Penguin Classics

Overview

Because What You Read Matters: Penguin Classics

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as quality translations by award-winning translators. Penguin Classics is proud to count among its authors John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, Shirley Jackson, William Golding, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, R. K. Narayan, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Dorothy Parker, H. P. Lovecraft, Hannah Arendt, Jack Kerouac, and Graham Greene, and among its translators Robert Fagles, Lydia Davis, Edith Grossman, Royall Tyler, John Minford, and Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

Awards

The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar
Winner of the Modern Language Association’s Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work

I Ching, translated by John Minford
Winner of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (AAH) Medal for Excellence in Translation

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, translated by Christine Donougher
Winner of the French-American Foundation & Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Lydia Davis
Winner of the French-American Foundation & Florence Gould Foundation Translation Prize

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, translated by Oliver Ready
Finalist for the PEN Translation Prize
Finalist for the Read Russia Prize

Jason and the Argonauts by Apollonius of Rhodes, translated by Aaron Poochigian
Honorable Mention, Modern Language Association’s Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work

The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr
Cover design named by The New York Times Book Review as one of the 12 Best Book Covers of the Year

The Pelican Shakespeare Series
Series cover design won gold medal from Society of Illustrators

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Cover design won silver medal from Society of Illustrators

Featured Authors

John Steinbeck

Maria Tatar

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Claude McKay

Chinua Achebe

Scott G. Bruce

Richard Matheson

Katherine Howe

Jack Kerouac

Hannah Arendt

Leslie Marmon Silko

Amy Tan

Don DeLillo

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

Meet Penguin Classics

Elda Rotor (Classics)

Vice President and Publisher

Elda Rotor is Vice President and Publisher for Penguin Classics. She has created and edited several series including Penguin Civic Classics, Penguin Threads, Couture Classics, Penguin Horror, Penguin Drop Caps, and the Penguin Orange Collection. She oversees the classic publishing programs for John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, Shirley Jackson, William Golding, and the Pelican Shakespeare series. In 2013, Ms. Rotor co-produced, edited and narrated Poems By Heart from Penguin Classics, named one of the Best Apps of the Year by Apple. For Penguin Books, she edited the New York Times-bestselling The Inaugural Address by Barack Obama, The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry edited by Rita Dove, The Penguin Guide to the United States Constitution by Richard Beeman, and The Art of Language Invention by David J. Peterson. She has worked with a wide range of contributors including Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Guillermo del Toro, David Simon, Tom Perrotta, Rebecca Mead, James Earl Jones, Laura Miller, Francine Prose, Stanley McChrystal, Michael Dirda, Jeff VanderMeer, and Lois Lowry. Prior to coming to Penguin, Elda was a Senior Editor at Oxford University Press.

Elda Rotor (Classics)'s Featured Titles

The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic

John Siciliano (Classics)

Executive Editor

John Siciliano is Executive Editor of Penguin Classics. He has brought to the list many new titles from around the world—from China, Japan, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Russia, Sweden, Turkey, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Kenya, and Egypt—as well as American classics such as Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara, A Death in the Family by James Agee, The 13 Clocks and The Wonderful O by James Thurber, White Noise by Don DeLillo, and The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr. He published Lydia Davis’s award-winning, nationally bestselling translation of Madame Bovary, Philip Pullman’s nationally bestselling Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, and Franz Xaver von Schönwerth’s The Turnip Princess—a volume of newly discovered fairy tales by a contemporary of the Brothers Grimm—and he conceived of the six-volume hardcover Penguin Christmas Classics series and the six-volume hardcover Penguin Galaxy series of sci-fi/fantasy classics, introduced by Neil Gaiman. He has commissioned introductions from Lena Dunham, James Franco, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tony Kushner, Jonathan Franzen, James Wood, Kelly Link, Ransom Riggs, and Karl Ove Knausgaard. For Penguin Books, where he is a senior editor, he has published the New York Times bestsellers The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker, Philomena by Martin Sixsmith, and There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya; the World Fantasy Award–winning anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales; the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize winners The Corpse Exhibition by Hassan Blasim and Ten White Geese by Gerbrand Bakker; and the international bestsellers The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly by Sun-mi Hwang and The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down by Haemin Sunim. He has participated in editorial fellowships in Jerusalem, Istanbul, London, Salzburg, Helsinki, Barcelona, Krakow, Sharjah, Tokyo, and Taipei.