90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksRabindranath Tagore was one of the greatest authors to ever live. In these two short stories - 'The Broken Nest' and 'Dead or Alive' - he is at his devastating best, charting the slow, then fast, implosion of two perfect Bengali households. No-one understands each other; everything is misconstrued; all is lost.

Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali polymath who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful" poetry of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.