Penguin Classics

His family was from old Muslim Spain, had been expelled in the course of the Reconquest, and he had traveled across much of northwestern Africa and wrote a record of his travels.

In fact, a great modern translation of this work has just been brought out, and it's available in Penguin Classics.

And, you know, he divided Africa into four different regions, Barbary, Numidia, Libya, and the lands along the Niger River.

He had not been to...

And I'd also note that there's a brand new translation out from the Oxford Text Series.

There's kind of an Oxford equivalent of the Penguin Classics.

And Glyn Burgess just released it, a very affordable translation of Wass's Brute.

So I'd strongly recommend that to your listeners.

Some are not.

Penguin Classics has been doing this for years, but typically it's associated with something in the book.

So, you know, if it's like War and Peace and then some old Russian village or St. Petersburg is going to be on fire.

There's also a trend where you take a classic work of art and then you deface it or modernize it somehow.

He was a contemporary of James and he was a proper historian.

So you can get his books in Penguin Classics.

They're probably here too in this bookshelf.

You just read that.

The Roman Roads Classics is an unnumbered classic series that really is, well, I'll put it this way.

I love Penguin Classics.

I think they're well-bound, beautiful editions with good scholarly introductions.

But then they started going, for lack of a better term, woke.

The introductions, the one that really kind of just put us over the edges is the Penguin Classics edition of Milton's Paradise Lost that you turn, you know, you read the back cover and it talks about how Essentially saying, did Milton really believe this or was he trying to unveil the cruelty of the Christian God or something along those lines.

And then it says, the introduction is rife with these controversies.

So what's happening is that these Penguin classics are what we are calling, you know, Trojan Penguins, beware of secular publishing houses bearing gifts.

They are bringing these controversies that undermine the authors and the text themselves in their introductions.

Rice died in twenty twenty-one.

A Penguin Classics fiftieth anniversary edition of her novel, Interview with the Vampire, has just been published.

[gentle music] Coming up, Justin Chang reviews the new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, convicted of fraud in connection with her health technology startup, Theranos.

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E.V. Rieu.

Uh, he was the head of Penguin Classics.

He translated the Homer and the Iliad, uh, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey for, um, the Penguin Classics series and they consider that to be the gold standard.

So Penguin came to him and said, "Would you do a fresh translation of the Gospels?" Now, here's the deal.

Dr. Rieu was an agnostic.

Well, you know, uh, I have a, a, a to-be-read, uh, something that, uh, Sarah, you read a couple years ago, actually.

Um, I finally got myself a nice Penguin Classics copy.

I think it might've been me.

Oh, yeah.