Mini Modern Classics

This edition was published in 2011 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Penguin. As Penguin Modern collection, it is made up of modernist writers or, as they say, ‘they're full of the best short fiction by the greatest writers of the last 100 years’.

The list of the 50 books:

1.    Ryōnosuke Akutagawa – Hell Screen

2.    Kingsley Amin – All the blood within me

3.    Donald Barthelme – Some of us has been threatening out friend Colby

4.    Samuel Beckett – The expelled

5.    Saul Bellow – Him with his foot in his mouth

6.    Jorge Luis Borges – The widow Ching-pirate

7.    Paul Bowles – The delicate prey

8.    Italo Calvino – The Queen’s necklace

9.    Albert Camus – The adulterous woman

10. Truman Capote – Children on their birthday

11. Angela Carter – Bluebeard

12. Raymond Chandler – Killer in the rain

13. Eileen Chang – Red rose, white rose

14. G.K. Chesternon – The strange crime of John Boulnois

15. Joseph Conrad – Youth

16. Robert Coover – Romance of the thin man and the fat lady

17. Isak Dinesen – Babette’s feast

18. Margaret Drabble – Hassan’s tower

19. Hans Fallada – Short treatise on the joys of morphism

20. F. Scott Fitzgerald – Babylon revisited

21. Ian Fleming – The living daylights

22. E.M. Forster – The machine stops

23. Shirley Jackson – The tooth

24. Henry James – The beast in the jungle

25. M.R. James – Canon Alberic’s scrap-nook

26. James Joyce – Two gallants

27. Franz Kafka – In the penal colony

28. Rudyard Kiplin – They

29. D. H. Lawrence – Odour of chrysanthemus

30. Primo Levi – The magic paint

31. H. P. Lovecraft – The colour of space

32. Marlcom Lowry – Lunar caustic

33. Carson McCullers – Wunderkind

34. Katherine Mansfiel – Bliss

35. Robert Musil – Flypaper

36. Vladimir Nabokov – Terra incognita

37. Rik Narayan – A breath of Lucifer

38. Frank O’Connor – The cornet-player who betrayed Ireland

39. Dorothy Parker – The sexes

40. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya – Trough the wall

41. Jean Rhys – La grosse fifi

42. Saki – Filboid studge, the story of a mouse that helped

43. Isaac Bashevis Singer – The last demon

44. William Trevor – The mark-2 wife

45. John Updike – Rich in Russia

46. H.G. Wells – The door in the wall

47. Eudora Welty – Moon lake

48. P.G. Wodehouse – The crime wave at Blandngs

49. Virginia Woolf – The lady in the looking glass

50. Stefan Zweig - Chess