Penguin 50 Moderns set @ £1 each or £50 for the box.

Japanese stories - Nagai's Behind the Prison, Uno's Closet LLB and Akutagawa's General Kim.
Russian Stories - Kunak by Galina Kuznetsova, A Miracle by Yury Felsen, The Murder of Valkovsky by Nina Berberova, and Gaito Gazdanov's Requeim

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DXNIqiGVMAAp86E.jpg

Distance of the Moon. Still remember the exhilaration of reading it, the feeling of ~opening up~ that Calvino gives me

https://theasylum.wordpress.com/2018/02/22/penguin-modern

I didn't know Yuko Tsushima was Dazai's daughter! Glad to know more about her.

This novel looks really good:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/305722/territory-of-light/

thanks for that link, mookie. the Balwin passage in there is a beauty. i think i'll start with that.

definitely seems more 'curated' than the 60s set, which included, e.g., racing classics by dick francis, but this might just be an artifact of the death of a popular reading public

can you expand on that?

This set is all authors in or soon to be in the Modern Classics range, so there's a generally higher quality level (though Ayn Rand and Jack Kerouac are in the Modern Classics series too). Also, rather nicely, several of these books contain stuff otherwise unavailable (the Baldwin, Ekwensi, Sagan, Simenon and Yuko Tsushima books), rather than them all just being extracts from already available books.

Why does the UK get all the good Penguins

(though Ayn Rand and Jack Kerouac are in the Modern Classics series too)

Hey I totally understand Kerouac's fallen out of favour and somewhat justifiably so, but I think his place in lit history/influence on other writers is still a bit higher than Ayn Rand's?

Rand is worse on every level, sure, but Kerouac is not actually good. Ginsberg either, and they publish him too.

There are about nine Ian Fleming books in Modern Classics editions - it’s not really meant as an indicator of literary quality.

There are about nine Ian Fleming books in Modern Classics editions - it’s not really meant as an indicator of literary quality.

Eh, I think that by definition it is. Having something in Penguin Classics is like a movie getting the Criterion treatment, it's a prestige move. And much as Criterion understand that putting out every new Wes Anderson movie will finance doing weirder stuff, I think Penguin are well aware that there's a lot of ppl who wanna read Fleming, and enjoy thinking of that as "reading a classic".

Rand is worse on every level, sure, but Kerouac is not actually good. Ginsberg either, and they publish him too.

I think a lot of Penguin Classics authors aren't "actually good", but they're respected/taught/seen as important (even if, like in the Fleming example above, it's within genre). Rand I don't think really qualifies.

Modern Classics is definitely ‘notable/ influential ‘ rather than good / worth reading and idk how many modern fiction authors are more politically / culturally influential than Rand, even if her writing was abysmal.

Culturally, sure, but I'd say she's totally the least influential on literature, even compared to someone like Fleming.

I don’t think I have read any of these so I’m looking forward to the results of the poll to see where to start.

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