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