AMERICAN SUPERNATURAL TALES
Edited with an Introduction by S. T. Joshi
 
Beware of the black cat! American Supernatural Tales, a Penguin Classics original anthology ranging from H. P. Lovecraft to Stephen King, puts the "goth" in American gothic.  S. T. Joshi collects some of the best supernatural short fiction, with an emphasis on twentieth century writers that should appeal to readers who have loved novels like Interview with a Vampire, movies such as The Exorcist, and TV shows about the paranormal. American Supernatural Tales joins an impressive and growing list of horror literature in Penguin Classics, from Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Jackson.

Before you attempt the Monster Mash or delve into your bag of collected sweets, pick up Frankenstein and American Supernatural Tales for a festive Penguin Classics Halloween round-up. They'll have you shaking in your boots before you can say BOO!

Several months ago the host of a Norwegian television program visited the Penguin offices to interview various Penguin representatives for a show about Sigrid Undset, whose novel Kristin Lavransdatter we'd recently published in an award-winning new translation by Tiina Nunnally and selected for discussion in an online Penguin Classics reading group.  Toward the end of the interview, the show's host asked us which of Norway's two most famous writers-both winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature-we thought was better: Sigrid Undset or Knut Hamsun. Not ones to play favorites with our authors, we're happy to be able to point to several novels by Knut Hamsun on the Penguin Classics list, and to announce that this month we're publishing the first new translation of Hamsun's Growth of the Soil since the book's original publication ninety years ago.
 
When it was published in 1917, Growth of the Soil was immediately recognized as a masterpiece, and it's widely thought to have clinched the Nobel Prize for Hamsun. It's a novel that might be considered an anthem for the environmental movement, and for agrarian values and simple living-even a kind of fictional counterpart to Thoreau's Walden. At its center is Isak, who leaves his village for the untilled tracts of the Norwegian back country, where he works the land by hand, builds a home, marries, fathers children, and prospers, while the world around him changes. By the novel's end, the land Isak has cleared is strewn with telegraph wires, and the inexorable march of "progress" is everywhere around him.
 
Our new translation is by the distinguished Hamsun scholar Sverre Lyngstad, who has translated four of Hamsun's other novels for Penguin Classics over the past ten years: Hunger, Mysteries, Pan, and Victoria. Featuring a new introduction by Brad Leithauser, the MacArthur Prize-winning poet, novelist, and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books who was honored by the president of Iceland for his writings about Nordic literature, this new edition of Growth of the Soil makes Penguin Classics the principal publisher of Hamsun in English. And it brings to five the number of Hamsun volumes we publish-the same number as Sigrid Undset, proving once and for all that at Penguin Classics, we love our Norwegian authors equally.
 
To watch the Penguin Classics editors discuss Sigrid Undset on Norwegian television, click here.

Have suggestions for other Norwegian or Scandinavian classics? Write to us here.

Before MINX there were the March Girls

This year, DC Comics has gone after the teen-girl demographic with new comics not just about going out with the cute guy but also about stories that appeal to their individuality, assertiveness, and intelligence. In the same spirit, we have packaged our new Graphic Deluxe edition of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women to appeal to the next generation of young women who will do Jo, Beth, Amy, and Meg proud. Julie Doucet, one of the top young female graphic artists at work today, has designed a fun and satirical cover for the all-American beloved classic of the March sisters. Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres and most recently, Ten Days in the Hills, has written a great new introduction. Also, November 2007 marks the 175th anniversary of Louisa May Alcott's birth.

Grendel Goes to Hollywood

Every season, Hollywood returns to the classics in hopes of finding box-office success.  This is the season of Beowulf, with the November release of Robert Zemeckis's much anticipated "performance-capture" film version of the epic, starring Angelina Jolie, Ray Winstone, and Anthony Hopkins. Prepare for the legendary battles between the warrior Beowulf and a trio of uber-monsters with one of Penguin Classics' three essential editions-in prose, verse, and Old English: 

• Beowulf (Prose)
  
• Beowulf (Verse)
  
• Beowulf (Old English)
  

Journey back in time and around the world with Penguin's Great Journeys, a new series of ten original titles mapping history's greatest adventures. Pocket-sized and gorgeously packaged, this collection boasts tales by such notable authors as Isabella Bird, Mark Twain, and Anton Chekhov. Whether you're journeying to the end of the Russian Empire, braving the stormy seas of the Indian Ocean, or dodging icebergs in the glacial Antarctic, the Great Journeys collection is sure to exercise your imagination-and passport! Already attracting attention in The Washington Post Book World, and praised in Nylon as "intriguing on their own and breathtaking as a set," these titles are not to be missed. So sit back, relax, and let Penguin Classics transport you all over the map.

Bon voyage!

Snakes with Wings & Gold-digging Ants by Herodotus

The Customs of the Kingdoms of India by Marco Polo

The Shipwrecked Men by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca

Sold as a Slave by Olaudah Equiano

Jaguars and Electric Eels by Alexander von Humboldt

In the Heart of the Amazon Forest by Henry Walter Bates

Can-Cans, Cats & Cities of Ash by Mark Twain

Adventures in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird

A Journey to the End of the Russian Empire by Anton Chekhov

Escape from the Antarctic by Ernest Shackleton

Campus Classic

For each Penguin Classics Newsletter we invite a professor to share an experience of teaching with a Penguin Classic.  Michael Gorra, editor of the forthcoming Portable Conrad, shares his thoughts and his Smith College students' responses to Goethe's Italian Journey:
 

These days when I teach a class on the Victorian novel I order all Penguins if I can. I like their black-spined uniformity, their solidity-sometimes I tell my students that this is what a canon looks like. Of course, when I make my choice of the Penguin Bleak House or Middlemarch I'm doing so in a market of competing editions. That's not the case with my favorite Penguin to teach from, an edition of Goethe's Italian Journey that has been continuously in print since 1970. There's no other paperback available, and really there doesn't need to be, even if by today's standards its apparatus is minimal-no notes, not even a map. The translation has a kind of stately zest; no surprise, given that Auden did it, in collaboration with Elizabeth Mayer. Every year the students in my course on travel narratives find that this book takes them by surprise. They may know Goethe as a name, but only as a name, and one they're a bit scared of. And yet each time they find themselves taken by his enthusiasm, his excitement and delight, his sense that coming to Italy has put him into a larger world. As do I. For if in Rome even Goethe can admit to being swept away, then who are we to play things cool? 
 
 
Michael Gorra
Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English, Smith College
Course: "Travellers' Tales"