Penguin Little Black Clas­sics

(photo from the Penguin Books website)

I bought some of these tiny 80th anniversary Penguin books the other day. Each book is around 50 pages long, and has short stor­ies, poems or extracts from writers from around the world. The perfect size to keep in a bag for spare moment read­ing. There are 80 differ­ent ones to choose from, and each one costs a bargain 80p. In pick­ing the books, I went for authors I had never heard of, or writers like Cavafy I’d heard of but never checked out. Hope­fully I’ll discov­er some­thing I really like. The full list of titles can be seen here.

Here’s the ones I picked:

As King­fish­ers Catch Fire– Gerard Manley Hopkins
Wail­ing Ghosts– Pu Songling
Three Tang Dynasty Poets
A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees– Kenko
How to Use Your Enemies– Baltas­ar Gracian
How A Ghastly Story Was Brought to Light by a Common or Garden Butcher’s Dog– Johann Peter Hebel
Of Street Piemen– Henry Mayhew
A Hippo Banquet– Mary Kings­ley
Remem­ber, Body– CP Cavafy
The Life of a Stupid Man– Ryun­osuke Akutagawa
The Old Man of the Moon– Shen Fu
A Pair of Silk Stock­ings– Kate Chop­in