Some Penguin Classics, as we noted last time, come along as almost indisputable improvements on what’s come before (‘almost’ because there’ll always be a few token refusniks in any crowd, don’t you know), and in the case of the last item in our Week of Penguins,  the new Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Dostoevsky’s Crime […]

Some Penguin Classics are clear, almost necessary improvements on their own Penguin predecessors, and we’ll be closing out our week of Penguins with two of those – starting with a new collection of the writings of Gertrude Bell called, somewhat redundantly, A Woman in Arabia: The Writings of the Queen of the Desert. The volume […]

Some Penguin Classics have horrible tidings to convey. In the broader game of literature, there’s no real way around that. On paper, all books are like the spirits in the underworld encountered by Ulysses: they need human blood in order to give them the power to speak. Printed words never stole a man’s property or […]

Some Penguin Classics, as we’ve seen over the years, abruptly thrust their readers into bewilderingly alien territory. For every well-known novel by a Bronte sister, in these thrillingly multi-cultural days, Penguin’s editors will cast their eyes to Africa or China, and the result is a growing library of diverse texts to keep readers very profitably […]

Some Penguin Classics, as we mentioned last time, are lost causes right out of the starting gate, and if such a thing applies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, how much more does it apply to this wonderful 1988 Penguin volume edited by Lawrence Buell, who wrote last 2014’s fantastic book The Dream of the […]

Some Penguin Classics preach a doomed gospel to the masses, and one of them that does this most self-consciously is Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1856 novel-in-verse Aurora Leigh, here presented in the lovely 1995 black-spine Classic edited by John Robert Glorney Bolton and his daughter Julia Bolton Holloway with a picture on the cover of a […]

Some Penguin Classics frankly puzzle, and a perfect example of this not-always-frustrating sub-category would have to be the plump new Complete Poetry volume of George Herbert, edited by Victoria Moul and John Drury, which comes only a skimpy ten years after the last edition of the previous Penguin Complete Herbert, edited by John Tobin, then […]

Some Penguin Classics seem particularly to invite the Deluxe treatment, and for a host of reasons good and bad, the poetry of Robert Frost is certainly one of those. This lovely little Deluxe Classic is set to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the publication of Frost’s iconic and poster-friendly poem “The Road Not Taken,” and […]