Round-up – New Classics, August 2025
From Cavendish and Ganjavi to Ramuz and Wright
Dear classics readers,
There are so many exciting classics publications this month, including the first English translation of Ágota Kristóf’s short stories and an inventively structured volume of Graham Greene short stories selected by the brilliant Yiyun Li. We also have parallel planets, cosmic disasters, monsters, memories, a Persian love story, indelible music and tales of the weird.
Also – because there wasn’t space in this selection of ten titles – I wanted to flag that Vintage is reissuing four previously unavailable Julio Cortázar titles (Final Exam, A Manual for Manuel, 62: A Model Kit and The Winners) and Virago are repackaging a number of novels by the great Rumer Godden (The Battle of the Villa Fiorita, Breakfast with the Nikolides, An Episode of Sparrows, The River).
Have a wonderful August!
The Blazing World and Other Writings by Margaret Cavendish (1666)
One of the most diverse, prolific and maverick intellectuals of her time, Margaret Cavendish is known for critiquing a wide range of early modern cultural and philosophical beliefs. While she was the first British woman to publish several philosophical treatises, she was also profoundly interested in literature and writing in nearly every available genre; indeed, with her wide-ranging, complex, and often unorthodox ideas, she was a pioneer of what today would be referred to as science fiction. In this edition Lisa Walters brings together well-known and popular works such as The Blazing World, alongside lesser-known poems and prose pieces, like The Ambitious Traitor and The Unnatural Tragedy.
[UK / US] Oxford World Classics | 464 pages | introduced by Lisa Walters
Khosrow and Shirin by Nezami Ganjavi (12th century)
Based on historical characters of the seventh-century Iranian court and written 850 years ago, the narrative poem about Khosrow and Shirin shares a shelf with the most intensely romantic classic stories, from Tristan and Isolde to Layla and Majnun to Romeo and Juliet. The love between an Iranian prince (Khosrow) and an Armenian princess (Shirin) is at the centre of this tumultuous tale in which the powers of politics and warfare intertwine with no less powerful forces of erotic desire and the quest for personal and spiritual fulfilment.
[UK / US] Penguin Classics | 448 pages | translated from Persian by Dick Davis
Duel Duet: Selected Stories by Graham Greene (1929-90)
Twenty-two of Greene’s very best stories are collected here, each of them bearing the hallmark themes that characterise his great novels: innocence and vengeance, love and hate, pity and violence. Writer and Greene aficionado, Yiyun Li, has arranged the stories into pairs, to be read together in contrast or in harmony – as a duel or a duet. In doing so Li draws out the extraordinary power in Greene’s work, creating an ingenious new perspective on a writer we thought we knew. Unexpected, surprising and wide-ranging, this is the short fiction of one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most adored storytellers, revealing his brilliance as never before.
[UK] Vintage Classics | 400 pages | selected and introduced by Yiyun Li
The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison (1991)
On a hot May night, three Cambridge students carry out a ritualistic act that changes their lives. Decades later, none of the participants can remember what transpired; but their clouded memories bind them together. Unable to move on, Pam Stuyvesant has epilepsy and is plagued by sensual visions. Her husband Lucas believes that a dwarfish creature is stalking him, and invents histories to soothe Pam’s fears. Self-styled Sorcerer Yaxley becomes obsessed with a terrifyingly transcendent reality. The narrator is seemingly the least effected participant in the ritual: he is haunted by the smell of roses, and his guilt as he attempts to help his friends escape the torment that has engulfed their lives. Strange, dreamlike and moving, The Course of the Heart is an examination of the edges of humanity where we lie, hide, hurt and heal.
[UK] Serpent’s Tail Classics | 288 pages | introduced by Julia Armfield
[US] Night Shade | 244 pages
I Don’t Care by Ágota Kristóf (1980s)
The best short fiction by the Hungarian master Ágota Kristóf, selected by the author herself and available in English for the first time. Written immediately before her acclaimed Notebook trilogy, the works here oscillate between parables, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone. By turns harrowing and whimsical, cruel and sharply funny, Kristóf’s world shifts our gaze to a shared reality, past and present. Here exile and existential alienation are undeniable – as is the force of every sentence, making for extraordinary and essential reading.
[UK] Penguin International Writers | 96 pages | translated from French by Chris Andrews
[US] New Directions | 80 pages | translated from French by Chris Andrews
Arturo’s Island by Elsa Morante (1957)
Young Arturo grows up in isolated freedom on an island in the Bay of Naples, roaming the hills with his dog, sailing and reading tales of mythical heroes. This idyll is shattered when his father returns home with a new wife, Nunziata. Barely older than Arturo, one of the only women he has ever met, she awakens his fierce longing for tenderness, a longing which draws the family towards a painful reckoning in this powerful story of disillusionment and desire.
[UK / US] Pushkin Press Classics | 384 pages | translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein
Bomarzo by Manuel Mujica Lainez (1962)
Pier Francesco Orsini, duke of Bomarzo, created a park of monsters in which the nightmares of the Renaissance are preserved, set in stone yet still writhingly alive. In Bomarzo, Manuel Mujica Lainez—one of the great Argentine novelists of the twentieth century—re-creates the dark and legendary duke as a brilliant memoirist recalling the trials and travails of his sixteenth-century life from a modern point of view (Freudian psychoanalysis and Lolita both put in an appearance) while ensconced in a city that sounds suspiciously like Mujica Lainez’s own Buenos Aires.
[UK / US] NYRB Classics | 800 pages | translated from Spanish by Gregory Rabassa | introduced by Álvaro Enrigue
Into the Sun by C. F. Ramuz (1922)
It’s been a hot summer for a Swiss lakeside town—both bucolic and citylike, old-fashioned and up-to-date—when a ‘great message,’ telegraphed from one continent to another, announces an ‘accident in the gravitational system.’ Something has gone wrong with the axis of the Earth that will send our planet plunging into the sun: it’s the end of the world, though one hardly notices it, yet . . . For now the surface of the lake is as calm as can be, and the wine harvest promises to be sweet. Most flowers, however, have died. The stars grow bigger, and the sun turns from orange-red to red, and then to black-red. Ramuz’s terrifyingly gripping scenario of a burning planet and the demise of humankind—now so fatefully on our horizon—is a stirring blast from the past, a truly hair-raising tour de force.
[US] New Directions | 144 pages | translated from French by Olivia Baes & Emma Ramadan
Transfigurations by Jay Wright (1967-91)
For over half a century, Jay Wright’s poetry has been celebrated for its alertness to the multiplicity of human experience and identity. Wright’s inexorable lyric voice, whose gravitational pull has an ‘indelible music’, transforms life into myth, body into spirit, image into icon, and ritual into collective consciousness. Revelling in the rich interplay between Native American, African American, Latin American, European and West African cultural forms, Wright detangles the threads of these complex historical forces to present a tapestry of the Atlantic World and the people who move within it. Published for the first time in the UK, Transfigurations is the definitive volume that includes all of Wright’s 20th century poetry works.
[UK] Penguin Modern Classics | 640 pages
[US] LSU Press | 640 pages
The Wayfarer’s Weird, edited by
Join
for a new journey into the ghostly and bizarre, striking out from the shelter of the inn for the places where the path begins to fade, from the sublime wilderness of mountains, coasts and ravines to forbidden, ancient tracts of woodland. Featuring disorientating classics from John Buchan and Algernon Blackwood alongside modern, thrilling (and sometimes violent) warnings to the intrepid from Lisa Tuttle and Dorothy K. Haynes, The Wayfarer’s Weird leads you towards fae dangers, down lost tracks in time and deep into the liminal spaces of Britain and beyond.[UK] British Library Tales of the Weird | 288 pages | introduced by
The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.
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I can’t recommend ‘Arturo’s Island’ enough. A captivating, modern masterpiece.
If I were to read my first Graham Greene novel which one should I choose?