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Introducing our African American Classics Series
Penguin Classics is proud to introduce the
first two books in our new six-book African American Classics
series: James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones and The Portable Charles W. Chesnutt. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Director of the W. E. B. Du
Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard,
serves as series editor.
The Portable Charles W. Chesnutt, edited
and introduced by William L. Andrews, includes twelve short stories,
three essays, and the complete novel The Marrow of Tradition.
We're publishing on the heels of a U.S. postage stamp issued in
January 2008 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Chesnutt's
birth. God's Trombones, a collection
of seven sermons that Johnson reconfigured into vivid spiritual
poetry, features a foreword by the incomparable Maya Angelou.
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Change We Can Believe In?
Henry Adams would be the first to scoff.
According to Morris Dickstein, writing in the current issue of
Bookforum: "Adams's 1880 novel, Democracy, begins as a
Baedeker to Washington politics, an insider's guide to how democracy
in America really works. But it ends with a sweeping moral retreat,
a sense that politics can lead only to contamination, an 'atrophy of
the moral senses by disuse.' America saw itself as the great
exception, free of the corruptions of a decadent Europe, but found
that only one's private life could serve as such an oasis of
innocence."
Maureen Dowd of The New York Times has
said that Democracy is "one of the most
perceptive books ever written about Washington," and we're
publishing just in time for the Fourth of July. It's the perfect
book for what's been called a change election—especially if you
think that some things never change.
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Fireworks and Forefathers
As our country gears up to celebrate another
birthday, join in the festivities and show your patriotism by
picking up some classic Americana:
America and Americans by
John Steinbeck
On the Road by Jack
Kerouac
The Portable John Adams
Dashing Diamond Dick and Other Classic Dime Novels
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We Love You, Angela Carter
You might've been justified in thinking
Angela Carter immortal, such was the influence she had on our
literature, but she died in 1992 and was eulogized by Salman Rushdie
in The New York Times as "the most brilliant writer in
England" and as English literature's "high sorceress, its benevolent
witch-queen." Margaret Atwood even said, "The amazing thing about
her, for me, was that someone who looked so much like the Fairy
Godmother . . . should actually be so much like the Fairy
Godmother." Penguin Classics is doing what we can to bring Angela
Carter back to life with a new edition of her virtuoso retellings of
some of our canonical fairy tales.
In Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Other Classic Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault,
Carter gives new life to some of the icons of Western folklore.
Charles Perrault, in seventeenth-century France, became the first to
set them down, and three hundred years later Angela Carter retold
them with the flair of a modern visionary, doing for such fairy tale
favorites as "Sleeping Beauty," "Puss in Boots," and "Bluebeard"
what Gregory Maguire did for the Wicked Witch of the West in the hit
Broadway musical Wicked. As mischievous as it is brilliant,
this volume marks the Penguin Classics debut of Angela Carter, a
writer of dazzling wit and subversive imagination.
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