Two little Penguins

A short post today as my wrists and fingers are sore and I'm a little scared that I might be developing RSI. Hopefully resting up over the weekend will help, but I couldn't resist showing off these new little books which I recieved to write about last week. These are Penguin's Mini Modern Classics, which are being released to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Penguin Modern Classics. There are 50 of the titles to collect and they showcase "short" writing from great writers of the last 100 years. I am particularly excited to see Margaret Drabble's The gifts of war because I have read and enjoyed very many of her novels. I have not come across Paul Bowles before but apparently he is "considered one of the most remarkable American authors of the twentieth century" [Amazon]. When I spot these in the shops, I will be on the look out for the Shirley Jackson's The tooth, because I greatly enjoyed both The haunting of Hill House and We have always lived in the castle (both of which were published as Penguin Modern Classics).

Here is the full list:

Hell Screen – Ryunosake Akutagawa
All The Blood Within Me – Kingsley Amis
Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby – Donald Barthelme
The Expelled – Samuel Beckett
Him With His Foot in His Mouth – Saul Bellow
The Widow Ching – Pirate – Jorge Luis Borges
The Delicate Prey – Paul Bowles
The Queen’s Necklace – Italo Calvino
The Adulterous Woman – Albert Camus
Children on Their Birthdays – Truman Capote
Bluebeard – Angela Carter
Killer in the Rain – Raymond Chandler
Red Rose, White Rose – Eileen Chang
The Strange Crime of John Boulnois – G. K. Chesterton
Youth – Joseph Conrad
Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady – Robert Coover
Babette’s Feast – Isak Dinesen
Hassan’s Tower – Margaret Drabble
Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism – Hans Fallada
Babylon Revisited – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Living Daylights – Ian Fleming
The Machine Stops – E. M. Forster
The Tooth – Shirley Jackson
The Beast in the Jungle – Henry James

Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book – M. R. James
Two Gallants – James Joyce
In the Penal Colony – Franz Kafka
‘They’ – Rudyard Kipling
Odour of Chrysanthemums – D. H. Lawrence
The Magic Paint – Primo Levi
The Colour Out Of Space – H. P. Lovecraft
Lunar Caustic – Malcolm Lowry
Wunderkind – Carson McCullers
Bliss – Katherine Mansfield
Flypaper – Robert Musil
Terra Incognita – Vladimir Nabokov
A Breath of Lucifer – R. K. Narayan
The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland – Frank O’Connor
The Sexes – Dorothy Parker
Through the Wall – Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
La Grosse Fifi – Jean Rhys
Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse That Helped – Saki
The Last Demon – Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Mark-2 Wife – William Trevor
Rich in Russia – John Updike
The Door in the Wall – H. G. Wells
Moon Lake – Eudora Welty
The Crime Wave at Blandings – P. G. Wodehouse
The Lady in the Looking Glass – Virginia Woolf
Chess – Stefan Zweig

Thanks to Ceri from Riot who sent them to me!