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Penguin Classics Book Club with Kathy Gursky
Kathy Gursky, our Penguin Classics Librarian, has selected Paths of Glory by Humphrey Cobb as the next title for our Penguin Classics Book Club. Best known by its 1957 Stanley Kubrick film adaptation, Paths of Glory is a harrowing account of the experiences of four soldiers during World War I. Cobb explores the limitations of men under the most extreme demands from their nation. This newly published war classic—featuring a foreword by The Wire creator David Simon and an introduction by James Meredith—is sure to provoke some exciting discussion, so join the conversation with Kathy Gursky and Penguinclassics.com.
New from Argentina! Joining The Sonnets and Poems of the Night—two new volumes of Jorge Luis Borges's poetry that we published for National Poetry Month—are three new volumes of Borges's essays, each featuring selections never before published in English: On Writing, a master class in the art by one of its most distinguished and innovative practitioners; On Argentina, an invaluable literary and travel guide to Borges's homeland; and On Mysticism, an unprecedented collection of Borges's meditations on the mystical realm.
Moby-Dick and all the Penguin Enriched eBook Classics are now available on the iPad! Learn more about our enriched eBook features such as 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! Mary Bercaw Edwards provides specially commissioned essays on Moby-Dick in popular culture, Melville's whaling years, cannibal talk in Moby-Dick, sermons in Moby-Dick, as well as enriched eBook notes, illustrations, and more.
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Arabian Nights Fever! Just as our landmark new translation of The Arabian Nights hits the shelves—the first complete English translation since Sir Richard Burton's of 125 years ago—we're seeing a flurry of high-profile productions for stage and screen that invoke the likes of Sheherazade, Sinbad, Ali Baba, and Aladdin: Sex and the City 2, in which Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha, and Miranda spend seven Arabian nights together in Dubai; Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and adapted from the Arabian Nights–themed videogame series; and MacArthur "genius" Mary Zimmerman's award-winning production of The Arabian Nights, which the National Repertory Theater will stage this summer.
Golden Globe winner and smash hit HBO series True Blood began its third season on June 13. Director Alan Ball puts a contemporary Southern spin on the classic vampire genre. Following Louisiana-native Sookie Stackhouse and her handsome (albeit 150-year-old) Confederate love in a plot filled with erotic tension and civil rights allegory, True Blood breathes 21st-century life into the Southern Gothic and inspires us to pick up The Portable Faulkner, writings by the original master of Southern local color, and, of course, the vampire daddy of them all—Dracula.
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New editions of two plays by legendary American playwright and Penguin Classics cornerstone author Arthur Miller, for the fifth anniversary of his death: An Enemy of the People, Miller's adaptation of the Ibsen play, featuring an introduction by Six Degrees of Separation author John Guare that situates Miller's version in the context of McCarthyism, and A View from the Bridge (recently revived on Broadway starring Scarlett Johansson and Liev Schreiber), with a foreword by Academy Award–winning actor and director Philip Seymour Hoffman, who writes that "Miller awakened in me the taste for all that must be—the empathy and love for the least of us, out of which bursts a gratitude for the poetry of his characters and the greatness of their creator."
Euclides da Cunha's Backlands is the Iliad of Brazil. In cinematic detail, da Cunha writes of the bloodiest civil war in Brazil's history—the infamous War of Canudos. From 1896 to 1897, the Brazilian government launched a campaign against the religious zealot Antonio Conselheiro and his 30,000 followers. Da Cunha delves deep into the psychology of Conselheiro (the "counselor") and questions the society that could breed such a fanatic. As he shows, both sides revealed in their bloodshed the complexities—and the effect of those complexities—of modern Brazilian society. From the excesses of state power to the place of tribal religion in Catholic society, Da Cunha explores it all in this poignant wartime epic. The Penguin Classics edition, newly translated by Elizabeth Lowe with an introduction by Ilan Stavans, is not to be missed.
Penguin Turns 75! Watch as Penguin counts down from 75 and commemorates some of our favorite classics from the last three quarters of a century. Featured reflections include Chris Ware on reaching new generations with his graphic cover treatment for Candide, Harold Augenbraum on how Dickens taught us to be modern through Great Expectations, and Tony Millionaire on what surprised him about Moby-Dick when he finally read it (and then designed its gorgeous graphic cover). Find these testimonials and more on Penguin's 75th-anniversary website.
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