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Inside Classics
Penguin Classics
 

Penguin Classics are books you won’t be able to put down, books you'll want to show off on your shelves, books behind movies
and books that have changed the world. Here you’ll find thinkers, lovers, poets, scientists, radicals and the best books ever written.

 

There are now 99 Popular Penguins available. Among them you'll discover junkies, crims, bikies, aliens, drifters, lovers and fighters.

Meet them all at popularpenguins.com

Popular Penguins are on Facebook. Become a fan.

 

 

What's New at Penguin Classics?

   



Thea Astley's The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow joins the Penguin Modern Classics livery. The book forecasts the tragedies of the twenty-first century, proving itself more powerfully relevant than ever.


'Formidable . . . uniquely provocative, acerbic and glittering' - The Australian

On a January morning in 1930, in an island mission off the Queensland coast, the superintendent goes on a rampage that rips the community apart. Afterwards, only a few are free to leave, but even back on the mainland they cannot escape the effects of the brutality they've witnessed. Two decades later, violence once again erupts on the island. Here is a paradise turned hell, where the winds of change have slowed to the feeblest of breezes.

Based on an actual incident that took place on Palm Island, this award-winning novel brilliantly allegorises an Australia still living in the shadow of its past. And in forecasting the tragedies of the twenty-first century, it proves itself more powerfully relevant than ever.


Read an extract


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Elizabeth Jolley's An Accomodating Spouse joins the Penguin Modern Classics livery. The book is vintage Jolley, filled with quiet wit and keen observations of the frailities of human relationships.


'A fantastic book in all senses of that word
' - Sydney Morning Herald

The Professor is married to Hazel, a diligent and generous (but rather plain) woman. She is so close to her twin, Chloe, that both women live under one roof with the Professor.

Back from an overseas trip come their daughters - triplets - ready to celebrate their twenty-first birthday. Family life in the otherwise peaceful house swells to a chaotic crescendo on the evening of the party, as the Professor feels the tender sting of his wife's accommodating ways.

Read an extract


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Australian Classics - How many of them have you read?

           
           

           
Lucky Country Fortunes Of Richard Mahony Well - Modern Classics My Father's Moon Georges' Wife Cabin Fever
           
Children's Bach
Honour & Other People's Children
Monkey Grip
Postcards from Surfers
Merry-go-round in the Sea Lucky Country
       


Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions

Out now Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions. Sure to impress traditional fans and newcomers alike. Collect them all.

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton: The Illustrated Edition

A tale of despair, forbidden emotions, and sexual undercurrents in the New England countryside.

Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeenie. But when Zeenie’s vivacious cousin enters their household as a “hired girl,” Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent.

In one of American fiction’s finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio toward their tragic destinies.

   

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: The Illustrated Edition

Of all the contenders for the title of The Great American Novel, none has a better claim than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Intended at first as a simple story of a boy's adventures in the Mississippi Valley—a sequel to Tom Sawyer—the book grew and matured under Twain's hand into a work of immeasurable richness and complexity. More than a century after its publication, the critical debate over the symbolic significance of Huck's and Jim's voyage is still fresh, and it remains a major work that can be enjoyed at many levels: as an incomparable adventure story and as a classic of American humour.

   

Moby-Dick, or The Whale by Herman Melville: The Illustrated Edition

Over a century and a half after its publication, Moby-Dick still stands as an indisputable literary classic. It is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopedia of whaling lore and legend, Moby-Dick is a haunting, mesmerizing, and important social commentary populated with several of the most unforgettable and enduring characters in literature.

   

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: The Illustrated Edition

Charlotte Brontë’s sweeping Victorian romance is reborn through the striking illustrations of the inimitable Dame Darcy.A devoted readership will recognize Dame Darcy as the creator of highly original and off-kilter comic books. Here she uses her lavishly detailed illustrations to bring the best-loved Victorian novel Jane Eyre back into the spotlight. Darkly elegant illustrations draw back the novel’s curtain, revealing the depths of human depravity, despair, and ultimate redemption.

   
Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen: The Illustrated Edition

When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever.
   
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: The Illustrated Edition

Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before: of the intense passion between the foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and her betrayal of him.
   
The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Illustrated Edition

Set in the harsh Puritan community of seventeenth-century Boston, this tale of an adulterous entanglement that results in an illegitimate birth reveals Nathaniel Hawthorne's concerns with the tension between the public and the private selves. Publicly disgraced and ostracized, Hester Prynne draws on her inner strength and certainty of spirit to emerge as the first true heroine of American fiction.



The Original of Laura - Nabokov's Final Work Now Available                      



The Original of Laura
is the final masterwork from one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, Vladimir Nabokov.

Dr. Philip Wild, a man of brilliance, wit, fortune and tremendous bulk, is used to suffering humiliation at the hands of his wife - the young, slender and rudely promiscuous Flora. In a novel, a 'maddening masterpiece' documenting her infidelities, written by one of her lovers and given to the doctor, she appears as My Laura. Dishonoured, Wild still finds pleasure in life by indulging in virtual self-annihilation, beginning with the removal of his toes.

Sensing that he would not complete The Original of Laura, Nabokov asked for the manuscript to be burned after his death. Now available for the first time, this novel is published with 138 colour reproductions of the index cards on which the novel was originally written, accompanied by an introduction by Dmitri Nabokov on his father's final great book, and the difficult decision to publish.

 


Dickens on Film


To commemorate the February 7 birthday of Charles Dickens we pay homage to some of our favourite Dickens' books adapted for film. Dickens' novels and stories have long been a source of inspiration for filmmakers. As early as 1897 material from Oliver Twist was adapted for cinema goers. Recent film and television versions of Dickens' work attract prestigious talent suggesting the interest in his stories and characters is alive and well.
   
Great Expectations

A terrifying encounter with an escaped convict in a graveyard on the wild Kent marshes; a summons to meet the bitter, decaying Miss Havisham and her beautiful, cold-hearted ward Estella; the sudden generosity of a mysterious benefactor – these form a series of events that change the orphaned Pip's life forever...

Read an extract

Adapted by David Lean in 1946 this version of Great Expectations is one of the most acclaimed of all British films.
   
Oliver Twist

The story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse only to be taken in by a den of thieves.. Dickens's tale of childhood innocence beset by evil depicts the dark criminal underworld of a London.
Listen to an audio extract

Carol Reed's 1968 muscial adaption Oliver! won 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. Reed's nephew Oliver was cast as Bill Sykes.
   
Hard Times

Coketown is dominated by Thomas Gradgrind, school headmaster and model of Utilitarian success. Feeding both his pupils and his family with facts, he bans fancy and wonder from young adult minds. His obedient daughter Louisa marries the loveless businessman Mr Bounderby, however his son Tom rebels to become embroiled in gambling and robbery...

Read more
This 1994 BBC adaptation of Hard Times is raw, honest and worth tracking down.
   
   


The Avant-guarde, Itinerant & Innovative William S. Burroughs.
Cult Classics: Books You Can Judge by Their Covers


William S. Burroughs was born February 5, 1914. His first published novel was the largely autobiographical Junky, which remains a classic depiction of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures and relapses he was victim to for most of his life. He was part of the Beat movement of the 1950s and his avant-garde writing profoundly influenced Twentieth Century popular culture.

Children's Bach Before his 1959 breakthrough, Naked Lunch, an unknown William S. Burroughs wrote Junky, a candid, eyewitness account of times and places that are now long gone. This book brings them vividly to life again; it is an unvarnished field report from the American postwar underground.

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Children's Bach 'A whirlwind valedictory of Burroughs' own unconscious.  An intensely personal book.' - The New York Times Book Review

Exploring and embodying Burroughs' provocative ideas on writing, painting, consciousness and creativity, My Education is intense, vivid, wry and laconic – and a revealing journey into the mind of a great writer.

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Children's Bach

An opium addict is lost in the jungle; young men wage war against an empire of mutants; a handsome young pirate faces his execution; and the world's population is infected with a radioactive epidemic. These satirical stories are woven together in a single tale of mayhem about modern society.

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Children's Bach

A fascinating mix of autobiographical episodes and extraordinary Egyptian theology, Burroughs's final novel is poignant and melancholic. Blending war films and pornography, and referencing Kafka and Mailer, The Western Lands confirms his status as one of America's greatest writers.

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Children's Bach

'Will be read with the same shock of terror and pleasure in a hundred years’ time’ - Angela Carter

The Western Lands confirms Burroughs' status as one of America’s greatest writers. Burroughs explores the after-life by dream scenarios, hallucinatory passages, occultism, superstition, and his characteristic view of the nature of reality.

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Children's Bach

'Heartwarming acecdotes. Burroughs ventures galaxies away from his usual twisted literary turf.' - Time

There is an unexpected side to William Burroughs: the author of weird and disturbing fictions had a great fondness for cats.

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Children's Bach Interzone shows the evolution of William Burroughs from the terse, fiercely confessional writer of Junky to the wild, brutal fantasist of Naked Lunch.

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Children's Bach

Burroughs was itinerant not just by disposition but often by legal necessity (his accidental, fatal shooting of his wife and constant drug troubles required regular relocation), so letters were lifelines for the outcast and works-in-progress for the writer. Here they track his turbulent journey across three continents and two decades...

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