PENGUIN CLASSICS NEWSLETTER

December '07/January '08

Deck the Halls . . . and Shop Penguin Classics this Holiday Season!

Need a little sturm und drang this holiday season? Skip the mall and shop Penguin Classics! Pick up a copy of the new Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Tolstoy's War and Peace. Trust us: you'll find all the drama you need with infinitely more enjoyment.

For the adventure seekers in your life, consider our handsome boxed set of Homer's The Odyssey and The Iliad—two classic journeys one never tires of.

Winter nights are long and cold—who wants to leave the house? Your friends and family won't have to when you give them The Complete Pelican Shakespeare. Romance, comedy, history, drama—this is truly the gift that keeps on giving!

The elegant verse of the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Abolqasem Ferdowsi's Shahnameh will also keep readers enthralled. Khaled Hosseini, author of extraordinary bestsellers The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has said of Dick Davis's new translation that it "will show Western readers why Ferdowsi's masterpiece is one of the most revered and beloved classics in the Persian world."

And for the winter holiday enthusiast, check out these timeless tales: the brand new Nutcracker and Mouse King and The Tale of the Nutcracker by E. T. A. Hoffman and Alexandre Dumas, or Dickens's perennial favorite Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings.

Happy shopping, and happy holidays, from Penguin Classics!

New Year's Resolution—Eat Healthier, Exercise, Read East of Eden

Hillary and Rudy, Meet Your Master

At the height of the presidential primary season, with Hillary and Rudy, Obama and Mitt, Edwards and Huckabee barnstorming Iowa and New Hampshire, Penguin Classics revives a political speechmaker par excellence to show the Democrats and Republicans just how it's done. Winston Churchill, the most eloquent and expressive statesman of his time, is the only political leader to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the words of Edward R. Murrow, "he mobilized the English language, and sent it into battle." Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat collects thirty-three of Churchill's greatest speeches in a volume edited by David Cannadine, one of the foremost historians of modern Britain. Marking the debut of Churchill in Penguin Classics, and published to coincide with the new HBO miniseries Churchill at War, Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat is a touchstone volume against which to test the oratorical mettle of the men—and woman—who would be president, and an essential addition to the library of every Churchill fan.

Classic Iraq

Chuck Palahniuk, bestselling author of Fight Club, and Joe Sacco, creator of the American Book Award-winning graphic memoir Palestine, team up to bring to a new generation of readers to Ken Kesey's counterculture classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Sacco's spectacular graphic cover art makes visually indelible the denizens of the Kesey's oppressive psych ward, and Palahniuk's frank and admiring foreword grapples anew with the far-reaching implications of Kesey's landmark novel.

Brecht's Dramatic Debut

Starring on the Penguin Classics stage are the authorized, definitive editions of Bertolt Brecht's greatest plays, The Threepenny Opera and Mother Courage and Her Children. Here are the acclaimed Manheim/Willett translations with new forewords by Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer and Academy Award winner Olympia Dukakis, and new introductions by Brecht scholar Norman Roessler. With striking covers, each book also contains Brecht's own notes and extensive editorial commentary by Ralph Manheim and John Willett.

Discover The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes)

One of our favorite titles for the season is The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes), the beloved French novel that suggests a cross between The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby. Voted one of the top ten books of the twentieth century by Le Monde, it is an unforgettably bittersweet story of youthful friendship and the search for lost love. Adam Gopnik, the New Yorker contributor and bestselling author of Paris to the Moon, has written a stirring new introduction that discusses the novel's young author, who was killed in World War I. Robin Buss's sparkling translation is the first in fifty years. The great-great-grandfather of our best pop love songs, The Lost Estate has a cult following of admirers including Beck and Nick Hornby, who said of the novel, "I find its depiction of a golden time and place just as poignant now."

More Janemania in January
 

Jane Austen enthusiasts rejoice! On January 13, 2008, Masterpiece on PBS will kick off its Jane Austen festival, "The Complete Jane Austen," by showing the latest film adaptations of six Austen classics. To prepare, why not find a cozy spot by the fire and delve into Penguin Classics' extensive Austen library, including Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Sense and Sensibility? Or, find all in one book with the convenient and gorgeously packaged Deluxe Edition of The Complete Novels, featuring an introduction by Karen Joy Fowler, the bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club. Dances, decorum, heartbreak, and humor—now that's something to celebrate!

Happy Birthday to . . . Joseph Conrad!

The 150th anniversary of Joseph Conrad's birth is this December, and to celebrate, Penguin Classics is publishing new editions of Conrad's most famous books. Our evocative new covers and useful features—including maps, glossaries, and comprehensive notes—guarantee that you will continue discovering these tales for the next 150 years. Begin by jumping in (at your own risk!) with Lord Jim, and brush up on your sea-speak with our edition's new nautical glossary. Then sail down to the Congo and into The Heart of Darkness, the enigmatic, controversial classic for which Conrad is best remembered. For the politically-minded, our new edition of Nostromo, in which Conrad examines imperialism in Latin America, now includes Conrad's original serial ending, and The Secret Agent, an exposé of terrorism and London's seedy underworld, boasts a new introduction discussing London's real-life political anarchy and corruption. Still can't decide? Neither can we! Try a collection of different Conrad favorites in Typhoon and Other Stories, The 'Nigger of the Narcissus' and Other Stories, or The Portable Conrad. Happy birthday to Conrad, and happy reading to you!

Campus Classic

For each Penguin Classics Newsletter we invite a professor to share an experience of teaching with a Penguin Classic.

Like many another professor of nineteenth-century American literature, I find myself teaching a great, great many books from the Penguin Classics series. I sometimes like to think, in the way of aging professors, of all those black-spined volumes, those weighty copies of Moby-Dick, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Walden and such, that wend their way through the lives and homes of former students, finding space for themselves first in moving boxes and on improvised shelves and, later, dog-eared and a bit battered, into a place of permanence in their grown-up lives. One of the books I most like to imagine my students carrying with them into adulthood is Henry James's The Bostonians, appended in Richard Lansdown's Penguin edition with extracts from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and James's own The American Scene. It is a particular joy to teach to undergraduates. I hope they return to it and find undimmed their initial, wonderful surprise: surprise that a writer so "difficult" could also be so funny, that a book could so combine satirical cold-heartedness with such aching tenderness, that a place and a time and a writer so removed from their present tense could be posing questions—about the entanglements of sex and love and politics, say—that feel to them anything but antiquated or academic. Of course, this vision of a post-collegiate return to those weathered black Penguins may be little more than a professor's pipe dream. But, as modest dreams go, it is, I find, a sustaining one.

Peter M. Coviello
Associate Professor of English and Acting Director of the Program in Africana Studies,
Bowdoin College
Course: "Empire of Feeling"