Penguin has released a new series of cheap and cheerful classics. I think I have raved about the ingenuity of the reissuing of the Orange classic series before and bringing long forgotten classics back to the mass market. It’s also nice to see Penguin continue to embody the company’s original idea that good literature should be accessible to all. I just love how they freshen up the old titles. The new Green series harks back to the original Green crime series. The titles all look amazing and, of course, those lovely looking green spines wouldn’t look too shaby on my bookcase next to the numerous Orange Penguins I have collected. First off my list to purchase will be this:
I read it awhile ago after a serious hunt and sourced it at a library. That copy was old, dusty and smelled a little mouldy. It was a wonderful read and now it will be great to own a copy too. You can find the complete list of the fifty titles here.
(Disclaimer: It looks like I’m raving a lot about Penguin but this isn’t a paid advertisement. I just really love how they keep invigorating old Classics!)
The titles of the next batch of the popular Orange Penguins have been released! There are 75 titles this time in celebration of Penguin’s 75th year. They all look so exciting and I want so many of them already. I’m a bit disappointed that they’re publishing The Wizard of Oz and Nausea after all the trouble I went to find them and have just recently bought them! Also delighted, but also very annoyed, that Shirley Jackson is being published too along with M.J. Hyland’s debut novel (which I also just got).
I’m pretty excited that they’re publishing Muriel Spark since I’ve heard many positive reviews of her writing on other blogs. The list is quite inspiring and I love it. There’s a few F. Scott Fitzgeralds, Kafkas, interesting inclusions of writings by Leonard Cohen and Andy Warhol, plays and some excellent Australian writing.
At the moment, there doesn’t seem to a list up and only a video which is slightly annoying. You can view it here:
I’ve listed them here but I can’t make out some authors.
The Wizard of Oz – Frank L Baum
Foe – J.M. Coetzee
Dangerous Liaisons
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Prophet
The Thirty-Nine Steps
One Hundred Great Books in Haiku
The Invisible Man
Obernewtyn
The Lady in the Lake – Raymond Chandler
Seven Little Australians
Poems – Michael Leunig
The Little Prince
Our Sunshine – Robert Drewe
Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland
Three Men in a Boat – Jerome K. Jerome
Three Tales from the Arabian Nights
I Can Jump Puddles – Alan Marshall
It’s Raining in Mango – Thea Astley
Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
The Psychology of Love
The Ghost Road – Pat Barker
Washington Square – Henry James
The Trial – Franz Kafka
Therese Raquin – Emile Zola
Hamlet
How the Light Gets In – M.J. Hyland
The Go-Between – L.P. Priestly? Hartley?
Gulliver’s Travels
On Natural Selection – Charles Darwin
Pygmalion – George Bernard Shaw
Howl, Kaddish and other poems – Allen Ginsberg
The Shiralee – D’arcy Niland
Beowulf
Postcards from Surfers – Helen Garner
From Russia with Love – Ian Flemming
Hard Times -Charles Dickens
Keep the Aspidistra Flying – George Orwell
The Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles
Civilisation and its Discontents – Sigmund Freud
The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx (what about Engles?)
Raffles
Nausea
The Jungle Book
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol – Andy Warhol
The Call of the Wild – Jack London
Scoop – Evelyn Waugh
The Lost Estate – … Alain-Fournier
Hedda Gabler and other plays – Henrik Ibsen
How we are Hungry
Confessions of an English Opium Eater – Thomas de Quincy
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Selected Poems – John Keats
Book of Longing – Leonard Cohen
The Inheritance of Loss – Kiran Desai
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
In the Winter Dark – Tim Winton
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
Surrender – Sonya Hartnett
The Beautiful and the Damned – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Playing Beatie Bow – Ruth Park
The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
The Periodic Table
The Happy Prince and other stories
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
Around the World in Eighty Days
The Power of One – Bryce Courtenay
Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle
Inferno – Dante
Edit: Penguin has put up the official list. And also thanks to Dominique for posting the link to the list earlier. It’s pretty exciting!
Tim Winton has won his fourth Miles Franklin book award for Breath. I haven’t read many of his books aside for Dirt Music which won the Miles Franklin in 2002.
This is the BIG news – the Tomorrow series will finally be made into a movie trilogy! They’re focusing on the first three books and will be written and directed by Stuart Beattie who also co-wrote the script for ‘Australia’. I hope it turns out to be wonderful.
I also bought some more of those orange Penguins which were further marked down. They are just wonderful although I’m pretty sure they will probably disintergrate in my hands in ten years time. New titles are:
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
The Surgeon of Crawthorne by Simon Winchester
The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton
Tales of the Unexpected by Roald Dahl
I must have almost half the available titles. I also got my Zafon which I’m very excited about.
Life has caught up with me and I’ve been crazed by stress. However, I’m not crazed enough to not appreciate new books. 🙂 I was strolling around Borders and saw they were having a special on the Orange Penguins if you bought three. Who was I to protest? It was difficult picking out the three. I chose:
1. Delta of Venus by Anais Nin
2. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
3. The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault
I also would have liked In Cold Blood by Truman Capote but I guess that can wait another day. I love these Penguins! I can’t wait for the new batch to be released.
Penguin has released a series of blank notebooks with the covers of popular works. It looks exactly like the orange, classic Penguins except now you can pen your next masterpiece in it. It’s a fantastic idea and I can’t wait to go and grab a few of these spendiferous notebooks although it will look like you’re scribbling away in a copy of the actual book (a big, bibliophile no-no) to the unsuspecting public. If you don’t fancy being constantly intimidated by Virginia Woolf and George Orwell while you’re penning the next great classic, there’s also the choice of having a series of Penguin spines as the cover.
I’m very excited! And, of course, it’s obviously another way for Penguin to make quick bucks. We all know stationery freaks, writers and bibliophiles won’t be able to resist.
Penguin has teamed up with Bill Amberg to design and release six Penguin classics with beautiful cream leather covers. I didn’t know who or what Bill Amberg is so I googled him and it’s a leather goods brand for those who aren’t in the know.
The books, from what I can see on the Penguin website ,are:
1. Evelyn Waugh “Brideshead Revisited”
2. Raymond Chandler “The Big Sleep”
3. Oscar Wilde “The Picture of Dorian Gray”
4. E.M Forster “A Room with a View”
5. F. Scott Fitzgerald “The Great Gatsby”
6. Truman Capote “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”
I wonder what the price are for these though and whether Bill Amberg played a role in choosing the titles. They’re highly tempting and they are released just in time for Christmas this year. I wish they did “Jane Eyre” though, because I would definitely buy that. I love Penguin – and I love how they are always invigorating and putting out new designs for the classics and never letting them sit on the backburner.
Mad Bibliophile 