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Overview
Penguin Little Black Classics
Challenge Prompts
21. Trimalchio’s Feast by Petronius (1 added)
A satirical portrait of a drunken, orgiastic Roman banquet, hosted by the grossly ostentatious Trimalchio.
22. How a Ghastly Story Was Brought to Light by a Common or Garden Butcher’s Dog by Johann Peter Hebel (1 added)
Written for a local German journal and published in 1811, these fabulous, funny, jewel-like miniature tales describe con men, tricksters, disasters, murders, rascals and lovers, and include Franz Kafka’s favourite story.
23. The Tinder Box by Hans Christian Anderson (1 added)
Though criticised for their anarchic immorality when first published, Hans Christian Andersen’s tales made him an international star, taken to the hearts of children and adults for their beauty, sorrow and strangeness. Included here are 'The Steadfast Tin Soldier’ and 'Big Klaus and Little Klaus’.
24. The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows by Rudyard Kipling (1 added)
Kipling first became famous for his pungent, harsh and shocking stories of northwest India, where he grew up. This is just a small selection from his inexhaustibly contentious and various early work.
25. Circles of Hell by Dante (1 added)
Ten of the most memorable and most terrifying cantos from Dante’s Inferno.
26. Of Street Piemen by Henry Mayhew (1 added)
Radical Victorian reformer Henry Mayhew walked the streets of London interviewing ordinary flower girls, market traders, piemen and costermongers to create the first ever work of mass social observation, and the ultimate account of urban life - including an extraordinary description of the city from a hot air balloon.
27. The Nightingales are Drunk by Hafez (1 added)
Sensual, profound, delighted, wise, Hafez’s poems have enchanted their readers for more than 600 years. One of the greatest figures of world literature, he remains today the most popular poet in modern Iran.
28. The Wife of Bath by Geoffrey Chaucer (1 added)
Three of them were good and two were bad.
The three that I call “good” were rich and old…’
One of the most bawdy, entertaining and popular stories from The Canterbury Tales.
29. How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing by Michel de Montaigne (1 added)
A selection of charming essays from a master of the genre exploring the contradictions inherent to human thought, words and actions.
30. The Terrors of the Night by Thomas Nashe (1 added)
The greatest of Elizabethan pamphleteers, Nashe had a magical ability with words, never more so than in The Terrors of the Night, where he mulls over ghosts, demons, nightmares and the supernatural.