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The Penguin Modern Classics Book

The Penguin Modern Classics Book

Summary

The essential guide to twentieth-century literature around the world

For six decades the Penguin Modern Classics series has been an era-defining, ever-evolving series of books, encompassing works by modernist pioneers, avant-garde iconoclasts, radical visionaries and timeless storytellers.

This reader's companion showcases every title published in the series so far, with more than 1,800 books and 600 authors, from Achebe and Adonis to Zamyatin and Zweig.

It is the essential guide to twentieth-century literature around the world, and the companion volume to The Penguin Classics Book.

Bursting with lively descriptions, surprising reading lists, key literary movements and over two thousand cover images, The Penguin Modern Classics Book is an invitation to dive in and explore the greatest literature of the last hundred years.

Reviews

  • A heavyweight - but never burdensome - history of the publishing house... A must for quiz-hounds
    Alex Diggins, Telegraph

About the author

Henry Eliot

Henry Eliot is the author of The Penguin Classics Book, The Penguin Modern Classics Book, Follow This Thread and Curiocity: An Alternative A-Z of London. An inveterate bookworm, Henry has tackled a number of bookish adventures, such as recreating Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, leading pilgrims from Southwark to Canterbury and retelling the tales along the way; mounting a quest for the Holy Grail based on Malory's Morte d'Arthur; swimming across the Hellespont from Europe to Asia on the bicentenary of Lord Byron's crossing (the subject of Byron's 1810 poem, 'Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos'); and reading Ulysses in real-time on Bloomsday, 16 June, starting at 8am with grilled kidneys and finishing in the early hours of the following morning. He produced an interactive edition of Shakespeare's The Tempest in collaboration with Sir Ian McKellen and Professor Sir Jonathan Bate, which Apple named one of the '10 best apps of 2016', and for five years he was an editor of the Penguin Classics series in London. Today he is one of the QI research elves and hosts the podcast On the Road with Penguin Classics, in which he travels to discuss books with guests including Frank Cottrell Boyce, Louis de Bernières, Rachel Joyce, Patience Agbabi, Andrew Motion and Will Self.
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