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