Penguin Moderns

Back in 2018 I was lucky enough to be gifted a box set of the Penguin Moderns by my lovely offspring – you can read about this here!

I have been gradually making my way through the series (with pauses!), reading pairs of books at a time, and this page is to collect together links to all my posts so far. This is a really lovely little set of books, a wonderful way to be introduced to new authors, and I highly recommend it!

So here’s the list of titles with links to my posts:

1. Letter from Birmingham Jail – Martin Luther King, Jr. – review here
2. Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber – Allen Ginsberg – review here
3. The Breakthrough – Daphne du Maurier – review here
4. The Custard Heart – Dorothy Parker – review here
5. Three Japanese Short Stories – Akutagawa & Others – review here
6. The Veiled Woman – Anaïs Nin – review here
7. Notes on Nationalism – George Orwell – review here
8. Food – Gertrude Stein – review here
9. The Three Electroknights – Stanislaw Lem – review here
10. The Great Hunger – Patrick Kavanagh – review here
11. The Legend of the Sleepers – Danilo Kiš – review here
12. The Black Ball – Ralph Ellison – review here
13. Till September Petronella – Jean Rhys – review here
14. Investigations of a Dog – Franz Kafka – review here
15. Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady – Clarice Lispector – review here
16. An Advertisement for Toothpaste – Ryszard Kapuscinski – review here
17. Create Dangerously – Albert Camus – review here
18. The Vigilante – John Steinbeck – review here
19. I Have More Souls Than One – Fernando Pessoa – review here
20. The Missing Girl – Shirley Jackson – review here
21. Four Russian Short Stories – Gazdanov & Others – review here
22. The Distance of the Moon – Italo Calvino – review here
23. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House – Audre Lorde – review here
24. The Skeleton’s Holiday – Leonora Carrington – review here
25. The Finger – William S. Burroughs – review here
26. The End – Samuel Beckett – review here
27. New York City in 1979 – Kathy Acker – review here
28. Africa’s Tarnished Name – Chinua Achebe – review here
29. Notes on Camp – Susan Sontag – review here
30. The Red Tenda of Bologna – John Berger – review here
31. The Gigolo – Françoise Sagan – review here
32. Glittering City – Cyprian Ekwensi – review here
33. Piers of the Homeless Night – Jack Kerouac – review here
34. Why Do You Wear a Cheap Watch? – Hans Fallada – review here
35. The Duke in His Domain – Truman Capote – review here
36. Leaving the Yellow House – Saul Bellow – review here
37. The Cracked Looking-Glass – Katherine Anne Porter – review here
38. Dark Days – James Baldwin – review here
39. Letter to My Mother – Georges Simenon – review here
40. Death the Barber – William Carlos Williams – review here
41. The Problem that Has No Name – Betty Friedan – review here
42. The Dialogue of Two Snails – Federico García Lorca – review here
43. Of Dogs and Walls – Yuko Tsushima – review here
44. Madame du Deffand and the Idiots – Javier Marías – review here
45. The Haunted Boy – Carson McCullers – review here
46. The Garden of Forking Paths – Jorge Luis Borges – review here
47. Fame – Andy Warhol – review here
48. The Survivor – Primo Levi – review here
49. Lance – Vladimir Nabokov – review here
50. Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer – Wendell Berry – review here
51. Star – Yukio Mishima – review here

In case you’re wondering, Modern no. 51 was released as a standalone, as part of Penguin’s series of newly translated Mishima books. The reading project was finished on 3rd June 2022! 😊