Penguin Celebrations was a book series released by Penguin Books in 2008, Penguin re-released 36 modern popular works using Penguin's distinctive late 1940s style, rebranded 'Penguin Celebrations'. [1] Following the 1940s style; Green is for 'mystery', Orange for 'fantastic fiction', Pink for 'distant lands', Dark Blue for 'real lives' and Purple for 'viewpoints'.
Penguin Books is a British publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane, his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence, bringing high-quality paperback fiction and non-fiction to the mass market. Penguin's success demonstrated that large audiences existed for serious books. Penguin also had a significant impact on public debate in Britain, through its books on British culture, politics, the arts, and science.
The 'Penguin Celebrations' books are as follows:
- Fiction
- William Boyd - Any Human Heart
- Jonathan Coe - What a Carve Up!
- Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything Is Illuminated
- Zoë Heller - Notes on a Scandal
- Nick Hornby - How to Be Good
- Marian Keyes - The Other Side of the Story
- Matthew Kneale - English Passengers
- Hari Kunzru - The Impressionist
- Marina Lewycka - A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
- Meg Rosoff - How I Live Now
- Ali Smith - The Accidental
- Zadie Smith - White Teeth
- Sue Townsend - Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction
- Pat Barker - Regeneration
William Boyd is a Scottish novelist, short story writer and screenwriter.
Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart is a 2002 novel by William Boyd, a British writer. It is written as a lifelong series of journals kept by Mountstuart, a writer whose life (1906–1991) spanned the defining episodes of the 20th century, crossed several continents and included a convoluted sequence of relationships and literary endeavours. Boyd uses the diary form to explore how public events impinge on individual consciousness, so that Mountstuart's journal alludes almost casually to the war, the death of a prime minister or the abdication of the king. Boyd plays ironically on the theme of literary celebrity, introducing his protagonist to several real writers who are included as characters – a spat with Virginia Woolf in London, a possible sexual encounter with Evelyn Waugh at Oxford, a clumsy exchange with James Joyce in Paris, and a friendship with Ernest Hemingway that spans several years.
Jonathan Coe is an English novelist and writer. His work has an underlying preoccupation with political issues, although this serious engagement is often expressed comically in the form of satire. For example, What a Carve Up! reworks the plot of an old 1960s spoof horror film of the same name. It is set within the "carve up" of the UK's resources which some feel was carried out by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative governments of the 1980s. One claim to fame that Coe has is writing the longest sentence in the literature of the English language, one that appeared in The Rotters' Club and appears to hold the record at 13,955 words.
- Non-fiction
- Noam Chomsky - Hegemony or Survival
- Niall Ferguson - Empire
- Robin Lane Fox - The Classical World
- Malcolm Gladwell - Blink
- Brian Greene - The Fabric of the Cosmos
- Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner - Freakonomics
- James Lovelock - The Revenge of Gaia
- Eric Schlosser - Fast Food Nation
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, political activist, and social critic. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He holds a joint appointment as Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and laureate professor at the University of Arizona, and is the author of over 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.
Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance is a study of the American empire written by the American linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was first published in the United States in November 2003 by Metropolitan Books and then in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books.
Niall Campbell Ferguson is a British historian and works as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Previously, he was a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, and also taught at Harvard University.
- Crime
- Donna Tartt - The Secret History
- P. D. James - A Certain Justice
- John Mortimer - Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders
- Alex Garland - The Beach
- Barbara Vine - The Chimney-sweeper's Boy
Donna Tartt is an American writer, the author of the novels The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), and The Goldfinch (2013). Tartt won the WH Smith Literary Award for The Little Friend in 2003 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Goldfinch in 2014. She was included in Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People" list, compiled in 2014.
The Secret History is the first novel by Donna Tartt, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. Set in New England, it tells the story of a closely knit group of six classics students at Hampden College, a small, elite Vermont college based upon Bennington College, where Tartt was a student between 1982 and 1986.
Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park,, known professionally as P. D. James, was an English crime writer. She rose to fame for her series of detective novels starring police commander and poet Adam Dalgliesh.
- Travel and adventure
- Ryszard Kapuściński - The Shadow of the Sun
- Redmond O'Hanlon - Congo Journey
- Paul Theroux - Dark Star Safari
Ryszard Kapuściński was a Polish journalist, photographer, poet and author. He received many awards and was considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Kapuściński's personal journals in book form attracted both controversy and admiration for blurring the conventions of reportage with the allegory and magical realism of literature. He was the Communist-era Polish Press Agency's only correspondent in Africa during decolonization, and also worked in South America and Asia. Between 1956 and 1981 he reported on 27 revolutions and coups, until he was fired because of his support for the pro-democracy Solidarity movement in his native country. He was celebrated by other practitioners of the genre. The acclaimed Italian reportage-writer Tiziano Terzani, Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, and Chilean writer Luis Sepúlveda having accorded him the title "Maestro".
The Shadow of the Sun is a travel memoir by the Polish writer and journalist Ryszard Kapuściński. It was published by Penguin Books in 2001 with the English translation by Klara Glowczewska. Kapuściński spent nearly 30 years in various African countries such as Kenya, Rwanda, Nigeria, Ethiopia and more, detailing his accounts as a white, foreign visitor, of the development of the African states.
Redmond O'Hanlon, FRGS, FRSL is an English writer and scholar.
- Biography
- Charles Nicholl - Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind
- Claire Tomalin - Jane Austen: A Life
- Jeremy Paxman - The English
Charles Nicholl is an English author specializing in works of history, biography, literary detection, and travel. His subjects have included Christopher Marlowe, Arthur Rimbaud, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Nashe and William Shakespeare. Besides his literary output, Nicholl has also presented documentary programs on television. In 1974 he was the winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer Award for his account of an LSD trip entitled 'The Ups and The Downs'.
Claire Tomalin is an English author and journalist, known for her biographies on Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Jeremy Dickson Paxman is a British broadcaster, journalist, author, and the quizmaster of University Challenge, having succeeded Bamber Gascoigne at the time the programme was revived in 1994.
- Essays
