Special Editions
7th Feb 2011
Win! Penguin Mini Moderns
This time next week, Penguin will be celebrating half a century of publishing their Modern Classics series by launching their brand new Mini Moderns. Featuring fifty short stories and novellas from some of Penguin’s most popular authors, the pocket-sized silver editions will be on sale from Monday 14th February for only £3 a pop.
The Mini Moderns series includes lesser-known works from some of literature’s most iconic authors, including wonderful women writers such as Angela Carter, Virginia Woolf, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Katherine Mansfield and Shirley Jackson, not to mention other classic authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Louis Borges and Albert Camus.
To celebrating, we’ll be reviewing two titles from the series when it launches next week, so keep your peepers peeled for those. And in the meantime, we’ve got a bundle of ten Mini Moderns to give away to one lucky winner.
To be in with a chance to win, all you need to is enter in one of these three easy ways: comment on this post telling us which text or author you’d have chosen to be a Mini Modern, tweet us saying “I want ten Mini Moderns from @forbookssake,” or like the Facebook post.
We’ll pick a winner next Monday when the series launches, so get your entries in before then. Good luck!
Jane Bradley
Oooh, I want! They’ve already published two of my all-time favourite authors as Mini Moderns (Carter and Nabokov), but I s’pose an Orwell wouldn’t have gone astray.
They’re so pretty. A mini Jane Eyre would be awesome. Or some old school kids books like The Indian in the Cupboard.
I don’t know if it would fit in such a small format but I love Michel Faber’s novella, The 199 Steps, or any of his stories from The Fahrenheit Twins, including the title one. I recently read David Garnett’s A Man at the Zoo, and I’m sure that would fit. Or the title story from James Meek’s Museum of Doubt would be amazing. It’s a brilliant and disconcerting story. Or a Patricia Duncker short story, I don’t know which one, but perhaps the one about Zeus in Seven Tales of Sex and Death. Please give me some Penguin Mini Moderns! The list of titles is really intriguing.
Thanks Rebecca – you’ve got loads of original ideas for Mini Moderns! We’ll keep you posted..
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I’d pick some Dorothy Parker or A.S. Byatt. I think i’ll be buying lots of these!
Thanks Amelia – both wonderful authors that we love a lot!
Some fantastic choices there already. I would also have included Doris Lessing and/or Ursula K LeGuin, two brilliant authors whom I studied at University.
The modern classics would be a welcome addition to my library especially now that my 11 year old daughter is fast overtaking me as ‘champion bookworm’.
@coffeewithkate
Thanks Kate – inspired choices, and your daughter sounds like a cutie!
O! I love to win these! Penguin is my favourite publisher but buying the entire boks is a little bit too much for my budget …
Tweet: http://bit.ly/eVL3S6
Oh, this is amazing. I’d loved to have seen some Chicana Lit represented in the form of Sandra Cisneros’ “The House on Mango Street.”
The real eye-opener is looking through the list and realising how many of these classic must-reads I haven’t yet read. If I don’t win, I’ll be investing in some of these for sure!
Thanks Laura, this is a fab idea – I love Sandra Cisneros and would be glad of any excuse to read more from her…
Nice! I spend so much time on trains and tubes these would be ideal. I read ‘Flatland’ by Edwin Abbott Abbott recently which is a great little satirical novella, so I’d probably go for that.
Thanks for stopping by Jessica – love your blog too!
There would be an awesome addition to my ever-growing collection of green and orange Penguins. I think ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ by Agatha Christie would have been great. She may not have been the finest writer in terms of characterisation and depth, but people still buy hundreds of thousands of her novels, her plotting was amazing and ‘Roger Ackroyd’ challenged the conventions of Golden Age detective fiction. So there
Thanks for the comment Sarah, old Aggie is definitely still influential!
Either Somerset Maugham or Ernest Hemmingway. Brilliant writers!
Love that Angela Carter, Jean Rhys and Saul Bellow are already included – some of my favourite authors. Would like to have seen something from Faulkner perhaps.
[...] not an easy choice!), I noticed that the ladies over at For Books’ Sake were running a competition to win the entire set of 50 books! So I got [...]
Great selection but I think Somerset Maugham (one of the greatest writers ever) should be included. Oops – perhaps he is, I haven’t seen the entire list.