A Literary Look for Your iPhone

The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill A Mockingbird, A Clockwork Orange.

Eight First Edition Covers of Classic Novels

1. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. Chatto & Windus, London, 1932. Cover design by Leslie Holland. 
2. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scribner, New York, 1925. Cover design by Francis Cugat.
3. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. Macmillan, 1865
4. The Trial (Der Process), by Franz Kafka. Die Schmiede, Berlin, 1925
5. Animal Farm, by George Orwell. Secker and Warburg, London, 1945
6. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. Viking Press, New York, 1957
7. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess. William Heinemann, London, 1962
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. Secker and Warburg, London, 1949. Cover design by Michael Kennard.

From The First Edition Covers of 25 Classic Books

Virago ‘Coming of Age’ series

The six titles, publishing in August, are:

Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue

Mary, daughter of a poor seamstress, longs for fine clothes as her neighbours hunger for food and warmth. For the love of a gorgeous red ribbon, she is seduced into a life on the cold, murky streets of late 1700s London.

Invitation to the Waltz by Rosamond Lehmann

On her seventeenth birthday, Olivia Curtis receives: a diary for her innermost thoughts, a ten-shilling note and a roll of flame-coloured silk for her first ballgown. For her pretty sister Kate, the dance is sure to be a triumph, but what will it be for shy, awkward Olivia?

My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin

Trapped on her parents’ farm in the hardscrabble Australian outback, Sybylla Melvyn longs for a refined lifestyle, but most of all she longs to achieve great things. Soon she finds herself choosing between the conventional path and her plans for a ‘brilliant career’.

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

A multi-layered historical romance set in the ‘roaring’ 1890s, Sarah Waters’ bestselling debut novel follows the glittering career of Nan King from Whitstable oyster-girl to star of the music hall to cross-dressing rentboy to East End ‘tom’.

The River by Rumer Godden

Harriet is caught between two worlds, and the comforting rhythm of her Indian childhood – the sounds of the jute factory, the colourful festivals and the eternal ebb and flow of the river on its journey to the Bay of Bengal – is about to be shattered by a tragic event.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

In the celebrated first volume of her autobiography, Maya Angelou evokes her childhood in the American South of the 1930s. As a black woman, Maya Angelou has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope and joy, celebration and achievement.

From ‘Is there a story that has a permanent place in your heart?’

What, exactly, is a classic, and why should we care?

Italian writer Italo Calvino addresses this in his book Why Read the Classics? (public library) — a sort of “classic” in its own right

In this collection of essays on classical literature, Calvino also produces these 14 definitions of a “classic”:

1. The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: ‘I’m rereading…’, never ‘I’m reading….’
2. The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.
3. The classics are books which exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when they hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual’s or the collective unconscious.
4. A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
5. A classic is a book which even when we read it for the first time gives the sense of rereading something we have read before.
6. A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.
7. The classics are those books which come to us bearing the aura of previous interpretations, and trailing behind them the traces they have left in the culture or cultures (or just in the languages and customs) through which they have passed.
8. A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off.
9. Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.
10. A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.
11. ‘Your’ classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.
12. A classic is a work that comes before other classics; but those who have read other classics first immediately recognize its place in the genealogy of classic works.
13. A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without.
14. A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.

Reblogged from The Atlantic

Literary Dishes

• Moby Dick
• Alice in Wonderland
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
• The Catcher in the Rye
• Oliver Twist

Source: Literary Dishes

1. The Innocents by Francesca Segal (The Age of Innocence)
2. Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin (The Aeneid)
3. A Monster’s Notes by Laurie Sheck (Frankenstein)
4. Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding (Pride and Prejudice)
5. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (Paradise Lost)
6. March by Geraldine Brooks (Little Women)
7. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood (The Odyssey)
8. Railsea by China Miéville (Moby Dick)
9. The Hours by Michael Cunningham (Mrs. Dalloway)
10. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (King Lear) 

The Tale of Peter Rabbit

Classic Books Reproduced

Embroideress Jillian Tamaki was approached by Penguin Threads to hand embroider the designs for the latest re-prints of three of their timeless classics including The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.  

(Source: lisapocklington.blogspot.com)

10 Books About The Filthy Rich

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. Rules of Civilityby Amor Towles
3. By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham
4. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by David Herbert Richards Lawrence
5. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
6. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
7. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
8. The Privileges by Jonathan Dee
9. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
10. The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Source

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, 1881 (first American edition)

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1878 (first Russian edition)

Still the great British ‘Idol’