Issue 44 / May 2012
Small and Perfectly Formed
By Adam Freudenheim, Penguin Classics Publisher
Perhaps it's not surprising that as editors at Penguin Classics we love fiction. After all, there are literally hundreds of novels published in Penguin Classics. These novels hog the limelight, however, and I was not alone in thinking that what really needed attention were the hundreds of short stories and novellas we publish. These stories and novellas by some of the best-known, most lauded writers are often unfairly neglected in deference to their more famous and heavier cousin the novel.
But despite our wish to turn the spotlight on these shorter works, it wasn't easy to find the right way to do it. After all, these stories are available, it's just that most of them are only found in larger - often, table-topplingly large - collections of stories. Then one of us - put onto it by Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget - read EM Forster's little-known story The Machine Stops first published in 1909. This incredibly prescient story describes the Internet and Virtual Reality about 100 years ahead of its time. It's jaw-droppingly timely and thought-provoking. It's published in Penguin Classics, and yet buried as it was in Forster's Selected Stories none of us had ever come across it. We felt something had to be done. We needed change we could believe in!
Inspired by the astonishing Forster story, our passion for short fiction and the upcoming 50th anniversary of Penguin Modern Classics we eventually came up with the idea of a new format that would be small yet perfectly formed, beautifully produced with the best of Penguin's design and production values and inexpensive to tie in to Penguin's long tradition of attractive and affordable books. Thus was born mini modern classics, a new series of books starting with 50 titles (50 years - 50 titles, tada!) including the widest range of the best short fiction we all love from the last century or so. They are in a sense 'paper apps', small, fun and easy to share with friends.
We had enormous fun choosing the stories - and we could have chosen many more, which we hope to include in future titles as the series develops. The only limiting criteria were that the stories had to be enjoyable to read and by writers who were either currently published in Penguin Modern Classics, had been in the past or (in the case of Robert Coover, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and Eudora Welty) were about to be published in the series. This isn't a definitive selection - that wasn't the intention - and certain major authors inextricably linked with Modern Classics are not in the series as stories were not their forte (for example, George Orwell). And though 50 titles seemed like a lot at the start, making the final selection proved harder than we imagined and there were heated discussions about who to include in the launch of the series, with the likes of Barthelme and Bellow forced to go head to head, competing for inclusion (both did make the final cut - phew).
We hope mini modern classics will be read by everyone who loves fiction and anyone who loves books. And with luck - with one or the other of these mini modern classics - readers will have the same 'Eureka' moment we experienced on reading Forster's The Machine Stops. Because in the end it's hard to beat the appeal, the satisfaction that comes from reading a great piece of short fiction - bite-sized and digestible in one sitting (or tube journey), yet staying with you long after you get up (or off the train).
Adam Freudenheim
Wednesday, 16 February, 2011
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