Introducing Brief Encounters from Penguin
Short books. Timeless stories. 
 
Brief Encounters is a 52-book collection of short novels and classic, captivating stories to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days.  
 
Whether you’re tackling the great canonical novelists for the first time or uncovering something more unexpected and unknown, each book offers a moment of discovery. Stories of love and desire, of exploration and adventure, of mystery and imagination, and of lives shaped by political tension and risk. 
 
Each brief but lasting. Get lost in the pages of your next favourite writer. 
 
The full list of books is below - please let us know which one(s) you'd like!
 
Ape and Essence — Aldous Huxley
Bartleby, The Scrivener — Herman Melville
Behind a Mask — Louisa May Alcott
Bewitched — Edith Wharton
The Book of Imaginary Beings — Jorge Luis Borges
Cain — José Saramago
The Case of the Late Pig — Margery Allingham
The Castle of Crossed Destinies — Italo Calvino
The Cat — Colette
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age — Bohumil Hrabal
The Dead — James Joyce
Distant Star — Roberto Bolaño
Down by the Riverside — Richard Wright
Dracula’s Guest — Bram Stoker
The Dunwich Horror — H. P. Lovecraft
The Fatal Eggs — Mikhail Bulgakov
Fighters & Martyrs — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Fire on the Mountain — Anita Desai
First Light — Toni Cade Bambara
A Gentle Spirit & A Faint Heart — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
In Watermelon Sugar — Richard Brautigan
The Invisible Girl — Mary Shelley
Kew Gardens — Virginia Woolf
Lady Susan — Jane Austen
Laura — Vera Caspary
The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices — Charles Dickens & Wilkie Collins
Masks — Fumiko Enchi
The Master of Go — Yasunari Kawabata
Monkey Business — Kurt Vonnegut
Mouse Folk — Franz Kafka
The Old Man and the Sea — Ernest Hemingway
Paradises Lost — Ursula K. Le Guin
The Parasite — Arthur Conan Doyle
A Parish Chronicle — Halldór Laxness
Passing — Nella Larsen
Pinball, 1973 — Haruki Murakami
The Poet — Yi Mun-yol
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog — Dylan Thomas
Recitatif — Toni Morrison
Sally Bowles — Christopher Isherwood
Significant Moments — Margaret Atwood
A Souvenir of Japan — Angela Carter
Sunday’s Children — Ingmar Bergman
Tender Buttons — Gertrude Stein
Things: A Story of the Sixties — Georges Perec
The Third Man — Graham Greene
An Undesirable Friend — Natsume Sōseki
Venus Smiles (and Other Vermillion Sands Stories) — J. G. Ballard
We Were Forbidden — Jacqueline Harpman
Woman of Genius — Simone de Beauvoir
Young at the Time — Eileen Chang