Serpent's Tail Classics
Serpent’s Tail Classics is an impressively diverse selection of cult masterpieces that have changed the way we see the world. We’re proud to have authors including Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Albertine Sarrazin and David Gates on this list, with introductions by great writers ranging from Patti Smith to Bernardine Evaristo. Our classics still burn as fiercely as they did on first publication.
As Serious As Your Life
Val Wilmer
An essential masterpiece of jazz history by renowned photographer and music historian, with a new foreword by Richard Williams
African Psycho
Alain Mabanckou
Alain Mabanckou's uproarious, fleet-footed English-language debut, reissued as a Serpent's Tail Classic to coincide with the publication of…
The Passport
Herta Muller
A beautiful, haunting novel by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
Jernigan
David Gates
Jernigan is the great lost American masterpiece of suburban despair, a modern Revolutionary Road or Stoner
A Lesson Before Dying
Ernest J. Gaines
Award-winning classic novel of prejudice, community and what it means to be a man in the American South. New edition with an introduction by Attica Lo…
The Seven Madmen
Roberto Arlt
An extraordinary portrait of 1920s Buenos Aires, with the existential angst of Sartre's Nausea, the spiritual drama of Dostoyevsky's The Bro…
Pedro Paramo
Juan Rulfo
A legendary classic of magic realism and the most important Mexican novel ever written – with a new foreword by Gabriel García Márquez
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
Lester Bangs
The essential writings of the greatest music writer of the twentieth, or any, century, reissued as a Serpent's Tail Classic
Her Privates We
Frederic Manning
A new edition of a classic First World War novel, a brilliant and bitter picture of human conflict.
The Walk
Robert Walser
One of the great works of European short fiction, by turns funny, reflective and profound
The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
Catherine Millet
The sensational erotic memoir that shocked the world, now re-issued as a Serpent's Tail Classic.
Whatever
Michel Houellebecq
'The mischief-making enfant terrible of new-wave French fiction' Independent
Beer in the Snooker Club
Waguih Ghali
Known and loved by readers and writers since first publication, now back in print as a Serpent's Tail Classic
If He Hollers Let Him Go
Chester Himes
Acclaimed expose of racism in mid-twentieth century USA, now a Serpent's Tail Classic
The Piano Teacher
Elfriede Jelinek
Elfriede Jelinek's most famous novel is an explicit, shocking exploration of sex and fantasy