The Penguin Press / Literary

The Dark Road: A Novel

von Ma Jian & Flora Drew

From one of world literature's most courageous voices, a novel about the human cost of China's one-child policy through the lens of one rural family on the run from its reach

Far away from the Chinese economic...

You Are One of Them

von Elliott Holt

Sarah Zuckerman and Jennifer Jones are best friends in an upscale part of Washington, D.C., in the politically charged 1980s.  Sarah is the shy, wary product of an unhappy home: her father abandoned the family...

Ghana Must Go

von Taiye Selasi

Kweku Sai is dead. A renowned surgeon and failed husband, he succumbs suddenly at dawn outside his home in suburban Accra. The news of Kweku's death sends a ripple around the world, bringing together the family...

A Working Theory of Love

von Scott Hutchins

Settled back into the San Francisco singles scene following the implosion of his young marriage just months after the honeymoon, Neill Bassett is going

through the motions. His carefully modulated routine, however,...

NW: A Novel

von Zadie Smith

New York Times Ten Best Books of 2012

“A boldly Joycean appropriation, fortunately not so difficult of entry as its great model… Like Zadie Smith’s much-acclaimed predecessor White Teeth (2000), NW is...

Inherent Vice

von Thomas Pynchon

A Best Book of the Year for the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times

Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon—private eye Doc Sportello surfaces, occasionally,...

Against the Day

von Thomas Pynchon

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year    

Spanning the era between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, and constantly moving...

Mason & Dixon

von Thomas Pynchon

A Time magazine and New York Times Best Book of the Year 

Charles Mason (1728–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania...

Vineland

von Thomas Pynchon

“Later than usual one summer morning in 1984 . . .” On California’s fog-hung North Coast, the enchanted redwood groves of Vineland County harbor a wild assortment of sixties survivors and refugees from...

Slow Learner

von Thomas Pynchon

Compiling five short stories originally written between 1959 and 1964, Slow Learner showcases Thomas Pynchon’s writing before the publication of his first novel V. The stories compiled here are “The Small...

Gravity's Rainbow

National Book Award for Fiction 1974

von Thomas Pynchon

Winner of the 1974 National Book Award

“A screaming comes across the sky. . .” A few months after the Germans’ secret V-2 rocket bombs begin falling on London, British Intelligence discovers that a map...

V.

von Thomas Pynchon

The wild, macabre tale of the twentieth century and of two men—one looking for something he has lost, the other with nothing much to lose—and “V.,” the unknown woman of the title.

The Crying of Lot 49

von Thomas Pynchon

The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.   ...