General Books : Classics

Anthony and Gloria are the essence of Jazz Age glamour. A brilliant and magnetic couple, they fling themselves at life with an energy that is thrilling. New York is a playground where they dance and drink for days on end. Their marriage is a passionate theatrical performance; they are young, rich, alive and lovely and they intend to inherit the earth.

But as money becomes tight, their marriage becomes impossible. And with their inheritance still distant, Anthony and Gloria must grow up and face reality; they may be beautiful but they are also damned.

ISBN: 9780141195001
Edition: NE
Price: $13.99
Author: Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Format: Paperback

Liberty fabric covered editions bring classics from the Faber backlist together with important modern titles, putting them in conversation and celebrating both the history and the future of Faber & Faber.

In 2019, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar will be reissued as a special hardback edition with a Liberty fabric from the year of the novel's first publication (1963); Milkman, winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize, will be reissued with a bespoke Liberty fabric cover, created uniquely for Anna Burns.

Sylvia Plath's groundbreaking semi-autobiographical novel offers an intimate, honest and often wrenching glimpse into mental illness. The Bell Jar broke the boundaries between fiction and reality and helped cement Sylvia Plath's place as an enduring feminist icon. Celebrated for its darkly humorous, razor sharp portrait of 1950s society, it continues to resonate with readers today as testament to the universal human struggle to claim one's rightful place in the world.

ISBN: 9780571355068
Publication date: 05/09/2019
Price: $32.99
Author: Plath, Sylvia
Format: Hard Back

A new, feminist translation of Beowulf by the author of The Mere Wife

Nearly twenty years after Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf - and fifty years after the translation that continues to torment high-school students around the world - there is a radical new verse interpretation of the epic poem by Maria Dahvana Headley, which brings to light elements never before translated into English.

A man seeks to prove himself as a hero. A monster seeks silence in his territory. A warrior seeks to avenge her murdered son. A dragon ends it all. These familiar components of the epic poem are seen with a novelist's eye towards gender, genre, and history. Beowulf has always been a tale of entitlement and encroachment - of powerful men seeking to become more powerful and one woman seeking justice for her child - but this version brings new context to an old story. While crafting her contemporary adaptation, Headley unearthed significant shifts lost over centuries of translation; her Beowulf is one for the twenty-first century.



' The Mere Wife includes some tantalising snippets of Beowulf as translated by Headley. Now we have the full version, and it is electrifying ... It is brash and belligerent, lunatic and invigorating, with passages of sublime poetry punctuated by obscenities and social-media shorthand ... With a Beowulf defiantly of and for this historical moment, Headley reclaims the poem for her audience as well as for herself.'
-Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker

'An iconic work of early English literature comes in for up-to-the-minute treatment ... Headley's language and pacing keep perfect track with the events she describes ... giving the 3,182-line text immediacy without surrendering a bit of its grand poetry. Some purists may object to the small liberties Headley has taken with the text, but her version is altogether brilliant.' STARRED REVIEW
-Kirkus Reviews

'Headley's Beowulf is kindred in spirit to The Mere Wife - highly conscious of gender and modernised to the hilt - but totally different in form. Instead of changing names or places, Headley sticks closely to the original Old English text while updating the vocabulary with flourishes of internet humour ... The feminism in Headley's translation is embedded in the texture and language of the poem itself rather than in its individual events or characters ... Her Beowulf is a tragicomic epic about the things men do to impress one another. It's as fierce an examination of masculine weakness as The Mere Wife was of feminine strength.'
-Jo Livingstone, Poetry Foundation

ISBN: 9781925713886
Publication date: 05/01/2021
Price: $35.00
Author: Headley, Maria Dahvana
Format: Paperback

Stunningly-designed new editions of Toni Morrison's best-known novels, published by Vintage Classics in celebration of her life and work.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS, AUTHOR OF QUEENIE

Pecola Breedlove longs for blond hair and blue eyes, so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the marigolds in her garden will not bloom, and her wish will not come true. Pecola's life is about to change in other painful and devastating ways.

A powerful interrogation of what it means to conform to an idea of beauty, The Bluest Eye asks vital questions about race, class and gender and remains one of Toni Morrison's most unforgettable works.

ISBN: 9781784876449
Publication date: 04/02/2021
Price: $24.00
Author: Morrison, Toni
Format: Paperback