The list began with distinctive grey spines and evocative pictorial covers – a look that, after various incarnations, continues to influence their current design – and with books that are still considered landmark classics today.
Penguin Modern Classics have caused scandal and political change, inspired great films and broken down barriers, whether social, sexual or the boundaries of language itself. They remain the most provocative, groundbreaking, exciting and revolutionary works of the last 100 years (or so).
On the fiftieth anniversary of the Modern Classics, we’re publishing fifty Mini Modern Classics: the very best short fiction by writers ranging from Beckett to Conrad, Nabokov to Saki, Updike to Wodehouse. Though they don’t take long to read, they’ll stay with you long after you turn the final page.
1. Haslam was also the author of A General History of Labyrinths.
2. Russell (The Analysis of Mind [1921], p. 159) posits that the world was created only moments ago, filled with human beings who ‘remember’ an illusory past.
3. A ‘century,’ in keeping with the duodecimal system in use on Tlön, is a period of 144 years.
4. Today, one of Tlön’s religions contends, platonically, that a certain pain, a certain greenish-yellow color, a certain temperature, and a certain sound are all the same, single reality. All men, in the dizzying instant of copulation, are the same man. All men who speak a line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.
5. Buckley was a freethinker, a fatalist, and a defender of slavery.
6. There is still, of course, the problem of the material from which some objects are made.
1. Mme Henri Bachelier also lists a literal translation of Quevedo’s literal translation of St Francis de Sales’s Introduction à la vie dévote. In Pierre Menard’s library there is no trace of such a work. This must be an instance of one of our friend’s droll jokes, misheard or misunderstood.
2. I did, I might say, have the secondary purpose of drawing a small sketch of the figure of Pierre Menard – but how dare I compete with the gilded pages I am told the baroness de Bacourt is even now preparing, or with the delicate sharp crayon of Carolus Hourcade?
3. I recall his square-ruled notebooks, his black crossings-out, his peculiar typographical symbols, and his insect-like handwriting. In the evening, he liked to go out for walks on the outskirts of Nîmes; he would often carry along a notebook and make a cheery bonfire.
The Widow Ching—Pirate Page 6