FEBRUARY / MARCH 2007 CLASSICS NEWSLETTER

   PENGUIN EPICS!

Hot on the heels of the success of Penguin's Great Ideas series, the Classics team is proud to announce for the New Year the arrival of the Penguin Epics, a gorgeously packaged collection of 20 short tales of adventure, drama, and myth. We're thrilled that the epics are making a big splash, as Robert Fagles' new translation of The Aeneid has received much acclaim from critical circles, including The New York Times.  Among the stories in this collection is the legendary Beowulf, in which the valiant warrior challenges the fiendish mother-beast Grendel in order to save the ancient kingdom of the Danes and its people from brutal and irreparable destruction.  The ever-popular Odysseus, former king of Ithaca, also appears in this series in Odysseus Returns Home.  In this tale, the broken king, transformed by ten years of wandering and war, must employ his cunning and ingenuity to help his wife, Penelope, recognize him without ever revealing himself. Other stories span the extraordinary courage of King Arthur in King Arthur's Last Battle to Dante's plunge into the dark forest of the damned in The Descent Into Hell. Buy these exciting tales separately or together as a convenient box set - either way, they are swift and heart-pounding reads you won't forget. So go ahead and channel your inner Sinbad. Just don't forget your sword!

PENGUIN EPICS: THE GREATEST STORIES EVER TOLD

"The Epics depict the most extreme acts of heroism, ambition, bravery and violence, and in doing so they reveal mankind's most profound aspirations and darkest fears."
 -Philip Pullman

This month Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, celebrates the greatest stories ever told.  To read his essay, click here.

A CLASSIC EPIC

SHAHNAMEH: THE PERSIAN BOOK OF KINGS

In Penguin Classics we are proud to publish great epics from around the world. Along with Paradise Lost, The Divine Comedy, and the epics of Homer stands the Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings by Abolqasem Ferdowski. We have published Dick Davis's magnificent translation of the Shahnameh in a Classics Deluxe edition. Azar Nafisi, author of the bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, contributes a Foreword. Critically acclaimed, Davis's new translation of the Shahnameh was chosen as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post Book World. 

For those readers who loved the bestselling book The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and are anticipating the release of the movie adaptation in November 2007, you will remember that the heroic tales that the main characters, Amir and Hassan, read together as young boys are from the Shahnameh.   Khaled Hosseini commented, "Davis's wonderful translation will show Western readers why Ferdowski's masterpiece is one of the most revered and most beloved classics in the Persian world."

When we think of the classics it's the past that we're usually enshrining, often in acknowledgment of the continuity between the past and the present, and in tribute to the ideals - literary or otherwise - that we wish to uphold. But one of our latest additions to the Penguin Classics points thrillingly to the future.
 

A Princess of Mars is the first novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose Tarzan of the Apes spawned twenty-two sequels, with sales of more than thirty million copies in fifty-eight languages around the world. A futuristic sci-fi fantasy, A Princess of Mars has also given rise to a number of great American imaginative franchises, among them Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles and George Lucas's Star Wars. To read an appreciation of A Princess of Mars contributed by John Seelye, general editor of the Penguin Classics, click here.