Penguin Book

Take a look at the life and works of designer and typographer Jan Tschichold

A wise woman (my mother) asked me what was up with the vintage-looking Penguin cover that read “Go Away I’m Reading” in my last post. I always do as my mother tells me (right mom?…

Buy Little Black Classics Box Set (Penguin Little Black Classics) 1 by Various (ISBN: 9780141398877) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

On of the three little Penguin books I bought in Tokyo for the plane trip back home. Here are 3 small selections of the works by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, the king of the Japanese decadent writers, as well as the famous prize given out every year to a contemporary Japanese writer. Oddly enough, I never read his works, but I knew of him as the iconic writer of his time. Strongly influenced by the French writers and poets of the 19tth century (he was born in 1892 and died in 1927), there are traces…

Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola and her philandering rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly and unloved. Yet telling her story is the narrator Rodrigo S.M., who tries to direct Macabéa's fate but comes to realize that, for all her outward misery, she is inwardly free. Slyly subverting ideas of poverty, identity, love and the art of writing itself, Clarice Lispector's audacious last novel is…

Explore maraid's 7911 photos on Flickr!

We take a look at the history of book publishing's most famous bird, and speak to the man charged with updating it.

'I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's' Bob Dylan Sal Paradise, a young innocent, joins his hero, the mystical traveller Dean Moriarty, on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their hedonistic search for release or fulfilment through drink, sex, drugs and jazz becomes an exploration of personal freedom, a test of the limits of the American dream. A brilliant blend of fiction and autobiography, Jack Kerouac's…

Early blue biography penguins.