This collection of 50 books by Penguin is a fascinating series. It brings together fifty short texts by renowned authors from around the world. The genres vary – fiction, poetry, essays – and so do the themes and styles, which makes the collection particularly rich and diverse. I will borrow a sentence from the Penguin website because it captures perfectly the feeling of reading these books: “Ground-breaking and original in their day, their words still have the power to move, challenge and inspire.” Altogether, it is a wonderful collection for discovering – or rediscovering – great authors.

Books read

2. Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Death Chamber – Allen Ginsberg
11. The Legend of the Sleepers – Danilo Kis
13. Till September Petronella – Jean Rhys
19. I Have More Souls Than One – Fernando Pessoa
24. The Skeleton’s Holiday – Leonora Carrington
31. The Gigolo – Françoise Sagan
34. Why Do You Wear a Cheap Watch? – Hans Fallada
43. Of Dogs and Walls – Yuko Tsushima

Books to read

1. Letter from Birmingham Jail – Martin Luther King Jr
3. The Breakthrough – Daphne Du Maurier
4. The Custard Heart – Dorothy Parker
5. Three Japanese Short Stories – Akutagawa & Others
6. The Veiled Woman – Anaïs Nin
7. Notes on Nationalism – George Orwell
8. Food – Gertrude Stein
9. The Three Electroknights – Stanislaw Lem
10. The Great Hunger – Patrick Kavanagh
12. The Black Ball – Ralph Ellison
14. Investigations of a Dog – Franz Kafka
15. Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady – Clarice Lispector
16. An Advertisement for Toothpaste – Ryszard Kapuscinski
17. Create Dangerously – Albert Camus
18. The Vigilante – John Steinbeck
20. The Missing Girl – Shirley Jackson
21. Four Russian Short Stories – Gazdanov & Others
22. The Distance of the Moon – Italo Calvino
23. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House – Audre Lorde
25. The Finger – William S. Burroughs
26. The End – Samuel Beckett
27. New York City in 1979 – Kathy Acker
28. Africa’s Tarnished Name – Chinua Achebe
29. Notes on Camp – Susan Sontag
30. The Red Tenda of Bologna – John Berger
32. Glittering City – Cyprian Ekwensi
33. Piers of the Homeless Night – Jack Kerouac
35. The Duke in His Domain – Truman Capote
36. Leaving the Yellow House – Saul Bellow
37. The Cracked Looking-Glass – Katherine Anne Porter
38. Dark Days – James Baldwin
39. Letter to My Mother – Georges Simenon
40. Death the Barber – William Carlos Williams
41. The Problem that Has No Name – Betty Friedan
42. The Dialogue of Two Snails – Federico García Lorca
44. Madame du Deffand and the Idiots – Javier Marías
45. The Haunted Boy – Carson McCullers
46. The Garden of Forking Paths – Jorge Luis Borges
47. Fame – Andy Warhol
48. The Survivor – Primo Levi
49. Lance – Vladimir Nabakov
50. Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer – Wendell Berry