Tag Archives: penguin classics
Penguins on Parade: Juvenal!
Some Penguin Classics are doubly significant – not only is the ‘source material’ something that’s often been venerated for centuries, but the particular edition chosen by Penguin has also achieved something of the status of a classic. Such is certainly the case with the renowned edition of Juvenal’s satires produced by the great classicist Peter [...]
Penguins on Parade: The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.!
Some Penguin Classics just automatically prompt a smile – because some classics are just happy occurrences, free of somber overtones, free of the burden of interpretation, free of the obligation to be anything other than entertaining (which hasn’t stopped academics and English departments from beavering away at them, but even so). And one of those [...]
Penguins on Parade: The Odyssey!
Some Penguin Classics are just a bit more famous than others, and the top spot there will likely always go to E. V. Rieu’s 1946 translation of Homer’s Odyssey, because it got the whole show started. And it started in the way all the best intellectual endeavors do: on amateur footing, without a thought of [...]
Penguins on Parade: Wives and Daughters!
Some Penguin Classics make their courtroom cases with the blunt force of a bulldog trial lawyer, flatly asserting that their client deserves a better deal. Of course this is what all reprint editions should do, ideally: no book should assume a second life in print – books cost money to make and time to read, after [...]
Penguins on Parade: Sentimental Education!
Some Penguin Classics live forever in the shadow of their more famous brethren, which is of course unfair. My lit’rary friends and I have often lamented the way so many authors are best known for their second-best work, and predicting when and how it’ll happen seems to boil down to divining the urgencies [...]
Penguins on Parade: Two Years Before the Mast!
Some Penguin Classics prove a few of my Rules About Authors (not to be confused with my Rules For Authors, a very different though equally long list) rather handily, as in the case of Richard Henry Dana, Jr.’s rip-snorting 1840 book Two Years Before the Mast, issued as a Penguin in their American Library in [...]
Penguins on Parade: The Shadow-Line!
Some Penguin Classics are eerily prescient, sometimes in decidedly unpleasant ways. In 2013 we’re resolutely gearing up for the 2014 centennial of the opening of the First World War, gearing up for a probable onslaught of books, documentaries, and commemorative magazines designed to remember/reassess/cash in on one of the gruesome formative events of the [...]
Penguins on Parade: Old Goriot!
Some Penguin Classics – in fact, perhaps a good deal more than we like to tell ourselves – enshrine books that aren’t really ‘classics’ at all, or ought not to be. This problem – if you view it as a problem, which I tend to – has been hugely exacerbated in the last twenty [...]
Penguins on Parade: The Prince!
Some Penguin Classics have been a part of the mental landscape for so long that finding a Penguin edition of them seems like a foregone conclusion, and surely high up on the list of such books would be Il Principe, the slim, explosive manual Niccolo Machiavelli wrote around 1513 as a dutiful, hopeful submission to [...]
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