Penguin Book

Is there anything more British than a Penguin paperback? A gallery of distinctive covers from times gone by.

A wise woman (my mother) asked me what was up with the vintage-looking Penguin cover that read “Go Away I’m Reading” in my last post. I always do as my mother tells me (right mom?…

Buy Little Black Classics Box Set (Penguin Little Black Classics) 1 by Various (ISBN: 9780141398877) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

The Master and Margarita: 50th-Anniversary Edition (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition): Bulgakov, Mikhail, Fishman, Boris, Askew, Christopher Conn, Pevear, Richard, Volokhonsky, Larissa: 9780143108276: Books - Amazon.ca

nineteen eighty four george orwell 1984 book cover orange penguin eye

On of the three little Penguin books I bought in Tokyo for the plane trip back home. Here are 3 small selections of the works by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, the king of the Japanese decadent writers, as well as the famous prize given out every year to a contemporary Japanese writer. Oddly enough, I never read his works, but I knew of him as the iconic writer of his time. Strongly influenced by the French writers and poets of the 19tth century (he was born in 1892 and died in 1927), there are traces…

Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola and her philandering rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly and unloved. Yet telling her story is the narrator Rodrigo S.M., who tries to direct Macabéa's fate but comes to realize that, for all her outward misery, she is inwardly free. Slyly subverting ideas of poverty, identity, love and the art of writing itself, Clarice Lispector's audacious last novel is…

I love the logo of Penguin books! Read more on my blog

War of the Worlds, Penguin books. Design by Coralie Bickford Smith.

A hot tip for those of you yet to read Wuthering Heights: given how many characters Emily Brontë names for their parents, and how many of them marry their cousins, an edition with a Genealogical Table in the front is really handy!