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

Vintage Minis

Vintage Minis can be made up by full essays, some short story, excerpts of one of some novels… These books have just two things in common, the title is made up of one word and it has one topic related to the word in the title. Up to now, there are only 35 published books:

1.    Laurie Lee – Summer

2.    Toni Morrison – Race

3.    William Styron – Depression

4.    Jeanette Winterson – Love

5.    Salman Rushdie – Home

6.    Nigella Lawson – Eating

7.    Aldous Huxley – Psychedelics

8.    Louisa May Alcott – Sisters

9.    Anne Enright – Babies

10. Roger Deakin – Swimming

11. Tim Parks – Calm

12. Helen Simpson – Motherhood

13. Joseph Heller – Work

14. Haruki Murakami – Desire

15. John Cheever – Drinking

16. Karl Ove Knausgaard – Fatherhood

17. Julian Barnes – Death

18. Marcel Proust – Jealousy

19. Xiadu Guo – Language

20. Virginia Woolf – Liberty

21. Yuval Noah Harari – Money

22. Rose Tremain – Friendship

23. M. R. James – Ghosts

24. Jane Austen – Marriage

25. Sigmund Freud – Dreams

26. Richard Wright – Injustice

27. Sebastian Faulks – War

28. Margaret Atwood – Freedom

29. Yaris Varoufakis – Austerity

30. A vintage Christmas

31. Stephen Grosz – Therapy

32. Helen Macdonald – Recovery

33. Mark Haddon – Family

34. Ian McEwan – Science

35. Irvine Welsh – Rave

These books are in presale:

36. Karen Armstrong – Religion

37. Simon Schama – Art

38. Arthur Conan Doyle – Murder

39. Charles Dickens – London

40. William Shakespeare – Power

41. Oscar Wilde – Lies

42. Charlotte Brontë – Independence

43. F. Scott Fitzgerald - Parties

Clothbound Classics

I can totally affirm that this is my favorite Penguin edition. The cover is so beautiful, hardcover, soft, made of cloth, the drawings are usually related with the topic of the book, the letter has the perfect font and size that makes the reading so pleasant, enjoyable and easy.

The only problem is that they are a bit expensive (comparing them with their paperback counterpart), but I assure you that it worth each euro spend on them!

Here you have the list of published books of this collection:

1.    Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary

2.    Charles Dickens – Great Expectations

3.    Charles Dickens – Bleak house

4.    Charles Dickens – Hard Times

5.    Charles Dickens – Oliver Twist

6.    Charles Dickens – A Christmas carol and other christmas stories

7.    Charles Dickens – A tale of two cities

8.    Emily Brontë – Wuthering Heights

9.    Charlotte Brontë – Jane Eyre

10. Emily Brontë – The tenant of Wildfield hall

11. Anne Brontë - Villette

12. Jane Austen – Sense and sensibility

13. Jane Austen – Pride and prejudice

14. Jane Austen – Emma

15. Jane Austen – Pesuasion

16. Jane Austen – Mansfield Park

17. Jane Austen – Northanger Abbey

18. Jane Austen – Love and friendship: another youthful writings

19. Jane Austen  - Sanditon

20. Elizabeth Gaskell – Cranford

21. Thomas Hardy – Tess of the d’Ubervilles

22. Thomas Hardy – Far from the maddening crowd

23. Thomas Hardy – The mayor of Casterbridge

24. Thomas Hardy – Jude the obscure

25. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and punishment

26. Oscar Wilde – The picture of Dorian Gray

27. Louisa May Alcott – Little Women

28. Wilkie Colliens – The woman in white

29. Arthur Conan Doyle – The hound of the Baskervilles

30. Homer – Odyssey

31. Homer – Illiad

32. Robert Louis Stevenson – Treasure Island

33. Lewis Carroll – Alice in Wonderland and through the looking-glass

34. Lewis Carroll – Jabberwocky and other nonsense: collected poems

35. D.H. Lawrence – Lady Chatterley’s lover

36. William Shakespeare – The sonnet’s and A lover’s complaint

37. Dante – Inferno: The Divine Comedy I

38. Jonathan Swift – Gulliver’s travels

39. The Qur’an

40. The Ramayana

41. The Mahabharata

42. The Bhagavad Gita

43. Bram Stoker – Dracula

44. George Eliot – Middlemarch

45. Victor Hugo – Les miserables

46. Alexandre Dumas – The cound of Monte Cristo

47. William Thackeray – Vanity fair

48. Herman Melville – Moby Dick

49. Mary Shelley – Frankenstein

50. Geoffrey Chaucer – The Canterbury Tales

51. Leo Tolstoy – Anna Karenina

52. Leo Tolstoy – War and peace

53. Mark Twain – The adventures of Huckleberry Finn

54. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe

55. Ovid – Metamorphoses

56. Rudyard Kipling – The jungle books

57. John Milton – Paradise Lost

58. Charles Dickens – David Copperfield

59. John Steinbeck – The Pearl

60. Henry James – The portrait of a lady

61. Marco Polo – The travels

62. William S. Burroughs – Naked lunch

63. Jean Rhys – Wide Sargasso Sea

64. Virginia Woolf – Orlando

65. John Kennedy Toole – A confederacy of dunces

66. Evelyn Waugh – Brideshead revisited

67. John Wyndham – The day of the triffids

68. Marcel Proust – Rememberance of things past vol. 1

69. Marcel Proust – Rememberance of things past vol. 2

70. Marcel Proust – Rememberance of things past vol. 3

71. Jules Verne – Twenty thousand leagues under the sea

72. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote

73. Richard Wagner – The ring of the Nibelung

74. Arthur Conan Doyle – The adventures of Sherlock Holmes

75. H. W. Wells – The war of the worlds

76. Tales from 1001 nights

Penguin Modern

Al igual que Little Black Classics, esta edición es preciosa. Es menos numerosa (solo tiene 50 libros) y se compone exclusivamente de escritores modernistas.

Aquí está la lista de esta colección:

1.    Martin Luther King Jr. – Letter from Birmingham jail

2.    Allen Ginsberg – Television was a baby crawling toward that deathchamber

3.    Daphne du Maurier – The breakthrough

4.    Dorothy Parker – The custard pie

5.    Akutawa & others – Three Japanese short stories

6.    Anaïs Nin – The veiled woman

7.    George Orwell – Notes on nationalism

8.    Gertrude Stein – Food

9.    Stanislaw Lem – The three electroknights

10. Patrick Kavanagh – The great hunger

11. Danilo Kiš – The legend of the sleepers

12. 12.Ralph Ellison – The black ball

13. Jean Rhys – Til September petronella

14. Franz Kafka – Investigations of a dog

15. Clarice Lispector – Daydream and drunkness of a young lady

16. Ryszard Kapuscinski – An advertisement for toothpaste

17. Albert Camus – Create dangerously

18. John Steinbeck – The vigilante

19. Fernando Pessoa – I have more souls than one

20. Shirley Jackson – The missing girl

21. Gazdanov & others – Four Russian short stories

22. Italo Calvino – The distance of the moon

23. Audre Lorde – The master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house

24. Leonora Carrington – The skeleton’s holiday

25. William S. Burroughs – The finger

26. Samuel Beckett – The End

27. Kathy Acker – New York City in 1979

28. Chinua Achebe – Africa’s tarnished name

29. Susan Sontag – Notes on camp

30. John Berger – The red tenda of Bologna

31. Françoise Sagan – The gigolo

32. Cyprian Ekwensi – Glittering city

33. Jack Kerouac – Piers of the homeless night

34. Hans Fallada- Why do you wear a cheap watch?

35. Truman Capote – The duke in his domain

36. Saul Bellow – Leaving the yellow house

37. Katherine Anne Porter – The cracked looking-glass

38. James Baldwin – Dark days

39. Georges Simenon – Letter to my mother

40. William Carlos William – Death the barber

41. Betty Friedan – The problem that has no name

42. Federico García Lorca – The dialogue of two snails

43. Yuko Tsushima – Of dogs and walls

44. Javier Marías – Madame Du Deffand and the idiots

45. Carson McCullers – The haunted boy

46. Jorge Luis Borges – The garden of forking paths

47. Andy Warhol – Fame

48. Primo Levi – The survivor

49. Vladimir Nabokov – Lance

50. Wendell Berry – Why I am not going to buy a computer