, "Writing Degree Zero" introduced the themes that would soon establish Barthes as one of the leading voices in literary criticism.

'One of the few great and perfect works of poetic imagination written during this century' Elias Canetti WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ADAM THIRWELL One morning, Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect. His family is understandably perturbed and he finds himself an outsider in his own home. In 'Metamorphosis' and the other famous stories included here, Kafka explores the confusing nature of human experience with sly wit and compelling originality.

Determined to take his deeply loved younger sister Pauline's education in hand, Henri Beyle--better known by the most famous of his scores of noms de plume, Stendhal--was obliged to continue her tuition in epistolary fashion on leaving Grenoble. In his letters to her he instructs her in what she should read (Plutarch, Moliere, and Shakespeare); what to study (philosophy, logic, mathematics, and music); whether or not to get married (and to what kind of man); and generally how to enliven the tedium of a French provincial town. At the same time, he encourages her to think for herself--a process that, inevitably, reveals what he thought when thinking for himself.

Andrei Bely's masterpiece, Petersburg is a vivid, striking story set at the heart of the 1905 Russian revolution. This Penguin Classics edition is translated from the Russian by David McDuff with an introduction by Adam Thirlwell. St Petersburg, 1905. An impressionable young university student, Nikolai, becomes involved with a revolutionary terror organization, which plans to assassinate a high government official with a time bomb. But the official is Nikolai's cold, unyielding father, Apollon, and in twenty-four hours the bomb will explode. Petersburg is a story of suspense, family dysfunction, patricide, conspiracy and revolution. It is also an impressionistic, exhilarating panorama of the city itself, watched over by the bronze statue of Peter the Great, as it tears itself apart. Considered by writers such as Vladimir Nabokov to be one of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century, Bely's richly textured, darkly comic and symbolic novel pulled apart the traditional techniques of storytelling and presaged the dawn of a new form of literature. This acclaimed translation captures all the idiosyncrasies and rhythms of Bely's extraordinary prose. It is accompanied by an introduction by Adam Thirwell discussing the novel's themes, extraordinary style and influence. Andrei Bely (1880-1934), born Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, was educated at Moscow University where he studied science and philosophy, before turning his focus to literature. In 1904 he published his first collection of poems, Gold in Azure, which was followed in 1909 by his first novel, The Silver Dove. Bely's most famous novel, Petersburg, was published in 1916. His work is considered to have heavily influenced several literary schools, most notably Symbolism, and his impact on Russian writing has been compared to that of James Joyce on the English speaking world. If you enjoyed Petersburg, you might like Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, also available in Penguin Classics. 'The one novel that sums up the whole of Russia' Anthony Burgess

There are many stories of Haffner. Haffner is charming, morally suspect, vain, obsessed by the libertine emperors. He is British and Jewish and a widower. But this, the most secret story, is the greatest of them all. In a forgotten spa town snug in the eastern Alps, at the end of the twentieth century, Haffner is seeking a cure, more women, and a villa that once belonged to his late wife. But really he is trying to escape: from his family, his lovers, his history, his entire Haffnerian condition. For Haffner is seventy-eight. In other words, Haffner is too old to be a grown-up. So unravels the plot of The Escape--a swift, sad farce of sexual mayhem by a novelist The New York Times has called "a prodigy."

First published in 1971 in a typewritten edition, then finally printed in book form in 1989, I Served the King of England is "an extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel" (The New York Times), telling the tale of Ditie, a hugely ambitious but simple waiter in a deluxe Prague hotel in the years before World War II. Ditie is called upon to serve not the King of England, but Haile Selassie. It is one of the great moments in his life. Eventually, he falls in love with a Nazi woman athlete as the Germans are invading Czechoslovakia. After the war, through the sale of valuable stamps confiscated from the Jews, he reaches the heights of his ambition, building a hotel. He becomes a millionaire, but with the institution of communism, he loses everything and is sent to inspect mountain roads. Living in dreary circumstances, Ditie comes to terms with the inevitability of his death, and with his place in history.