February 2012
36 posts
“When Monsieur Mabeuf said to Marius, ‘Of course I approve of people...”
– Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Election Countdown | Every Tuesday we present a political feature in anticipation of the 2012 Presidential Election, which will be held on Tuesday, November 6.
“How happy I am to be away! My dear friend, what a thing is the heart of Man!”
– The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Monday First Sentences | Every Monday, we offer the opening sentences of a Penguin Classic to start the week. Today, the exultant beginning to Werther’s ultimately tragic story.
“The young man strips, and all that his apparel had drunk of Ocean’s...”
– From Edith Grossman’s translation of The Solitudes, Luis de Góngora’s epic poem about a jilted lover who has been shipwrecked on an island of sublime and unspoiled beauty. Grossman will be in conversation with Antonio Muñoz Molina tomorrow night at the Cervantes Institute.
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“Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch...”
– Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern...”
– James Madison, “Federalist No. 51” in The Penguin Guide to the United States Constitution
Election Countdown | Every Tuesday we present a political feature in anticipation of the 2012 Presidential Election, which will be held on Tuesday, November 6.
“I’m saying that poets write about life because they are living deep in life....”
– Rita Dove, editor of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, speaking on Moyers & Company
“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing...”
– Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Monday First Sentences | Every Monday, we offer the opening sentences of a Penguin Classic to start the week. Today, the iconic first words of Pynchon’s postmodern epic.
“For if you kill me, you will not easily discover another of my sort,...”
– From Plato’s The Last Days of Socrates. In his Apology, Socrates responds to accusations that he corrupts Athenian youth by questioning the authority of the city’s gods. Though he faces execution, Socrates does little to defend himself, and he closes his speech saying, “I turn it...
“As I climb the mountain path, I ponder— If you work by reason, you grow...”
– Kusamakura by Natsume Sōseki
Monday First Sentences | Every Monday, we offer the opening sentences of a Penguin Classic to start the week. Today, the elegant lyricism of Sōseki’s 1906 haiku-novel about a young artist’s encounters with beauty.
“I suspect that sympathy, or its absence, is involved in almost every...”
– Jonathan Franzen, in his fantastic introduction to Three Novels of New York, which appears in this week’s New Yorker as “A Rooting Interest: Edith Wharton and the Problem of Sympathy”
“I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is...”
– From William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, collected in The Portable Faulkner
Is Faulkner February really a thing? We love this, so we’ll take it.
“Here’s another hardship a tyrant experiences, Simonides. He is just as...”
– Xenophon, Hiero the Tyrant and Other Treatises
Election Countdown | Every Tuesday we present a political feature in anticipation of the 2012 Presidential Election, which will be held on Tuesday, November 6. Here, Xenophon presents a dialogue on the nature of sole rule between free-thinking poet...
“Let the reader be introduced to Lady Carbury, upon whose character and doings...”
– The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
Monday First Sentences | Every Monday, we offer the opening sentences of a Penguin Classic to start the week.
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Classic Fridays | The world is full of classics. Every Friday, we close the week with one of our favorites.
“Wine has a longer life than us poor folks. So let’s wet our whistles. Wine...”
– Truth-telling nouveau-riche millionaire Trimalchio, in Petronius’ Satyricon, now newly translated by J. P. Sullivan
“For a certain audience, all Penguin Classics are trance-inducing objects of...”
– Dwight Garner, in his glowing review of our new Kama Sutra, in which he also praises the book’s “epicurean foxiness” and calls it an “intellectual aphrodisiac.”
January 2012
36 posts
“It is in the nature of all party systems that the authentically political...”
– On Revolution by Hannah Arendt
Election Countdown | Every Tuesday we present a political feature in anticipation of the 2012 Presidential Election, which will be held on Tuesday, November 6. Arendt’s brilliant and wide-ranging exploration of revolution as political beginning traces the idea...
“The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding...”
– The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
Monday First Sentences | Every Monday, we offer the opening sentences of a Penguin Classic to start the week.
“As virtuous men pass mildly away, And whisper to their souls to go, Whilst some...”
– “A Valediction: forbidding Mourning” from The Complete English Poems by John Donne
Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play “Wit” opens today on Broadway (starring Cynthia Nixon) and draws heavily on the work of this preeminent metaphysical poet. His tender piece...
“Even if there are two kinds of political oratory, one of them, I suppose, would...”
– Socrates, in Plato’s Gorgias
Election Countdown | Every Tuesday we present a political feature in anticipation of the 2012 Presidential Election, which will be held on Tuesday, November 6. If you’re wondering what happens next in this dialogue, by the way, Socrates asks Callicles to name...
“The first thing I did was make a mistake. I thought I had understood capitalism,...”
– “The Rise of Capitalism” from Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme
Monday First Sentences | Every Monday, we offer the opening sentences of a Penguin Classic to start the week.
“I’m not reader-friendly. I do ask something of the reader, and many...”
– William Gaddis, on receiving the National Book Award for A Frolic of His Own, in The Rush for Second Place