"All children, except one, grow up."

That's the famous first line of J. M. Barrie's novel Peter and Wendy, better known as Peter Pan. For a number of years Penguin Classics has been publishing so-called children's literature, giving each edition the full Penguin Classics treatment: engagingly written critical introductions, suggestions for further readings, and helpful explanatory notes. We do this not only because these books help define classic literature, but because they're great stories that live in the popular imagination, and like all great literature, they are a joy to reread, long after we've finished school, long after we've become grownups.

And so we happily urge you to rediscover--or to read for the first time--Alcott's Little Women (edited by the feminist critic and cultural commentator Elaine Showalter), Burnett's A Little Princess (rife with allusions to Thackeray and Dickens, notes editor U.C. Knoepflmacher) or The Secret Garden (which, as editor Alison Lurie observes, exhibits Brontëan influences), Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (a foundation text of anarchic children's literature, paired with Through the Looking-Glass by editor Hugh Haughton), Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm (translated by the eminent David Luke), The Complete Fairy Tales of George MacDonald (a favorite of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, says editor Knoepflmacher), or Stevenson's rousing adventure stories including Treasure Island (edited by Penguin Classics consulting editor John Seelye--and without which, arguably, there would be no Pirates of the Caribbean).

You'll find many more such titles in the Children's Classics Library that will bring reading pleasure to your whole family.

Included are 51 great titles:M