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Alan Walker, our Senior Director of Academic Marketing & Sales, volunteered to start an ambitious marathon to read one book by an author per letter of the alphabet. Here are Alan's latest blog posts on reading classically.
"To e, or not to e"—Whether you prefer our Pelican paperback or our eBook edition, Penguin provides high quality accessible scholarship for all readers' enjoyment of the Bard's work. Check out our Penguin Enriched eBook Classic of Shakespeare's Hamlet, edited by Sean Keilen, which includes character sketches, Shakespeare places to visit, and notes on famous phrases. Enjoy more Penguin Enriched eBook Classics featuring filmographies, scathing nineteenth-century book reviews, first edition illustrations, Salem witch trials, directions on how to prepare tea like Jane Austen, and cuts of beef and pork!
The eBook publication of The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights is one of many eBook classics now available by Nobel laureate and iconic American writer John Steinbeck.
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 The Academy of American Poets has selected the Penguin Classics edition of C. P. Cavafy's Selected Poems, translated by Avi Sharon, as the best book of poetry translated from any language last year. In announcing the 2009 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, the Academy said: "Avi Sharon's considerable gifts as a classicist are one asset; his ear for poetry still another. Both talents merge in his new translation to offer us a Cavafy that is accessible in an almost conversational way, without losing its rhythmic current or its exquisite historical associations."
 J.R.R. Tolkien's newly released novel, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, was discovered among his papers and is based on the Norse epic The Saga of the Volsungs, a Penguin Classic. This book, along with the Penguin Classics edition of The Prose Edda, were Tolkien's main sources of inspiration for The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun and The Lord of the Rings.
 Now on Broadway: Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, face off in "a spectacular stage burner of a revival" (The New York Times) of Friedrich Schiller's Mary Stuart.
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 One of literature's consummate cads has got some great new pickup lines in Natasha Randall's seductive new translation of Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. In his foreword to this trailblazing Russian novel, filmmaker-playwright-provocateur Neil LaBute pays homage to Lermontov: "You know you've done a good day's work when you've split the critical community in two (or three or four). . . . I'd like to believe Lermontov would've spat in the face of popular opinion"—and then gloated to see his scandalous novel become one of the most beloved in Russian literature.
 Who stole the Penguin?! The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime gathers the legendary thieves, burglars, rogues, and con artists from the time of Sherlock Holmes, in an ensemble cast as stylishly criminal as that of Ocean's Eleven.
 Almost fifty years after antiapartheid activist Ruth First's arrest and detention by South African authorities, Penguin Classics publishes 117 Days, her harrowing account of solitary confinement under the government's ninety-day detention law. First's spare, haunting voice recounts her grueling war of nerves with her captors—South Africa's dreaded Special Branch of interrogators. World renowned scholar and activist Angela Y. Davis contributes a new introduction.
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